Robert Moog, creator of synthesizer, dies at 71

Anton Warde

As the world celebrates 250 years of Mozart in 2006, many of us will also be celebrating 100 years of E. Power Biggs (1906–1977). The happy coincidence of yet a third anniversary, the semi-centennial of Biggs’s A Mozart Organ Tour, the landmark recording released by Columbia Masterworks in the month of July 1956, gives us an ideal place to start the party.
Biggs’s trip “down the Mozart trail” from Strasbourg to Salzburg, across the pre-Alpine highlands of southern Germany and south to Innsbruck, produced one of the most imaginative and memorable Mozart recordings of all time. It took the measure of Mozart’s limited output for the organ more generously than it had yet been taken and set a new benchmark for Biggs himself in his still novel enterprise of recording older music in the landscape from which it had sprung.
Even under non-anniversary circumstances, the Mozart album would make an excellent point of entry for considering the larger Mr. Biggs. Dating from the pivotal midpoint of his recording career, it capped a quartet of albums released by Columbia Masterworks during an 18-month period in 1955 and 1956 that presented the distillate of some 150 reels of tape Biggs had filled on his first two journeys to the organ lofts of Europe: in the spring of 1954 and the summer of 1955. Like no other organ albums before them, they showcased the instrument itself no less than the music. And they awakened us to the notion of “organ as place,” as musical destination, not to mention as destination worthy of pilgrimage. The four albums in this series were, in order of appearance (and with dates of release by Columbia Masterworks): Bach, Toccata in D Minor, “a HI-FI Adventure” (ML 5032, February 5, 1955), a single LP with 14 performances of the toccata (one with fugue) played on 14 different organs; The Art of the Organ (KSL 219, February 21, 1955), a two-LP set with music of Purcell, Sweelinck, Buxtehude, Pachelbel, and Bach performed on 20 notable organs; Bach: Eight Little Preludes and Fugues “played on eight famous European classic organs” (ML 5078, April 2, 1956), a single LP; and A Mozart Organ Tour (K3L 231, July 16, 1956), a 3-LP album containing the 17 “Festival Sonatas” for organ and orchestra, and complete works for solo organ, played on 14 organs in Austria and southern Germany.1 The two 1955 releases presented music Biggs had recorded “on the side” during his 11-week concert tour of as many countries in the spring of 1954. Of this music, only the six Pachelbel pieces and two of the Bach “D Minors” were recorded in the German south. The two 1956 releases, on the other hand, consisted almost exclusively of “takes” made on the 1955 Mozart trip.
If Biggs had never heard anything like the sonorities that cascaded from many of these instruments, neither had we. And, thanks to the advent of magnetic tape recording—in general use beginning only in 1950—we too came to know those sounds well enough to appreciate how dramatically different they were from any we had heard before, and how strangely vital and appealing. The old instruments might have known alterations of one kind or another since first sounding in their splendid spaces—possibly (we liked to think) under the fingers of a Sweelinck, Pachelbel, Buxtehude, Bach, or even Mozart—but that did not matter to us. The spaces themselves had not changed. And, change or no change, the proof was in the listening: even through the tunnel of vintage, monaural “high fidelity,” the texture of the sound, so amazingly varied from instrument to instrument, yet so uniform in clarity and cohesiveness, compelled our ears. We listened, for example, to those “eight little preludes and fugues played on eight famous European classic organs,” the 1956 companion to A Mozart Organ Tour, and were, like Biggs himself, forever smitten. Whether the music had been written by Bach or Krebs (or whomever) did not matter. As Biggs presented these tuneful miniatures, they would lead initiates straight to greater music by J. S. Bach, of undisputed attribution.

Georg Steinmeyer was there—twice!

As we revisit the making of these remarkable recordings, we are fortunate indeed to have the recollections of an eyewitness (earwitness!) to the process, the “man who hung the mike” for no fewer than 18 of the performances that found their way into these albums. He is Georg F. Steinmeyer, scion of the well-known organbuilding family of Oettingen, Germany (specifically, great grandson and namesake of the G. F. Steinmeyer who founded Orgelbau Steinmeyer in 1847). Currently, he serves as Vice President of the Estey Organ Museum in Brattleboro, Vermont.
By the early 20th century, the Steinmeyers of Oettingen had come to “own” much of the organ landscape of Germany. Steinmeyer had been one of the first to undertake a sympathetic restoration of an historical instrument in Germany—and, indeed, one of great significance: Karl Riepp’s “Trinity” organ in the fabulous rococo abbey at Ottobeuren. Still largely in innocence of the movement that they were helping by chance to found, according to Steinmeyer, his grandfather’s team inadvertently established many of the restoration standards of the Orgelbewegung. Motivated simply by the respect they felt for what Riepp had achieved in the two astonishing instruments he had constructed on either side of the chancel between 1754 and 1766, they went about their refurbishing as true conservators, completing work on the “Trinity” instrument in 1914 and on its smaller companion, the “Holy Ghost” organ, in 1922. The quality of what they had accomplished at Ottobeuren so delighted Albert Schweitzer that he paid the Steinmeyer family a visit in 1929. Georg Steinmeyer does not remember the breakfast conversation himself, much less how he might have responded to the question as a 5-year-old, but his family never tired of repeating the story of how Albert Schweitzer asked the young boy that morning, “Glaubst Du, Junge, an die Schleiflade?” (Do you believe in the slider chest, young man?)
In fact, Georg Steinmeyer did much more than hang the microphone for Biggs (yes, there was just one—Columbia did not begin to record in stereo until the fall of 1956) on both of his forays to “Mozart country”—first, the nine hectic days of performing and recording in May 1954, and then the more leisurely 40 days with Mozart, recording only, in August and September 1955. He served as the Biggses’ universal “man on the ground”: as booking agent, organ guide, touch-up tuner, accommodations manager, automobile renter and driver, German translator, and last but by no means least, co-carrier of hundreds of pounds of recording equipment. Today, at age 82, Steinmeyer could as easily do it all again, it seems. He has the athletic moves of a man half his age and the nimble wits (and wit) to match. His eyes twinkle as he recalls “travels with Biggsy.” Thanks to Georg Steinmeyer, and thanks to materials preserved in the Biggs archives at the Organ Library of the Boston Chapter of the AGO at Boston University, we can now deepen our knowledge of this watershed time for Biggs.2

But first, Biggs at 100

With his name attached these days to some 50 CD offerings at Amazon.com, and with eBay a-flurry with Biggs transactions, some might argue that there is little chance of our forgetting the man. Certainly, time has revoked none of the superlatives that Lawrence Moe enumerated nearly three decades ago in the tribute he wrote for his teacher and friend:
During his lifetime, E. Power Biggs unquestionably played more organ recitals to larger audiences, performed on the organ with more symphony orchestras, played a more extensive repertory, and recorded more organ music than anyone else in history. Perhaps of greater and more lasting importance was his influence on the movement to restore the organ to some of the grandeur it enjoyed in the 17th and 18th centuries.3

But time is slowly making Biggs a stranger to a generation that owes him much. Today, even the organ world has begun to lose a valid sense of the “no small sensation” that was E. Power Biggs. A generation ago, his name meant “famous organist” in any American household, including ones with not the slightest interest in organ music. Now, as the era of his notoriety recedes into the past, many who encounter his name for the first time on the cover of a CD, or even attached to their OHS stipends, may imagine it to be some over-the-top stage moniker invented by a musician who could only have been an organist (what else, with that name?), and no doubt one with an insufferable ego.
The fact of the matter, of course, is that Jimmy Biggs (or “Bimmy Jiggs,” as he exuberantly signed the handwritten draft of the jacket notes he had penned for the 1956 “Eight Little Preludes and Fugues” album—not to mention the self-effacing “E. Punk Biggs” that he would slip in elsewhere just for fun) was a man of perfectly sufferable ego, with a personality as good-natured and charming as they come. The imposing name by which he let himself be known professionally was no mere invention but a perfectly legitimate (if certainly fortuitous) shortening of his full natural name: Edward George Power Biggs. A member of his family confirms that “Power” (the middle name of his father Clarence Power Biggs) was the maiden name of his paternal grandmother that had become, in common Victorian fashion, the first half of a double surname—like “Vaughan Williams.” To his parents and young friends, Biggs must have seemed more of a “Jimmy” than an “Eddy” or a “Georgy,” and so that nickname stuck until his wife Peggy (according to friend Barbara Owen) replaced it with “Biggsy.” When something more formal was needed, she (and Biggs himself) simply reached for “EPB,” a set of initials that, in the world of the pipe organ, will forever signify only one person.
Anyone who knew the genial man behind the all too earnest mien that appeared on many an album cover understood that the formidable look had more to do with Biggs’s respect for the music and the instrument he played than with any assertion of his own importance. As his eye lights on a 1955 photo of Biggs turning to grin at the camera from the front seat of their VW bus somewhere on “the Mozart trail,” Georg Steinmeyer exclaims, “Now, to me, that’s Biggsy!”
Of course, it would have been hard not to respect Biggs under any circumstances. Steinmeyer says that during his two recording expeditions with Biggs along the back roads of Germany and Austria, his respect for him bordered on awe. And yet, EPB’s most impressive achievements were still to come. “I can think of no other organist, on either side of the Atlantic,” Steinmeyer muses today, “who has exercised as much influence on the world of his instrument.” Certainly, no other has exuded the enthusiasm Biggs did for the pipe organ in its purest and most classic form, much less communicated it as well: first to his weekly radio audience of many thousands (over time, perhaps millions) in more than 800 North American broadcasts from 1942 to 1958, and then to growing legions of record buyers in the golden age of high fidelity during the 1960s and 70s. In the final decades of his life, his fans waited for the next “Historic Organs of X,” or next volume of “Bach Favorites” played on the Flentrop at Harvard, as eagerly as they waited for the next offering from the Beatles. Despite the ravages of rheumatoid arthritis (diagnosed already in 1958, the same year that his Flentrop arrived), the unfailingly cheerful and high-spirited Biggs played on to the end, extending his recording of historic organs, or organs in historic spaces, to more than two dozen adventures in musical geography. By the time he died, with many plans still unfulfilled, his discography comprised a staggering 148 titles. Beyond his recordings and recitals, he published dozens of articles and delivered countless addresses in advocacy of “classic principles” of pipe organ design. His influence on the Orgelbewegung in North America (and share of responsibility for lessons learned both good and bad) remains incalculable. Not long ago, Jonathan Ambrosino offered this capsule assessment of Biggs, as provocative, perhaps, as it is perceptive:
. . . Biggs was fundamentally a romantic organist, even if of great chastity. He stood ready to evolve a personal style from contact with fresh experience, whether it came in the form of old European instruments, the first wave of imported tracker organs, or his own Challis pedal harpsichord. Even if he rarely touched a swell pedal near the end, Biggs owned his phrasing, his touch, his style. That it was no more ‘authentic’ than, say, Landowska’s Bach seems beside the point. First and last, Biggs was a communicator, a musician who knew that his mission relied on developing a recognizable musical posture. His playing was one component of a larger persona that drew in a particular audience; though his ‘scholarship’ was everywhere praised, it was really his curiosity he was best able to convey.4

Provocatively, the term “romantic” describes neither Biggs’s first choice of organs, nor favorite kind of music, nor characteristic style of playing—all of which are as unromantically Apollonian as romanticism itself is Dionysian.5 He became famous for advocating articulately voiced, tracker-action instruments, and for disdaining the specification in which one might “contentedly wallow.”6 He liked his music tuneful and linear—and, above all, structured: older music of almost any kind; and, among the moderns, Sowerby and Joplin for their jazz-like “delineations,” and Hindemith and Pepping for their neo-baroque tidiness (Messiaen’s ethereal washes of color held little attraction). The “clipped” style of his playing, recognizable with almost any music, can be described as robust and forward-leaning yet rarely rushed; precise in touch yet flexible in phrasing; and most gratifying of all perhaps, responsive to the dictates of a sensitive ear as he played.
But “romantic” applies without question to his adventuresome, ready-for-anything pursuit of ever better organ sounds. Who but a “romantic” would embark on a classical Mozart organ tour with 650 pounds of recording equipment; or commission a classically voiced Schlicker large enough for solo performance in an auditorium but small enough to be folded into a trailer that could be hauled behind a 1953 Studebaker convertible; or, in the era of quadraphonic sound, conceive of recording Bach toccatas, as Biggs did in 1973, on the four separate organs of Freiburg Cathedral (all playable at once from a central console) delighting in the notion that Bach, like Biggs himself, “might have enjoyed tossing his antiphonal phrases side to side, or even batting them right down the church from one end to the other, as in some splendid tennis match.”7
And, “romantic” most assuredly applies to the aura with which Biggs endowed the organ in its purest form. By romanticizing the “classic” organs of Europe as history made audible, as living, breathing links to famous composers, and as destinations fabulously remote from our own quotidian world, Biggs made organ-romantics of all who fell under his spell. He once jotted on a notepad, “A wonderful aspect of the instrument is, there they stand! Down the centuries they come!” And down the centuries their recorded sounds seemed to echo. For record shoppers, the allure began even with the jacket notes Biggs wrote himself:
The very old and the very new meet on these records. For the organs heard are nine of the most famous and distinctive instruments of organ-building history. Of an extraordinary musical longevity, they are certainly among the oldest instruments still in normal everyday use. Yet though some are more than 400 years old, their characteristic sounds seem more vital than ever. . . .8

And even to fellow hi-fi aficionados, his pitch was essentially romantic:
High fidelity enthusiasts find, too, that these unique recorded sonorities add a new sense of space to reproducing equipment. And as the echoes of great music recede down the vaulted ceilings of some historic building, it may seem that your loudspeaker takes on a corresponding and possibly altogether new dimension of depth.9

How could any browser of LP bins in the 1950s resist the purchase of such an album, if only for its promise of access to something so amazing? By comparison, the jacket notes on “competing” albums from Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft’s Archiv label and Telefunken’s Das alte Werk seemed prosaic and dreary.
Awakening the ears of others to the sounds that had so beguiled his own became Biggs’s great mission in life. That he could be as good a marketer for these sounds as a missionary for them led to the occasional tongue-cluck of “middlebrow” by some whose pronouncements seem to reveal more about their own resentment of his success than insight into his art. It was as if his making the arcane accessible to the many somehow devalued it—despite a level of taste with which no one could argue. Mean-spiritedness of this kind (or any other) elicited little reciprocity from the unfailingly generous Biggs, for whom exuberant yet tasteful music-making was its own reward. His interpretations of Bach and other older music stand sui generis and, as Ambrosino suggests, largely “beside the point” of debates about authentic performance practice. Clean, transparent, and “declamatory,” Biggs’s Bach makes its own case for authenticity.
Unlike the volatile Virgil Fox (who seems to have felt his sense of rivalry with Biggs far more acutely than his counterpart), the ebullient EPB seemed to move through life happily at ease “in his own skin,” secure in simply making music the way he liked to make it. Less the virtuoso than an impeccably fine player, Biggs subordinated his act of performing to “the music’s own performance,” playing with an ear and a touch that, regardless of tempo, enabled a fine flowering, note by note, bar by bar, phrase by phrase. Craig Whitney has rightly observed that Biggs could have been describing himself when he cited what he admired most in the playing of his teacher G. D. Cunningham:
His own playing projected a wonderful sense of accent, a splendid ongoing rhythm. This rhythm was by no means metronomic; it was plastic and flexible. The secret (though “the secret” is no secret at all) was his sensitivity to note durations and his finger control of the organ key, disciplined by his piano technique.10

A “wonderful sense of accent,” a “splendid ongoing rhythm,” and an exceptional “sensitivity to note durations”: these were the hallmarks of Biggs. To the Dionysian extreme of all things formless and unbridled (and of course Virgil Foxian), Biggs, simply by nature, presented the Apollonian antithesis. From his advocacy of classic principles in organ design to his very clean touch, Biggs aimed to gratify the ear with unexpected clarity and “light.” It may well have been the surprise of such sonic light that made fans of so many, winning their ear for a musical instrument that they might otherwise never have taken seriously. Volume I of “Bach Organ Favorites” played on the Harvard Flentrop (the ubiquitous “white album” of 1961), may have been the single release by Biggs that most effectively delivered this kind of musical surprise.11

As late to Europe as to his instrument

As Biggs began to plan his first full-scale tour of continental Europe, the trip was to have been a recital tour only (with no thought of recording), to venues obligatory for any world-class concert organist. Indeed, one wonders whether the tour was not undertaken in part to match the public travels of Virgil Fox, who, since his early studies in Paris, had performed frequently in Europe. For a time, Biggs may simply have regarded his own emigration from England as enough of an international stretch. Or, like many a Briton of his generation, he may have looked upon the continent of Europe as somehow less worthy of an Englishman’s attention. The new world was the thing, not the old. But in the spring of 1954 he went, and discovered the pipe organ as if for the first time.
There had once been a real first time for Biggs, of course, some three decades earlier. It had occurred for him at the relatively mature age of 18, in the second year of what would normally have become a six-year apprenticeship, at an electrical engineering firm in London. Remarkably, it is a document from the 1954 tour that sheds fascinating light on that moment long past. Among his papers, we find the typewritten translation by one K. van Bronkhorst of an article published by an unnamed reporter in an unnamed Amsterdam newspaper, based on an interview that this reporter had conducted with Biggs on May 6, 1954, between practice sessions preceding his recital at the Oude Kerk that evening. One paragraph is of particular interest:
This 48-year-old musician has made a remarkable career. Originally he was an electrician, though with a decided musical talent which manifested itself in a great skill at piano-playing. The organ interested him only insofar as the electrician [in him] was concerned. Repair work on [electro-pneumatic] organs brought him much in contact with the instrument, which intrigued him more and more from a technical standpoint. Then, one day, he could not resist the temptation to sit on the organ bench and let his fingers, accustomed to the piano-technique, stir the organ keyboard. The mighty sounds impressed him; he played with greater and greater boldness, pulled register after register, and finally was so lost in his playing that he completely forgot his real job, the repair work on the organ. From that moment on—he was then [eighteen]—he gave up his old job and studied organ.

This account of “how it all began” for E. Power Biggs may ring outlandishly romantic, but we have no evidence that he disclaimed any part of it; and for now, at least, it fills a significant lacuna in his biography.
Biggs had played countless “average” organs in the intervening three decades, before, in the spring of 1954, he at last encountered the very old instruments of Europe and found their sounds and their response beneath his fingers to be “a revelation”—his word for the experience until the end of his days. Given his predilection for articulate, “outgoing” tonality, one wonders all the more why he had waited so long to mine the mother lode of the kind of sound he had, in a sense, been waiting for all his life. Certainly, he had heard the testimony of travelers like organ enthusiast Emerson Richards, and his colleague Melville Smith at the Longy School, not to mention his own compatriot émigré G. Donald Harrison, chief voicer for the firm of Aeolian-Skinner. As early as 1923, after hearing a “Silbermann organ familiar to Bach,” Richards (who also visited the Steinmeyer factory on two occasions in the 1920s and ’30s) had called for renewed attention to “proper choruses” even in specifications like the one he prepared for the enormous Midmer-Losh in the Convention Hall at Atlantic City.12 And Harrison had been working for years to bend the Skinner sound in a decidedly more classical direction. Biggs had read his Schweitzer, studied organ specifications, and listened to the stories of all these travelers; yet none of it had quite prepared him for his own surprise: “As a means to describe a certain sound, words are blunt tools,” he found himself writing. “A sonority must be heard to be understood, enjoyed, or even in some cases believed!”13
The “pre-education” of Biggs’s ear had begun on his own doorstep, with G. D. Harrison’s experimental “Baroque” organ of 1936. Biggs himself had taken a keen interest in the idea of this instrument from the beginning—and it was he who arranged to have it placed in the ideal acoustical setting of the Germanic Museum at Harvard University. There, as he wrote decades later, “it sounded extraordinarily well, bright tone, outgoing,” although, he continued, “of course the bland voicing did not give the organ any articulation, and the electric action precluded any control of chiff, had there been any chiff.”14 The instrument’s musical attractiveness suited it well for broadcasting, and by 1942 Biggs had begun his live weekly half-hour programs carried nationwide (and across Canada) by the CBS Radio Network for the next 16 years. In his 1977 tribute to Biggs, Lawrence Moe wrote, Even now I am astounded when I think of the vast literature he covered in sixteen years of broadcasting. Series of programs included the entire works of Bach, all the concertos by Handel, ensemble and concerted music of every kind involving the organ, great swaths of solo literature from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, works by classic, romantic, and contemporary composers were heard week after week. He commissioned works from American composers Walter Piston, Roy Harris, Howard Hanson, and Leo Sowerby, to name but a few, and he revived interest in countless composers of the past.15
And thus the instrument that had attuned Biggs’s ear to the virtues of a well-developed organ ensemble educated the ear of a growing public as well, not only to the listenable sound of such an instrument but to the wide repertory that could be played on it with success.

Biggs meets Steinmeyer

It was to one of these Sunday morning broadcasts that G. Donald Harrison brought Georg Steinmeyer in the fall of 1950. His guest had come from Germany a few months earlier to begin a one-year internship with Aeolian-Skinner of Boston, under the auspices of a postwar program for international technical cooperation, administered by the U.S. Department of Labor. Harrison was no doubt eager to have Steinmeyer hear his attempt at creating a neo-baroque organ. They sat in the small audience that was permitted to listen under the arch at the far end of the hall, and afterwards Harrison led Steinmeyer up to the gallery to meet Biggs. As he followed Harrison up the stairs that morning, he learned that he had been preceded one year earlier by the famous doctor who, two decades before, had quizzed him about slider chests. (Schweitzer had spend a few days in Boston on his way home from delivering an address at the Goethe bicentennial celebration in Aspen.) And in a broader sense, he knew he was walking in the footsteps of his own father, Hans, who, in 1913, had likewise come to Boston in his mid-twenties to work for E. M. Skinner. While installing the Finney Hall Skinner at Oberlin College in 1915, Hans Steinmeyer had met and soon married the young American woman who would become Georg’s mother a few years after the family moved back to Germany.
Georg Steinmeyer and Biggs took an immediate liking to each other, and it is easy to understand why. They shared a lively sense of humor, a keen antenna for “good ideas,” and the ability to pursue those ideas with an intensity that could exhaust the people around them. Recalling Biggs’s capacity for long—often nocturnal—hours of hard work, Barbara Owen exclaims, “How the man could focus—he was so much an ‘Aries,’ you could almost believe in astrology!” In readiness to focus on a task and to work like a dynamo to get it done, however, Biggs had met an equal in Georg Steinmeyer.
The Biggses invited young Steinmeyer to Thanksgiving dinner that year, which became only the first of several meals he would enjoy at 53 Highland Street, the grand Victorian home on a hill in Cambridge, about one mile from Harvard’s Germanic (by then Busch-Reisinger) Museum. When he brought with him a catalogue of Steinmeyer “factory” organs one evening, Biggs lost no time in placing an order for a tiny one-stop, hand-pumped portative. Steinmeyer and Biggs laid its parts out on the parlor rug when it arrived, more or less in kit form, and spent a Saturday morning assembling it.
Three years later, as Biggs was planning his European tour with the help of various branches of the U.S. State Department tasked with fostering cultural exchange, he had an easy answer when the request came for names of his contacts in Germany: “The organ builder Hans Steinmeyer, whose wife is American and whose son Georg has visited us on various occasions here, is the chief name I have to offer.”16 It was the energetic Georg, however, not his father, who quickly became the chief planner of the Biggses’ initiation to “Steinmeyer Country.” After concluding his internship at Aeolian-Skinner in 1951 (and with plans to return to the USA for good as soon as possible), he had gone home to work again for his father, helping first to complete the post-war replacement for the 1937 Steinmeyer Hauptorgel in the heavily damaged Lorenzkirche in Nuremberg, and then to refurbish the famous 1737 instrument of Joseph Gabler at Weingarten. Near the end of 1953, he sent the Biggses a long letter (unfortunately lost) laying out an itinerary for concerts and organ visits that would have taken them to every historic instrument between Frankfurt and Munich (not to mention many a Steinmeyer instrument). At the end of that letter he must have confessed the wish that they could somehow devote two months to doing all he had proposed. For, on January 20, Peggy Biggs sent this reply: Thank you so very much for your detailed letter about our proposed trip to Germany. This information is really invaluable to us. . . . All the names and places you have suggested look wonderful, and I’m afraid that by the time we have laid our definite plans we’ll wish we had two months also. . . . As you know, we would not want to have the concerts come too close together. Biggsy would want to have at least a full day to become familiar with each instrument before the concerts. . . . EPB is on the west coast and will be back here at the end of January. With warmest greetings from us both— As she typed these lines, Peggy may already have had an inkling of the latest “good idea” her husband was hatching—off in California—to crowd even more activity into their tight schedule for Europe. As he played the European masters up and down the west coast that January, Biggs’s mind turned ever again to the journey he would soon make to the geographic source of so much of that music. And, the more he thought about the organs he would encounter along the way in spaces known to Sweelinck, Buxtehude, Pachelbel, and Bach (perhaps already Mozart), the more excited he became about the concept of making recordings—someday—that could “relate the music, the organ, and the place.”
(To be continued)

Author’s note: This three-part essay had its genesis in an exciting chance encounter at a recent OHS seminar. When Mr. and Mrs. Georg F. Steinmeyer kindly asked how my own interest in the organ had begun, I confessed that it had dated from my being “dragged” by a music-major girlfriend at the age of 21 to an Orgelkonzert played on an 18th-century instrument in Lucerne, Switzerland. The “light for the ears” that radiated from that organ had just astonished me. Back in the U.S. after a summer’s language study at a Goethe Institute (and more organ concerts that I had sought out on my own!), and hungering for more such sonic light, I headed straight for the Apex Music Corner in Schenectady to discover in the LP bins—along with the first U.S. offering from those other musical “Brits” of the day, the Beatles (for it was the fall of ’63)—a modest-looking album entitled, Bach: Eight Little Preludes and Fugues “played on eight famous classic European organs.” One hearing of this album (I continued to explain to the Steinmeyers) had hooked me for life on E. Power Biggs and the sounds he stood for—not to mention, of course, the sounds of countless other fine organists and other kinds of organs. By that point in my recitation, Herr Steinmeyer’s eyes had taken on a special twinkle: “And do you know,” he laughed, “I helped Biggsy make that recording!” I was floored. Most of us have some particular record in our collection that we treasure above almost all the rest, some early acquisition that holds a kind of iconic meaning for us simply because it “set our direction.” For me it had always been that 1956 Biggs LP. And there I was, to my disbelief, speaking with one of the principals responsible for making that “exotic” record!
And what a Biggsian crackerjack of a fellow Georg Steinmeyer himself has turned out to be! I am enormously grateful to both of the Steinmeyers for the excuse they gave me to write this piece about the cultural hero of my youth for whom my admiration remains most enduring. Their recollections of “travels with Biggsy” have been invaluable. And of course I am most grateful of all to EPB himself in his centenary year for the memory of (1) his tireless—but unfailingly good-humored—advocacy of the musical point of view that his recordings taught me to share, (2) his example of great decency and generosity in all things, and (3) his will to play spiritedly on until the end, his enthusiasm amazingly undiminished by a battle of two decades with one of the cruelest afflictions that could befall any organist.

Douglas Reed

William Albright would have celebrated his seventieth birthday on October 20, 2014. Born in 1944 in Gary, Indiana, he died unexpectedly at his home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on September 17, 1998. One of the most significant composers of organ music in the 20th century, Albright was known mainly for his keyboard works, although he composed for nearly every medium. He received many commissions and awards including the Queen Marie-José Prize for Organbook (1967), two Fulbright grants, two Guggenheim fellowships, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and two Koussevitzky Competition Awards. His three Organbooks explore new means of idiomatic expression for the organ. A brilliant pianist and organist, he commissioned and premiered many new works for organ. He also performed and recorded the music of James P. Johnson, the complete piano music of Scott Joplin, and his own rag compositions.

The following interviews with Sarah Albright and John Carlson shed light on William Albright’s formative years and his creative process. 

 

Interview with Sarah Albright

Sarah and William Albright were married from 1966 to 1985. Sarah earned her Bachelor of Music degree from Salem College where she studied organ with John Mueller, and received the Master of Music degree from the University of Michigan as a student of Marilyn Mason. She studied in Paris for a year with Marie-Claire Alain. From 1985–2007, she was director of music at the First Unitarian Universalist Church in Ann Arbor. Presently, she teaches a large class of private piano students. 

 

Douglas Reed: How did you meet Bill?

Sarah Albright: I came here to graduate school in 1964 to study with Marilyn Mason. I first recall hearing Bill play in a student recital that fall. In the following months, we became good friends, and on Valentine’s Day, 1966, he proposed to me. We got married in June at the Presbyterian Church in Martinsville, Virginia. We had great music! Mr. Mueller came from Winston-Salem and played for the wedding and Rosemary Russell sang. She was my roommate and later taught at the University of Michigan. We went to Asheville, North Carolina, for our honeymoon and a week later, to Tanglewood where Bill was going to study with George Rochberg. We also met Bill Bolcom that summer. 

 

Let’s talk about your time in Paris. 

The first time we lived in Paris was in ’68–69. Bill had a Fulbright grant to study with Messiaen at the Conservatory. He also studied with Max Deutsch, who was a student of Schoenberg and conducted several of his works. Bill enjoyed being in Messiaen’s class. Messiaen played a lot of recordings for the class and frequently commented “c’est beau ça”. Messiaen also had a fondness for Ives, which Bill really liked, as Bill and Ives have the same birthday, October 20! Bill also looked forward to his lessons with Max Deutsch. They had many conversations about music, composition, and life, which Bill found stimulating and meaningful. 

Bill won the Queen Marie-José prize for Organbook (1967). Sargent Shriver, U.S. ambassador to France, gave a big reception at the American Embassy to honor Bill. The mayor of Geneva also had a dinner for us when Bill was invited to play a concert at the Geneva cathedral on a large Metzler organ. We did a lot of traveling out of Paris. One of Bill’s close high school friends and his wife came to Paris on their honeymoon and we traveled with them to play several organs in Germany, at Ebersmuenster and Marmoutier, and in Holland where we played the organ at Alkmaar and the beautiful Schnitger in Zwolle. 

We lived in Paris again in 1977, this time with our four-year-old son John and four-month-old daughter Elizabeth. Bill had a Guggenheim grant and we lived in an apartment in Neuilly. Here, he composed the Five Chromatic Dances for piano, partly inspired by a Chopin mazurka, op. 17, no. 4, which he often played when he was composing the Dances.

 

How do you think the Paris and European experience affected Bill and his music?

He loved Paris. He was very stimulated and inspired in Paris, where musicians, composers, and artists were appreciated. Yes, he was affected by the French music. He used to listen to Debussy’s La Mer and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring all the time. 

 

Can you speak about Bill’s early years? 

He was born in Gary, Indiana, but the family moved to New Jersey when Bill was in junior high. His father was a school administrator in West Orange, and his mother was a math teacher and a graduate of the University of Illinois. Bill and his two brothers were in the Cub Scouts, and their parents gave them many opportunities, including lots of Sunday school and church. In high school, Bill had a church job in a New Jersey suburb. 

In Gary, he was really fortunate to have had a fine piano teacher named Gladys Relph. When they moved to West Orange in 1959, he began studying piano with Rosetta Goodkind and composition with Hugh Aitken at the Juilliard Preparatory Department. When he was a junior in high school, he played the Grieg piano concerto with the New Jersey Symphony. During this time he used to take the train into New York for lessons and concerts and enjoyed walking around in the city.

He often checked out scores from the Newark public library for study, and spent a lot of time with two close friends, Glen Phillips, who sang in the St. Thomas Boy Choir, and Leonard Schaper. He and Len worked on building a pipe organ, and Bill played clarinet in the West Orange High School Band.

 

Please tell us about your children.

Bill loved our children, John and Elizabeth. He was very interested in their activities just as his father had been with him and his two brothers. John loved cars almost from day one and when he was about seven years old, we started going to the Detroit Auto Show. We had a great time admiring the cars, sitting in them, and taking pictures. Afterwards, we would take the People Mover to Greek Town for dinner. 

Elizabeth began dance classes at age four and we always looked forward to her dance recitals. Bill took her to dance concerts at U-M and a couple New York shows. He supported her dancing for years and was there to see her graduate from NYU in Fine Arts.

 

Can you speak about Bill’s work as a church musician?

Bill served as music director at the Ann Arbor Unitarian Universalist Church from 1966–1985. In 1970, he began a campaign to fund a new pipe organ for the sanctuary. To raise money he came up with the idea of having a “Ragtime Bash” to coincide with the rising popularity of classical ragtime music. These concerts were held annually until 2007 and were a huge success. The performers were nationally known ragtime players from southeast Michigan, and the church was overflowing with enthusiastic listeners.

From the money raised at the early concerts and donations from the congregation, the church was able to purchase a Holtkamp organ which was installed in 1973. Dedication recitals were played by Bill and the University of Michigan organ faculty. 

The choir loved working with Bill. They performed many standard choral works as well as music by Bill and other School of Music composers. Many students offered special music to enhance the worship services. Through the Ragtime concerts and installation of the organ, Bill had a very definite impact on the Ann Arbor community. The organ is now in a private home in New Orleans.

 

Do you have any final thoughts?

Bill was always appreciative of the teachers who guided and inspired him during his years as a student. Ross Lee Finney, Leslie Bassett, George Wilson, and Marilyn Mason at the U of M, and Messiaen, Max Deutsch, and George Rochberg, all influenced him with their thoughtful teaching and respect for his talent.

Tragically, Bill’s life and creativity were cut short due to complications of alcoholism. It affected his work, and his relationships with his family, friends, colleagues and students. People often tell me how much they miss him. We all do. 

Thank you, Sarah.

 

Interview with John Carlson

John Carlson was Albright’s roommate for one year at the University of Michigan and a close friend in the following years. Carlson earned bachelor and master of music degrees in organ and a master of music degree in composition from the University of Michigan where he studied organ with Robert Glasgow and composition with George Balch Wilson and Leslie Bassett. Carlson taught at the University of Dayton and the University of Michigan, and maintained a private studio in Ann Arbor where he offered instruction in music theory and electronic music composition. His interest in the history and future of recording technologies led to the invention of a holographic data storage system for which he received two U.S. patents. He lives near Muskegon, Michigan, where he continues to pursue his interest in information storage and the acoustics of performance venues.

 

Douglas Reed: When did you meet Bill Albright? 

John Carlson: I met Bill in the fall of 1963 at the University of Michigan in the old School of Music on Maynard Street in Ann Arbor. We lived in the same dormitory. Bill’s roommate was Russell Peck, a fellow composition major. They played records constantly…mostly contemporary music, things that appealed to them as young composers. I frequently spent time in their room, and I vividly recall the first piece I heard: Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge. This seminal piece of electronic music was shockingly original, combining electronically generated sounds with conventionally produced singing.

The next year Bill and I became roommates. During that year, I came to appreciate the full extent of his musical capabilities as a composer, a performer…and teacher. He was so enthusiastic about imparting his interest and knowledge of this new music. And, Bill’s work ethic was very rigorous. The task at hand would be completed no matter how long it took. If that meant staying up all night, that’s what he did. 

 

Were there any fun times?

Certainly! We would frequently go as a group to the same concerts, movies, and other events such as the ONCE Festival. The ONCE Festival was not a one-time event. There was a series of festivals between 1961 and 1966. These were music and multi-media presentations by a group of composers, performers, and artists that involved use of drama, lighting, staging, and film. Perhaps a performance would occur but once, since you could never get those people together again under that venue and in that circumstance. Apparently, that’s where the title came from. There was a deep seriousness of intent by the original ONCE Group, which included several young composers, all students of Ross Lee Finney: Robert Ashley, George Cacioppo, Roger Reynolds, Donald Scavarda, and Gordon Mumma. Also involved was the artist Milton Cohen, who specialized at that time in theatrical lighting. Bill and I attended at least one ONCE Festival together, probably in 1964. Each one was held in a different place. One was on the top of a parking structure.

 

Do you remember any specific ONCE Festival events? What kinds of sounds did you hear?

One or two of these composers had access to the early University of Michigan Electronic Music Studio. Others worked with their own equipment. Perhaps they used a tape recorder to make a prepared audio tape which accompanied instruments or other activities. Perhaps a cartoon film was used, or someone made his own film. A projection of this film might accompany one or more people playing various instruments. Perhaps someone would recite a poem with dramatic lighting effects. 

Sometimes the intention was to not have a specific piece, but rather to set up a situation and let it evolve. So, the goal was not to provide a “written-down” piece, except for a set of instructions. It would not be possible to go back, pick something off the shelf and recreate it, nor was that the intent. 

 

This is a fine description of Bill’s TIC (1967), composed entirely of little cartoon bubbles with suggested activities for the performers (see Example 1). His BEULAHLAND RAG (1967–69) also includes much improvisation but more specific musical notation and timing (see Example 2). Bill was also the associate director of the University of Michigan Electronic Music Studio. Is there a relationship between his work with electronic music and his acoustic music?

Yes. Understanding some electronic studio techniques from the mid to late 60s may help performers and listeners understand his organ music from that time. The actual electronic generation of sound was done by signal generators that could be found in any electronic repair shop, but instead of just one or two, the University of Michigan studio had a dozen. A large part of working in the early electronic studio was manipulating these electronically generated sounds—sine waves, square waves, and saw-tooth waves—in order to get some kind of humanness to them, some warmth and shape. 

If a series of pitches were desired, each being a short percussive sound, each one would have to be generated and recorded separately on audiotape. Then the tape would be cut up with a razor blade in what was called a splicing block. Next, we taped the little pieces back together interspersed with paper “leader” tape in whatever order we wished. That segment of tape could be played at its recorded speed, either 15 or 7.5 inches per second, or played back at the alternate speed to raise or lower the recorded pitches by a factor of one octave. The tape could be reversed end for end and played backward. This work was extraordinarily time-consuming. The tapes we ended up with consisted of paper leader interspersed with recorded audio segments sometimes only a quarter or half-inch long. By the way, the old advertisement for Maxwell House with the so-called “drips” of coffee were actually sine waves at various pitches that had been chopped up into short segments in the manner I’ve just described.

This effect was difficult to achieve in the electronic music studio, but it was easy to get on the pipe organ. Bill got the same effect by playing widely spaced intervals staccato and very quickly on flute stops. 

 

In Pneuma (1966) there are several passages that sound like they came right out of the electronic music studio. This type of abrupt juxtaposition of sounds or textures surely has a connection with the splicing block you mentioned earlier. Surprising explosions or reductions of sound were stylistic characteristics in several of Bill’s early pieces. (See Example 3.¹⁸)

There aren’t many examples in his music where he emphasized electronic sound. In fact, tonal, rhythmic, and other traditional musical elements are documented in a number of articles and dissertations on his music. But Bill was quite aware of the ability of the modern pipe organ to juxtapose sounds in a way similar to what was being done in an electronic music studio. To a certain extent it was a lot easier on the organ than on any other instrument. 

 

At the end of Benediction (Organbook I), the alternation of two chords includes the rapid succession of ten different organ timbres (see Example 4).

It must have been a pleasure for Bill to produce such musical gestures so easily. Oddly enough, the Hammond organ has come to be respected as a precursor to the electronic synthesizer because of its unique ability to manipulate various sine waves selected by drawbars. Bill had a healthy respect for that. Also, the attack and decay of the Hammond organ sound is very abrupt. It’s suddenly on, and then it’s off. There is no soft beginning to each specific note. Each has a percussive quality that was very familiar to people working in the early electronic music field. 

 

That attack could be accentuated on the Hammond with various other controls. This relates to several passages in Benediction (Organbook) where the beginning of a sustained chord is articulated, by a louder, more harmonically developed sound on an adjacent manual. (See Example 5.²¹)

Another element you can hear in Bill’s organ music, a direct result of his work in the electronic music idiom, relates to masses of sounds or tone clusters. One of the techniques in the early electronic music studio was to gradually alter the speed of the tape recorder. We could do that with those professional tape recorders by taking them off the line voltage and, employing one of our sine-wave oscillators, generating our own alternating current so that we could operate it not only at 60 cycles per second, but also at 59, then 58, 57, 56, thereby decelerating the speed of the tape recorder’s motor. 

We could take a very complex natural sound—perhaps the low-pitched, sustained singing with complex overtones of a group of Tibetan monks—record it and then slow it down to half that speed to get it extremely low, or we could start the tape recorder playing back at an artificially higher speed and then slow the tape recorder down very, very carefully to make a glissando of this massed sound. You can hear Bill emulating that in his organ pieces where he asks for the palm of a hand to move a note-cluster up and down the keyboard slowly or rapidly. I’m sure this derives from his familiarity with electronic music. 

Of course, clusters and cluster glissandos were a part of a genre of organ technique for at least 40 or 50 years by Bill’s time. That’s how theatre organists simulated the sound of a departing locomotive. And what theatre organist has not slid the palm of the hand up to one of those big major chords with an added sixth?!

 

Did you work with Bill in the electronic music studio? You mentioned Bill’s tapping on the back of a door to create a sound.

My involvement in the studio was simply to assist him. If a dial needed to be turned while he was occupied with starting or stopping a tape recorder, or vice versa, I helped by turning that dial perhaps to make a sound go up or down, or with manipulating that tape recorder. 

And, yes, the door to the electronic music studio in Hill Auditorium was hollow, and it had a nice sound when you rapped it with your knuckles, and, of course, the sound changed as you moved from the edge of the door. If you started at the very top and simply started tapping it rapidly as you moved down toward the center of the door, you could get a descending pitch of sorts. At least the timbre changed. So, we found if you recorded that tapping sound at 15 inches-per-second and then slowed it down to 7.5, instead of having something that went “tic, tic, tic,” it would go “tok… tok… tok… tok.” And then if you re-recorded that sound with a lot of reverberation at 15ips and dropped the result down to 7.5, instead of “tok… tok…tok” it would have become “boom…boom…boom… boom.” It was so mundane, but looking back on it now, it holds some very fond memories. 

 

In the 1960s, the electronic music medium seemed so far removed from traditional music making, but it’s worth remembering that these developments did not just come “out of the blue.” There were numerous earlier developments such as the Theremin, Ondes Martenot, and the Hammond organ. Charles Ives, Edgard Varèse, Henry Cowell, and other composers used sound blocks and clusters.

Using mechanical devices and whatever else was at hand has always appealed to composers. Bill was very fond of the American expatriate composer Conlon Nancarrow who lived in Mexico. Nancarrow found that he could compose for player piano, thereby vastly exceeding the capabilities of the human hand in what became sophisticated and complex music. Bill did meet Nancarrow on at least one occasion when he returned to the United States. Bill not only enjoyed the music itself but also admired the methodology by which the compositions were created, as they demonstrate the lengths to which composers are willing to go to follow an aesthetic arrow. 

 

Yes, Bill spoke enthusiastically about Nancarrow in one of his lectures. He played a recording of Nancarrow’s Study No. 21 (Canon X) and cited these very things: how fast Nancarrow could get the music to go and how complex he could make the rhythm.²⁴ He could have the effect of three or four different hands playing the piano totally independent of one another at different rates of speed.

Much of Underground Stream (Organbook III, 1978) has three different rhythmic layers going on at the same time. The second section of Bill’s De Spiritum, called Celestial Duel, ends with material gradually speeding up from a moderate tempo (quarter=72) to Vivo (quarter=160) and accelerates beyond that to “presto pos.” It sounds just like some of the fast passages in Nancarrow’s Studies for player piano. 

Nancarrow pushed tempo to the limits of the player piano by punching holes in paper sheets. Bill’s formidable keyboard technique allowed him to achieve similar effects on the organ. 

 

Can you talk about your film-making experience?

While we were roommates in 1964–65, we collaborated in making several 8mm films. As students, the possibility of having our own professional video camera was virtually zero. Since 16mm film was terrifically expensive, we resorted to using 8mm film, which was in our budget. One of our productions was good enough to win second prize in the first Ann Arbor 8mm Film Festival.

 

What was it about?

(chuckle) It was…to use that all too frequently abused word…an experimental film. Our main character was the composer, Robert Morris, who willingly did just about anything we asked of him including running up and down the stairwell of Burton Tower. At one point we were aiming the camera down the stairwell and filming at a slow speed. After the film was processed and running at normal speed, it appeared as though Bob was corkscrewing himself right into the ground. We sped up the camera; we slowed it down; we reversed the film; we photographed things in stop action. All the same things we were doing in the electronic music studio, we did with film. We knew that we could splice film together and cut it up in the same way that we did audio tape. So, we could introduce snippets of color with mostly black and white. We even hired some school children to do a small bit part. We asked them if they wanted to be in the movies, and they said, “Of course!” So, we gave them a dime apiece, and they acted for us (laughter).

 

What did you have them do?

I think we told them to stand at attention for a few seconds and then to look to their left, and then all run away…or something like that. Anyway, we pieced this thing together. We had heard there was a new Ann Arbor Film Festival that had an 8mm division, so as a lark, we put it into the Festival, and lo and behold, we won second prize. It was shown to great acclaim and applause that next night in a coffee house in Ann Arbor. We were very proud of ourselves, although it was a silly little thing. But it was fun.

 

Could you tell about your invention and how Bill helped you with that?

When it became necessary for me to establish a legal “date of conception” for a holographic storage system I had invented, Bill spent many hours looking at every single page in a bound notebook, then signing and dating that page. This was a very generous thing that he did for me. In the process of reaching a patentable stage, the inventor is obligated to write his ideas into a bound notebook in his own hand using indelible ink detailing every feature of the invention. Each page must be signed by the inventor and two witnesses, who must be sufficiently knowledgeable about the technology so they can sign every page of the book, “witnessed and understood by….” One person was an old friend of mine, an M.D. with enough technical prowess to understand the technology. The other person was Bill Albright, who did, indeed, sit there for several afternoons looking over all the written material including the detailed diagrams until he understood each page. He would quiz me about things, I would quiz him about his knowledge of it, and when he felt he was comfortable doing so, he signed off on that page, and then we went to the next page and the next page.

 

And the nice bottom line is that you actually got the patent (U.S. Patent 4,420,829—“Holographic System for the Storage of Audio, Video and Computer Data”). 

Yes! 

 

Ross Lee Finney was one of Bill’s major composition teachers.

I barely knew Finney. By the time I became a composition student, Leslie Bassett was the head of the department. But, I had occasion to be at Ross Lee Finney’s house when he invited me for a private conversation, which I understand he did from time to time with all the composition majors. He was a brilliant man and very generous with his time. He was very tough, but in a nice way. That is to say, he wanted the students to employ their talents to the very best of their ability. There was a professionalism about him. 

Finney’s contribution was not only as a teacher, but he was also able to get many other well-known composers to come to the university and donate their time to the task at hand of teaching and associating with the student composers, plus putting together ensembles for performance. He had many contacts throughout the musical world, which he could exploit in the best sense of the word, all for the benefit of his students. When he retired, Leslie Bassett, in his own way, did the same thing. 

 

Then Bill continued that tradition when he became the chair of the department…

…succeeding Bassett, that’s right. And then Bill was succeeded by William Bolcom. So, there’s been a long heritage of top-notch composition teachers.

 

Let’s talk a little bit about the fun, humorous aspect of Toccata Satanique and literary associations. Bill told me it really had nothing to do with Satan, and, in fact, the title may have been an attempt to poke fun at such “devilish” ideas. He also spoke about Poe, Hawthorne, and other 19th-century writers who sometimes dealt with such subjects, and, of course, we have Tartini’s famous “Devil’s Trill” sonata and numerous pieces by Liszt and Berlioz. 

In the notes to his recording of the piece, he writes that Toccata Satanique “is a matinee performance by the devil at the console, an attempt to exorcise those fiendish virtuoso toccatas of Mulet, Widor, et al;…” Bill had a rapier wit. People who knew him well enjoyed his joking, his fun with words, his double-entendres, everything in the bag of tricks of people who enjoy interacting with others in a social environment when everyone is enjoying each other’s familiarities with certain literary things, musical gestures, artistic relationships, and whatnot. Some religious connotations and associations can have a humorous aspect to them, and so church musicians and the organ can be part of that basket of topics as well.

One must be careful not to read in too much into a title. Actually the real purpose of a title might simply be to distinguish one piece from another when you’re talking with someone on the telephone. Sometimes, it doesn’t really get much beyond that. 

 

However, notes and comments on sketches for Night Procession and the Whistler Nocturnes suggest that in some cases Bill may have been thinking of titles right along with the musical concepts.

It’s possible that the title gave to the piece its nucleus, that is, the title might have to do with the style of the piece or it might be reminiscent of a certain performer whom he was trying to emulate. 

 

You performed several of Bill’s organ pieces. Did he have suggestions for you?

Bill coached me on the performance of Melisma. As usual, I was practicing it slowly at first and gradually picking up the tempo. Bill said, “You know that first little group of notes…you shouldn’t be able to hear the individual notes…it’s just baroop.” It’s a glissando. You have to do that fast! I can see him in the old electronic music studio with his hand on the dial of the signal generator and here’s a sine wave coming from the speakers, and he’d be twiddling the dial, making the sound barooarooaroo go up and down. (See Example 6.)

 

…which is like the beginning of Melisma…

Yes, but you can’t be playing the thing da-da-da-da-da-….It has to go so fast that it’s just a blur.

 

And with a traditional chromatic fingering, you can’t get it fast enough. So instead of (L.H.) 2-1-3-1-3, you use consecutive fingers 5-4-3-2-1 with a quick flick of the wrist.

I got the impression that Bill really wanted that thing to be at full bore velocity. Of course, you’re dealing with a person who is a virtuoso performer of great stamina. After all, he could keep up very well with those friends he’d invite over and with whom he’d play ragtime music all night long. You know, there were the legendary “cutting contests” [ragtime playing competitions] of the early ragtime pianists, and some of those fellows were still around, some who emulated that culture, so sheer speed and endurance was something Bill expected. Perhaps in his later years he modified that a little.

 

The question of tempo is a perennial one. When I performed Four Fancies (for harpsichord, 1979) and Symphony (for organ, 1986) he told me not to worry too much about tempo, that the most important thing was good rhythm. He commented specifically on honoring the complex rhythms in the second movement of the harpsichord piece, Mirror Bagatelle. Another time he wanted me to play much faster. When he narrated 1732: In Memoriam Johannes Albrecht (1984), he pushed me to the limit on several sections where he wanted it faster. “Let ’er rip!” he said.

I am reminded there are certain times in our musical past when new standards of velocity were set. I recently read a biography of the pianist Art Tatum who had extraordinary facility. As a young teenager, Oscar Peterson, another famous jazz pianist, thought he had arrived in terms of his technical prowess. He was told that by all of his relatives! Why shouldn’t he believe it? Oscar’s father brought home a record of Art Tatum and played it without telling Oscar anything about it. When it was all done, he asked his son, “Well, what ’ya think of that?” And Oscar said, “Boy, those guys are good!” And his father said, “Oscar, that’s only one man playing.” When Oscar realized his father was telling the truth, he said, “I didn’t go near a piano for three months.” 

When a standard like that is set, it forces people to do more than they think they can. You find that, yes, you can do it. Bill’s fingers weren’t built any differently than anybody else’s. With practice, you can achieve those velocities that he was looking for.

 

Thank you, John.

Thank you. It’s been a pleasure talking about an old friend and colleague and his music. 

Alexander Fiseisky

Alexander Fiseisky, born in Moscow, is one of the most famous and influential organists in Russia. He graduated with distinction from the Moscow Conservatoire as pianist and organist. He is an organ soloist of the Moscow State Philharmonic Society, head of the organ class at the Russian Gnessins’ Academy of Music in Moscow, and president of the Vladimir Odoyevsky Organ Center. He organized and served as artistic director for organ festivals in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev, and Tallinn, among others. In 1997 he was honored by President Yeltsin with the title ‘Honoured Artist of the Russian Federation’. Fiseisky has given concerts in more than 30 countries. In the Bach Anniversary Year of 2000 he played J. S. Bach’s entire organ works, twice in the context of EXPO 2000 in Hannover, and once in a single day in Düsseldorf as a Bach Marathon. Sought after as a juror in international competitions, he has directed seminars and masterclasses in Europe and the USA. He is the dedicatee of numerous compositions, including works by Mikhail Kollontai, Vladimir Ryabov, Milena Aroutyunova, and Walther Erbacher. A musicologist, he has edited anthologies of organ music of Russia and of the Baltics (Bärenreiter-Verlag). He has many recordings to his credit, including the complete organ works of J. S. Bach.

1. Historical Sketch
Until the 13th century, the indigenous people of the territories of modern Estonia suffered numerous invasions from the West, the South, and the East. Nevertheless, they were able to keep their independence, and the Estonian language emerged in the sixth century. During the 13th and 14th centuries the Estonians were Christianized, in the course of which the southern parts of Estonia were divided in 1224 between the German Schwertbrüderorden (a military-religious order) and the bishops of Dorpat and Ösel. The northern part of the country, together with the city of Reval (Tallinn) founded by German merchants in 1230, was under Danish rule from 1238 to 1346.
The country was ruled by the Teutonic Knights and local bishops, who were supported by the merchants of the towns and the landed gentry. This ruling class was almost entirely ethnic German, and the native Estonian farmers fell by degrees into bondage. The church, showing no interest in the Estonian language, had only limited influence on the local people until the Reformation, when, during the 1520s, the Estonian people began to take a more active part in church life.
As a result of the Livonian war (1558–83), the Order of the Teutonic Knights collapsed. The northern part of Estonia was occupied by Sweden, the southern part brought under Polish–Lithuanian rule, while the island of Saaremaa remained Danish. From 1645, all Estonian territory was under Swedish jurisdiction. After the Swedish defeat in the Great Northern War (1700–21), which was accompanied by a devastating plague, Estonia fell under Russian rule, remaining a part of the Russian Empire until 1917.
Under these circumstances, Estonian culture always developed under the influence of the ruling nations, that of the Germans being particularly strong. The Baltic German aristocracy, the clergy, and the merchants of the Hanseatic League maintained their privileged position in Estonian society, even when the Baltic territories were controlled by Poland, Sweden, or Russia. The church’s administration in Lutheran Estonia from the 16th century until Estonia’s declaration of independence in 1918 was, for instance, always headed by Germans.

2. Organs in Estonia from the 13th to the 16th century
Early Estonian music developed in monasteries and church schools, founded even during the subjugation of the Estonian tribes by foreign invaders. Twelfth-century unison church hymns written in neume notation can be found in liturgy books preserved in the Tallinn City Archives. In 13th-century sources, the main churches of Tallinn are mentioned for the first time: the Cathedral of St. Mary (1219); St. Nicholas’ Church (1230); and St. Olai’s Church (1267). It is evident that organs began to spread in parallel with the growing influence of the church in Estonia. However, the first documented reference to organs in Estonian territories dates only from 1329: in Paistu and Helme (northern Livonia) organs were destroyed by enemy action.1 Some years later (1341), an organist working for a church in Tallinn is mentioned.2
After the great fire, which almost completely destroyed Tallinn on 11 May 1433, a new organ was built in St. Nicholas’ Church (Niguliste) by the organ builder “Orgelmaker” Albrecht; it was later rebuilt in 1489 by Hermann Stüwe from Wismar and six assistants. Most of the organ builders working in Estonia during this period came from the Hanseatic cities of North Germany. Around 1500, the church of St. Nicholas, the largest and wealthiest church in the influential Hanseatic city of Tallinn, boasted a total of three organs3: the first on the west wall; the second in St. Antonius’ chapel; and the third in the chancel, built in 1502 by the local organ builder and Dominican monk Peter Schmidt.4 Tradition hands down the name of one more local “Maker of Organs”: Yllies. His name is mentioned in the report of the treasurer of St. Olai’s Church (Oleviste) in 1540.5
A new organ in St. Nicholas’ Church was built in 1547 by a certain “Meister Hans.” In 1584 this organ was enlarged by the organ builder Bartolt (Bartold) Fiehoff (Viehoff, Fehoff)6 and fitted with a Rückpositiv.7 Between 1588 and 1590 the same builder built an organ of 38 stops for St. Olai’s Church.
During the 15th and 16th centuries, positive organs became fashionable among the wealthier nobility, citizens, and town officials. For instance, in 1499 the “Domherr” and “Stadtschreiber” (Town Clerk) Magister Christianus Czernekow bequeathed his positive organ to the organist Matthias: “ . . . Item domino Mathie, organiste in summo, positivum stantem in camera mea . . .”8 The above-mentioned Bartolt Fiehoff also built a positive organ in 1585–86 for the church of St. Johannis in Tartu (Dorpat).
With the spread of Protestantism, church music in Estonia acquired new significance. Lutheran hymns, accompanied by the organ, became the musical basis of the liturgy. Following the guidelines of Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon about education, the Latin school at St. Olai’s Church in Tallinn was reorganized in 1528 as a Lutheran town school (Stadtschule). Its curriculum included basic studies of Protestant music. Choral singing was practiced under the direction of the Kantor—a special teacher who also became responsible for the musical accompaniment of the church services. Gradually the Kantors became the main figures in the cities’ music life. The first Protestant Kantor in Tallinn whose name has come down to us was Petrus Mellin (1531–2).
After the Reformation, the Tallinn churches of St. Nicholas and St. Olai became the focus of cultural life. In the second half of the 16th century, the choir of St. Nicholas’ Church, consisting of about 50 members, performed vocal music from handwritten Kantionalien (liturgical books) by Lukas Lossius, Jacob Meiland, Melchior Vulpius, Hieronymus Praetorius, and others.

3. Culture, religion and musical life in the 17th and 18th centuries
In 1630, the Swedish King Gustavus Adolfus II established a Gymnasium in Tartu for the purpose of strengthening Protestantism. Two years later this Gymnasium was transformed into a university (Academia Gustaviana) and became the most important center of cultural life in Estonia. In Tartu, for the first time in the history of the country, the music of an Estonian folk song was printed (Friedrich Menius, Syntagma de origine livonorum, Dorpat 1635). Another important publication appeared in Tartu in 1640, the Oratio de musica of Jacob Lotichius, who later became the Kantor of the Cathedral School in Riga (Latvia). Concerts and theatrical performances regularly took place in the University of Tartu.
The churches continued to be centers of musical life, the concerts that regularly took place there being contributed by choir, organ, solo singers, and the musicians in the service of the town. It should be noted that organists in Estonia maintained a privileged position compared with town musicians. While the latter received a payment of 20 Taler per year (with three tons of rye and other food in addition), the organists of the Tallinn churches of St. Nicholas and St. Olai in the middle of the 17th century received 100 Taler a year (as well as accommodation and other benefits).9
Much attention was paid to church music; for instance, St. Johannis, the main church in Tartu, employed two organists in the 1680s—one of them, the cantor figuralis, being responsible for the choir, the other, the cantor choralis, for hymn singing.
Use of the Estonian language had also grown. The first attempts at translating Lutheran hymns into Estonian had already been made in the 16th century, while the earliest surviving historical source in the Estonian language is Pastor Henrico Stahl’s anthology of religious hymns, Hand- und Haußbuch Für die Pfarherren und Haußväter Esthnischen Fürstenthumbs (Handbook and Domestic Book for the Clergy and Nobility in Estonia, 1632–38). The first collection of music was published in Estonia (in 1637) by Tallinn’s Gymnasium (founded in 1631 by Gustavus Adolfus II). From the end of the 17th century, lessons at schools were increasingly held in the mother tongue. The New Testament was translated into Estonian in 1686, followed by the entire Bible in 1739.
Country parish churches established the post of sacristan (Küster in German, köster in Estonian), whose duties included instructing young people in reading and writing, prayers, and singing hymns. In 1684 Bengt Gottfried Forselius founded a seminary near Tartu to train young people for such posts, and from the 19th century the köster was also the village schoolmaster and organist.
A tendency towards secular influences is noticeable in the art and religious life of that time. The decorative depiction of saints on organ cases was replaced by allegories from non-religious art. The organ gallery in the chancel of St. Nicholas’ Church in Tallinn, finished in 1639, was decorated with seven wooden sculptures. The “Allegory of Music” was placed in the middle between six other female figures. Together they portrayed the seven fine arts (septem artes liberales).
Important among organ builders working in Estonia at this time were Johannes Pauli (Pawels, Paulus) from Riga, who built and repaired several organs in Tallinn and Kuressaare (Arensburg) between 1611 and 1644, the Swede Andres Bruse (mid-17th century), and above all Christopher Meinecke (Christoff Mencke) from Lübeck, who, working first with Bruse, was active in Tartu until 1645, and from 1660 in Tallinn (St. Nicholas, III/P/3010, 1668).

Tallinn, St. Nicholas’ Church
Christopher Meinecke (Christoff Mencke), 1668 (does not exist)
HAUPTWERK (upper manual)
16' Principal
16' Quinta-Thön
8' Octava
8' Rohrflöte (4'')
4' Super-Octava
2' Rausch-Pfeife
Mixtur IV–V
16' Trommet
8' Trommet
RÜCKPOSITIV (lower manual)
8' Principal
8' Gedackt
4' Octava
4' Gedackt
Tertian II
Scharf III
8' Krumbhorn
8' Dulcian
BRUSTWERK (played from the upper manual)
8' Quinta-Thön
4' Gedackt
2' Octava
Sesquialtera II
8' Regal
PEDAL
16' Untersatz
8' Octava
8' Gedackt
4' Gedackt
16' Posaune
16' Fagotto
8' Trommet
4' Cornet

Tremolo
Koppel

Sources:
Leonid Rojman, Organnaja kul’tura 'stonii [The Organ Culture of Estonia], Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe muzykal’noe izdatel’stvo [State Musical Publishing House] 1960, p. 84.
Hugo Lepnurm, Istorija organa i organnoj muzyki, Kazan’ 1999, p. 74 (translation of the Estonian original “Oreli ja orelimuusika ajaloost,” Tallinn 1971 [“On the History of the Organ and Organ Music”]).
During the Great Northern War (1700–21), almost all organs in the Estonian territories were destroyed. There is a reference to only one organ preserved in a small church in Mänspä on the island of Hiiumaa (Dagö), built by an unknown organ builder at the beginning of the 18th century. After the war and until the end of the century, most of the existing organs were in poor condition because of the country’s extraordinary poverty. Only a few installations or renovations of organs are known; Gottfried Kloos (Clossen, Klossen, Kloss, died 1740), an organ builder from Danzig, installed a Vox humana stop and a Zimbelstern in the main organ of St. Nicholas’ Church in Tallinn (1720–21).
In the 1780s, the organ builder Johann Friedrich Gräbner from Bremen, who later became a citizen of Tallinn, began working in Estonia. He also built harpsichords, clavichords, lutes, harps and fortepianos. In April 1789, he visited St. Petersburg and handed over plans for two organs with 45 and 60 stops to Prince Grigory Alexandrovich Potyomkin (1739–91). Shortly before that, he had finished an organ for the Cathedral of St. Mary in Tallinn and brought a report about his work to St. Petersburg:

We, the undersigned members of the council of the church “de la Noblesse” and the Cathedral, certify by this document that Johann Friedrich Gräbner, an organ builder, designed and built a wonderful and majestic organ [ . . . ], which gained the endorsement of all experts.11
The most famous organ builder in the Baltics in the 18th century was Heinrich Andreas Contius (1708–92). Between 1764 and 1771, he built a new organ in St. Olai, Tallinn (III/P/60)12 (Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart gives the starting date as 176713). Abbé Georg Joseph Vogler played this organ on his way from Stockholm to Moscow in 1787; according to his report he “never encountered a better organ.”14
Contius’s son-in-law, Johann Andreas Stein (1752–1821), born in Karlsruhe, established his own workshop in Pärnu (Pernau) at the end of the century. In 1805, he installed an organ in the church of Kihelkonna on the island Saaremaa. This instrument, with a case in the late rococo style, is the oldest church organ in Estonia still preserved.

The Church of Kihelkonna
Johann Andreas Stein, I/P/14 (Pärnu), 1805
Friedrich Weissenborn, II. Manual (J'kabpils [Jacobstadt], Latvia), 1890
I. MANUAL (C–f³)
16' Bourdon
8' Principal
8' Gedackt
8' Gamba
4' Octave
4' Flöte
2 2/3' Quint
2' Octave
Mixtur II–III
8' Trompete
II. MANUAL (C–f³)
8' Geigenprincipal
8' Hohlflöte
8' Piano
4' Geigenprincipal
PEDAL (C–c¹)
16' Subbass
8' Principalbass
4' Octave
8' Posaune

II/I, I/Ped.
II. Manual in Swell Box

Sources:
Leonid Rojman, Organnaja kul’tura 'stonii [The Organ Culture of Estonia], Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe muzykal’noe izdatel’stvo [State Musical Publishing House] 1960, p. 85.
Andreas Uibo and Jüri Kuuskemaa, Historical Organs in Estonia, Lilienthal/Bremen (Eres Edition 2408) 1994, p. 72.
Among the foremost musicians in 17th-century Estonia was Johann Valentin Meder (1649–1719). Born in Wassungen on the Werra, he worked as a Kantor in the Tallinn Gymnasium (1674–83), and was a prolific composer. The first performance of his Singspiel Die beständige Argenia took place in Tallinn in 1680.
Notable contributions to the development of the art of the organ in Estonia were also made by Erasmus Pogatz (organist at St. Nicholas’ Church in Tallinn 1583–1630), Christopher Asmes (organist at St. Olai’s Church in the first half of the 17th century), and representatives of the Busbetzky musical dynasty. The most important of the latter was Ludwig Busbetzky, a pupil of Dietrich Buxtehude and from 1687 to 1699 organist at the German church in Narva.
Playing the organ became widespread in private homes from the middle of the 17th century. Organists were evidently invited to play at weddings there, for in 1665 a special decree was issued by the Tallinn Magistracy emphasizing that: “ . . . at weddings of housemaids only two musicians and an organist should play, and each of them should receive two Taler for his work.” In 1777, August Wilhelm Hupel, a member of the Independent Economics Society founded in St. Petersburg in 1765, wrote about organists coming from rural families: “ . . . our farmers are not completely without a musical ear: nobles have sent them to study and now they can satisfactorily accompany dances.”15
Musical life became more active in the second half of the 18th century, when it became fashionable to take music lessons and to give concerts in private homes. One instrument that was probably played on such occasions, a positive organ built by Johann Karl Thal from Antsla (I/2, 1795), is now exhibited in the Theatre and Music Museum in Tallinn.
Established by Carl Christian Aghte, the Hündelberger Theater-Kompanie (1776–82) performed the first Singspiels under his direction. In 1784, August von Kotzebue founded the Tallinn Liebhaber-Theater, known from 1809 as the Staendiges (“Permanent”) Theatre, where such works as Mozart’s operas Die Zauberflöte (1795') and Don Giovanni (1797) were performed.

4. Estonia in the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century
The 19th century brought momentous changes to Estonia. The abolition of serfdom between 1816 and 1819 by Tsar Alexander I (reigned 1801–25) was the decisive step towards liberating the Estonian peasants from the grip of their Baltic German landlords; however, it took several decades before the peasants came into the possession of their farms. In the course of agrarian reform and development of the education system, national self-awareness began to awaken. It was during Alexander II’s reign (1855–81) that the Estonian national movement came into being. Its leaders saw it as their main task to develop Estonia culturally, but step by step the movement became increasingly more political. During the Russian Revolution of 1905, the Estonians demanded cultural and political autonomy, but the Tsarist government refused any concession. It took the collapse of the Russian Empire to create the conditions for the emergence of an independent Estonia, proclaimed on February 24, 1918.
Against this background, concert-giving activity in Estonia steadily expanded. In Tallinn, compositions of the Viennese classical period were performed, among them Mozart’s Requiem (1814) and Haydn’s Creation (1817). In 1819 and 1821, compositions by Peter Andreas Johann Steinsberg using folk melodies and folk dances were performed in the Estonian language for the first time: Häbbi sellel’, kes petta tahhab (“Shame on One Who Wants to Cheat”) and Krappi kaie willetsus, ehk: Kes paljo lobbiseb, peab paljo wastama (“Krappi Kais’ Need, or: Who Chatters Much Has Much to Answer”).
Many famous musicians performed in Estonia, among them Clara Schumann, Franz Liszt, Sigismund Thalberg, and Anton Rubinstein, while the conductor Arthur Nikisch brought the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra to Tallinn in 1899.
Among composers particularly active in Estonia in the first half of the 19th century was Johann Friedrich de La Trobe (1769–1845), who came from Chelsea near London. From 1829 he worked as a music teacher in Tartu; in 1834 he conducted Handel’s Alexander’s Feast in St. Johannis Church there with more than a hundred singers, and in 1835 he founded the Tartu Choral Society, to promote the development of choral music in the town. De La Trobe’s works included mainly sacred vocal compositions, as well as piano and chamber music. His son-in-law Woldemar von Bock (1816–1903) studied law in Tartu before living in Riga (1857–66) and afterwards in Quedlinburg. His collection, Chorale Studies for the Organ, was published in Erfurt in 1855.
The surviving organ works of de La Trobe (the Chorale Preludes, 1805, and the Fughettas, 1798, from the early period of his life)—as well as those of von Bock—are of little artistic value.
The national epic poem Kalevipoeg (“Kalev’s Son”) by Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald, written between 1857 and 1861, became a landmark in Estonian literature. Poetry became the most important genre, represented by Lydia Koidula-Jannsen, Ado Reinwald, Mihkel Veske, Marie Under, and Betti Alver.
In 1841, the pianist Theodor Stein (1819–93) and Ferdinand Johann Wiedermann founded the Musical Society, followed by such associations as the Men’s Choral Society of Reval (1849), the Reval Choral Union (1854), the Harmony (1858), and the Jäkelsche Choral Union (1859). The art of choral performance developed rapidly, reaching its zenith in 1869, when the First Song Festival (Üldlaulupidu) took place in Tartu, involving 1,000 singers and an audience of 15,000. It was initiated by the journalist Johann Voldemar Jannsen (1819–90). Here for the first time choral works by Aleksander Saebelmann-Kunileid (1845–75) were performed, settings of patriotic poems by Lydia Koidula-Jannsen (1843–86): Mu isamaa on minu arm (“My Native Land, My Dearest Love”) and Sind surmani (“I’ll Cherish You till Death”).
In 1827, Eduard Philipp Körber published his Little Estonian Hymnal in the Tartu Dialect (Das kleine ehstnische Choralbuch in Dörptscher ehstnischer Sprache). Soon afterwards, Johann Leberecht Ehregott Punschel (1778–1849) presented the Evangelical Chorale Book Appropriate to German, Latvian and Estonian Hymnbooks in the Russian Baltic Provinces (Evangelische Choralbuch zunächst in Bezug auf die deutschen, lettischen und estnischen Gesangbücher der russischen Ostsee-Provinzen) (Leipzig, 1839). This book included 363 chorales. Its second, extended edition was issued in 1844.
These collections of hymns were complemented by tutorial books in the Estonian language for those who wanted to learn to play the klavier. One of the first books of this kind was the unfinished work by Johann Heinrich Rosenplänter (1782–1846), How One Can Learn to Play the Piano [and the Organ] (Õppetus kuida klawwerit [ja orelit] mängida) (manuscript, 1830).16 A little later, the Saxon Johann August Hagen (1786–1877), who from 1815 was the organist at St. Olai’s Church in Tallinn,17 published his instructive book Instruction on How Singing People, and Whoever Else Wishes, Can Learn to Bring Forth Songs from the Written Notes, in Order to Play Them on the House Organ and to Sing Themselves, As Well As Together with Their Pupils (Õppetus, kuida laulomehhed, ja kes muud tahtwad, joudwad notidest laulo wisid ülleswõtta, lauloerrelatte peäl mängides ja nende järrel lauldes, ni hästi nemmad isse, kui ka nende õppetus lapsed) (Tallinn, 1841). In 1861, a new work by Hagen was published: A Guide to Organ Playing for Those Who Wish to Attain the Position of Country Organist and to Prepare Themselves for It (Juhhataja errela mängimisseks neile, kes maal errela mängimisse ammetid noudwad ja ennast selle wasto tahtwad walmistada); and finally, the textbook of Andreas Erlemann, Instruction in Music (Musika õppetus), was published in 1864, placing special emphasis on the organ.
In addition to these theoretical works by Hagen and Erlemann, the large number of chamber organs built by self-taught enthusiasts had a significant influence on the musical education of the people. As a rule, most of these instruments had only wooden pipes. At the end of the 19th century, hardly any sizable family in Estonia did not possess a chamber organ. Schools contributed much to the spreading of music, as they also possessed organs. Thus the organ in Estonia really became the folk instrument.
Organs of a larger scale were built by Carl Tanton, as well as by the Germans Ernst Kessler and Wilhelm Müllverstedt, who had settled in Tartu. Some of their church organs are still preserved in Kullamaa (C. Tanton, I/P/12, 1854), Otepää (E. Kessler, I/P/12, 1853), Vigala (W. Müllverstedt, II/P/14, 1886), and other Estonian towns.
The Church of Vigala
Wilhelm Müllverstedt, II/P/14. Originally the organ was built for the church of St. Peter in Tartu (1886); was moved to Vigala in 1888.
I. MANUAL (C–f³)
16' Bordun
8' Principal
8' Gedackt
8' Gambe
4' Principal
4' Flöte
4' Spitzflöte
2 2/3' Quinte
2' Octav
Mixtur IV
II. MANUAL (C–f³)
Phisharmonika
PEDAL (C–d¹)
16' Subbass
8' Principal
8' Bassflöte

Calcant
Sperrventil Pedal
Pedal Coupler

Source:
Andreas Uibo and Jüri Kuuskemaa, Historical Organs in Estonia, Lilienthal/Bremen (Eres Edition 2408) 1994, p. 78.

Müllverstedt had often been in St. Petersburg and Moscow, where he repaired and tuned, in particular, the house organ “Sebastianon”18 of the Prince Vladimir Odoyevsky, and the old organ (1889) in the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire. As Professor Alexander Fyodorovich Goedicke (1877–1957) remembered, in the 1890s the Tartu master regularly visited towns in central Russia to tune and repair organs. There were about 60 organs in Russia in the care of Müllverstedt.19
Gustav Normann (1825–93), a very productive organ builder, was the founder of the “organ building school” in Northern Estonia. He built one of his more significant works for St. Johannis’ Church in Tallinn (III/P/40, 1869).20 Others of his surviving instruments include those in Harju-Madise (I/P/7, 1859) and Simuna (II/P/20, 1886).
Normann’s successors were the father and son Gustav and August Terkmann. Gustav (1855–1911) founded his own organ workshop in Tallinn in 1882 and produced mainly small organs with tracker action for village churches. One of his instruments (II/P/13, 1902) can be seen in Järva-Madise.
His son, organ builder August Terkmann (1885–1940), who had been a trainee of Laukhuff, used pneumatic and electropneumatic action in his instruments. Active in the Estonian countryside, as well as in St. Petersburg, Astrakhan and Simbirsk, he also built some larger organs in Tallinn, in particular for the Estonia concert hall (III/P/56 + 3 borrowed stops, 1913)21 and in St. Johannis’ Church, (III/P/36 + 23 borrowed stops, 1914).22

Tallinn, The Estonia Concert Hall
August Terkmann, III/P/56 + 3 borrowed stops, 1913 (does not exist)
I. MANUAL
16' Principal
8' Principal
8' Seraphon-gambe
8' Hohlflöte
8' Rohrflöte
8' Gemshorn
4' Octave
4' Rohrflöte
2' Octave
2 2/3' Quinte
Mixtur III
8' Trompete
II. MANUAL
16' Bourdun-doux
16' Quintatön
8' Principal
8' Bourdun
8' Quintatön
8' Traversflöte
8' Gamba*
8' Salicional
8' Unda maris
4' Principal
4' Traversflöte
4' Salicional
2' Waldflöte
Cornett III–IV
8' Clarinette
8' Basson
III. MANUAL
16' Lieblichgedackt*
8' Geigenprincipal
8' Gedackt
8' Flauto amabile
8' Gamba
8' Viola d’amour
8' Aeoline
8' Vox celestis
4' Fugare
4' Flauto dolce
2' Flautino
Harmonia aetheria III
Cornett IV
16' Fagott*
8' Trompete
8' Oboe
8' Vox humana
4' Clairon
PEDAL
32' Untersatz
16' Principalbaß
16' Violonbaß
16' Subbaß
16' Gedecktbaß (* Manual III)
8' Octavbaß
8' Cello (* II)
8' Flöte
8' Dolce
4' Flöte
(102'3' Quinte)**
16' Posaune
16' Fagott (* Manual III)

* Borrowed stops
** Thus in the source

Source:
Leonid Rojzman, Organnaja kul’tura 'stonii [The Organ Culture of Estonia], Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe muzykal’noe izdatel’stvo [State Musical Publishing House] 1960, pp. 85–86.

The large German companies were very productive in Estonia, above all
E. F. Walcker & Co. and Wilhelm Sauer. Walcker built two large organs in Tallinn: St. Olai (III/P/65, 1842) and St. Nicholas (III/P/43, 1895). Of the most important Sauer instruments to have been preserved, that in St. Mary’s Cathedral, Tallinn, is noteworthy (III/P/71 + 2 borrowed stops, 1914).

Tallinn, Cathedral of St. Mary
Wilhelm Sauer, III/P/71 + 2 borrowed stops (Frankfurt/Oder, Germany), Opus 1171, 1914
I. MANUAL (C–a³)
16' Principal
16' Bordun
8' Principal
8' Gamba
8' Doppelflöte
8' Flauto amabile
8' Quintatön
8' Gemshorn
8' Gedackt
8' Dolce
51'3' Nasard
4' Rohrflöte
4' Gemshorn
4' Octave
2' Waldflöte
Mixtur III
Cornett III
8' Trompete
II. MANUAL (C–a³)
16' Gedackt
16' Salicional
8' Dulciana
8' Rohrflöte
8' Salicional
8' Koncertflöte
8' Viola
8' Flauto traverso
8' Principal
4' Dolce
4' Flauto amabile
4' Principal
2 2/3' Nasard
2' Piccolo
Progress II–III
Cymbel III–IV
8' Klarinette
III. MANUAL (C–a³)
16' Gedackt*
16' Gamba
8' Voix celeste
8' Aeoline
8' Gemshorn
8' Gedackt
8' Viola d’amour
8' Quintatön
8' Flauto amabile*
8' Portunalflöte
8' Schalmei
8' Geigenprincipal
4' Flauto dolce
4' Salicet
4' Fugara
2' Flautino
Harmonia aetheria III
8' Aeolodian
8' Oboe
8' Trompete
PEDAL (C–f¹)
32' Untersatz
16' Lieblich Gedackt (* Manual III)
16' Gemshorn
16' Subbass
16' Quintatön
16' Violon
16' Principal
102'3' Quinte
8' Dulciana (* Manual III)
8' Gemshorn
8' Bassflöte
8' Cello
8' Principal
4' Flauto
4' Principal
16' Posaune
8' Trompete
4' Clairon

* Borrowed stops

III/II, III/I, II/I
III/Ped., II/Ped., I/Ped.

Sub-octave Coupler II/I
Super-octave Coupler II/I
General Coupler

Prepared Combinations: Piano, Mezzoforte, Forte
3 Free Combinations
Crescendo Roller
Swell Pedal for Manual III and Lieblich Gedackt 16', Dulciana 8' (Ped.)

Piano Pedal
Mezzoforte Pedal
Forte Pedal

Stops Off
Reeds Off
Pedal Couplers Off
Crescendo Off

Pneumatic Action

Restoration: Orgelwerkstatt Christian Scheffler (Frankfurt/Oder, Germany), 1998

This organ incorporates many elements of an earlier instrument by Friedrich Ladegast (III/P/51, 1878). Ladegast built also a number of organs in provincial towns, of which the instrument in the Town Church of St. Johannis (II/P/21, 1867) in Valga (Walk) should be first of all mentioned.

Valga, Town Church of St. Johannis
Friedrich Ladegast, II/P/21, 1867

I. MANUAL (C–f³)
16' Bordun
8' Principal
8' Doppelflöte
8' Flauto traverso
8' Viola d’amour
4' Rohrflöte
4' Salicional
2' Octave
Cornett III
Mixtur IV

II. MANUAL (C–f³)
8' Lieblich Gedackt
8' Gamba
8' Bassflöte
4' Principal
4' Flauto amabile
2 2/3' Quinte
2' Waldflöte
PEDAL (C–d¹)
16' Subbass
16' Violon
8' Cello
16' Posaune

II/I, I/Ped., II/Ped.

Source:
Andreas Uibo and Jüri Kuuskemaa, Historical Organs in Estonia, Lilienthal/Bremen (Eres Edition 2408) 1994, p. 78.

Other German organ builders who also worked in Estonia include E. Ch. Lemke (Narva, 1837); Guido Knauff from Coburg (Viljandi [Fellin], St. Paul’s Church, II/P/31, 1866); and the brothers Schwalbenberg.
Of great interest is the activity of another Estonian organ building dynasty, that of the three brothers Tannil, Juhan, and Jakob Kriisa. From Haanja in southeast Estonia, they continued an old popular tradition by building first smaller organs. Slowly their business expanded, their sons joined the firm, and at the beginning of the 20th century their instruments were to be found all over Estonia; one of their biggest was installed in the church in Võru (1910).
The importance of the organ in Estonian music is underlined by the fact that almost all significant Estonian composers were organists. This is particularly true in the older generation such as Johannes Kappel (1855–1907), Konstantin Türnpu (1865–1927), and Miina Härma (1864–1941), all of whom were graduates of the St. Petersburg Conservatoire, where their organ professor was Louis (Ludwig) Homilius (1845–1908).
Having finished his conservatoire studies in 1881, Kappel became the organist at the Dutch church in St. Petersburg. In later life he remained connected with that city, conducted Estonian choirs, and regularly took part in song festivals in Tallinn and Tartu.
Türnpu finished his studies in 1891 and became organist at St. Nicholas’ Church in Tallinn. As a choir trainer, he was unequalled in Estonia at that time. His choir performed major works of the central classical repertoire, such as J. S. Bach’s B-minor Mass, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, and others.
Härma (who graduated in 1890) became an active recitalist not only in Estonia and Russia, but also beyond their borders. The inclusion of works by Bach, Mendelssohn, and Reger in her programs introduced these organ classics to the Estonian public.
Kappel, Türnpu and Härma composed neither symphonic nor organ music. Their works consist mainly of choral music and solo songs. The first Estonian symphonic music was written around 1900 by the succeeding generation.
Rudolf Tobias (1873–1918) composed in 1896 the tragic overture Julius Caesar, and Artur Kapp (1878–1952) a dramatic overture, Don Carlos, in 1899. Both musicians were graduates of the St. Petersburg Conservatoire, the artistic traditions of which, represented in the music of Rimsky-Korsakov, Lyadov, and Glazunov, deeply influenced Estonian music.
Tobias, the founder of classical Estonian music, was born into a sacristan’s family in the village of Käina in 1873. He received his first music instruction from his father. From 1893 to 1897, he studied organ with Homilius and composition with Rimsky-Korsakov at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire. For a diploma, he submitted the cantata Johannes Damascenus for mixed choir, male voice choir, soloists, organ, and symphony orchestra. Having finished his studies, he became the choirmaster and organist at the Estonian church of St. Johannis in St. Petersburg. He was held in high regard as a performer and improviser.
In autumn 1904, he settled in Tartu and there conducted symphony and choral concerts, gave music lessons, and wrote articles on music, thus inspiring Estonian musicology. In 1908, he moved to Leipzig, and then from 1910 lived in Berlin, where he published articles as a music critic in (for example) the Deutsche Allgemein Musikzeitung. From 1912 onwards, he taught music theory at the Royal Music Academy (Königliche Akademische Hochschule für Musik). He died in 1918 in Berlin.
Besides the overture Julius Caesar and the cantata Johannes Damascenus, his output includes a concerto for piano and orchestra, string quartets, chamber music, and vocal compositions. For organ, Tobias wrote more than thirty preludes and choral arrangements, Fugue in D minor, Largo, Prelude and Fughetta in C minor, as well as a Concerto for Organ and Orchestra in F minor. He made use of the organ in almost all of his large choral works—in the oratorios On the Other Side of the Jordan, Jonah’s Mission, the cantata Johannes Damascenus, and others.
Artur Kapp, a classical master of Estonian music, was born in Suure-Jaani in 1878. He received his first instruction in music from his father, a village sacristan. After graduating in 1898 from the St. Petersburg Conservatoire, studying organ with Homilius, he continued his studies there in the composition class of Rimsky-Korsakov (diploma in 1900), and then for a few years he worked as the second organist (as assistant to Homilius) at the Lutheran church of St. Peter in St. Petersburg.
From 1904 to 1920, he was director of the music college and head of the local department of the Russian Musical Society in Astrakhan. In 1920, he became the musical director of the Estonia theatre and a teacher at the Tallinn Conservatoire (from 1925 professor of composition). Among his pupils were Edgar Arro, Gustav Ernesaks, Eugen Kapp, Riho Päts, Villem Reiman, and others. He died in 1952 in Suure-Jaani.
His output includes symphonic works and oratorios, concertos and compositions for different instruments, as well as chamber and vocal music. His organ works are of great importance; the first was the Sonata in F minor, which Kapp wrote while studying at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire (1897). This was followed by Variations on a Chorale Theme (1902), two concertos for organ and orchestra (1934 and 1946), a trio for violin, cello, and organ (1936), the Sonata in D major (1948), choral fantasias, and other compositions.
In Kapp’s truly independent works, various stylistic influences are obvious. His style attempts to combine the tradition of the classical Viennese school, polyphony and a Romantic internationalism.
Homilius’s predecessor as head of the organ department of the St. Petersburg conservatoire, Heinrich Stiehl (1829–86), had lived in Tallinn since 1880, being the organist of St. Olai. Besides the above-mentioned musicians, Louis Homilius was also the teacher of such renowned composers of Estonian music as August Topman (1882–1968), Mart Saar (1882–1963), and Mihkel Lüdig.
Mihkel Lüdig was born in Reiu in 1880. He received his first instruction in music from Max Peters, the organist at Pärnu. In 1897, he began his studies at the Moscow Conservatoire, but in the next year moved to St. Petersburg, where he graduated from the conservatoire organ class (of Homilius) in 1904. His other teachers there were Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov and Solovyov (composition), and Czerny (piano). After graduating the conservatoire, Lüdig worked in St. Petersburg as an organist and choirmaster. From 1912 to 1914, he was solo organist in Count Sheremetyev’s symphony orchestra. Lüdig’s organ recitals were always well received by both experts and press. Honored by the composer’s request to give the first performance of Alexander Glazunov’s first organ work, the Prelude and Fugue in D major, op. 93 (1906), he did so in the Small Hall of the St. Petersburg Conservatoire on January 29, 1907. In 1917, Lüdig moved to Tallinn, where in 1919 he established the Higher Music School, of which he became the director (1919–23). At the same time, he was the organist of the Charles’ Church in Tallinn (until 1924). He spent three years in Argentina and returned to Tallinn in 1928. From 1934 until his death in 1958, he lived in the village of Vändra.
Mihkel Lüdig’s output includes symphonic works and oratorios, as well as chamber and vocal music; his choral compositions are of great importance. Apart from Three Fugues for Organ (1946), Lüdig composed another work with organ (or piano) accompaniment: the romance In Remembrance of Mother.
Among the pupils of Louis Homilius, the talented Peeter Süda should also be mentioned. Born on the island of Saaremaa (Ösel) in Lümanda district in 1883, Süda studied organ at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire from 1902 to 1911 (first with Homilius, and, after the latter’s death in 1908, with Jacques Handschin). In 1912, he passed the final examination in composition, his teachers being Anatoly Lyadov, Nikolai Solovyov, and Alexander Glazunov. After completing his education, Süda lived in Tallinn, gave private music lessons, and performed as a solo organist. Even as a student, his organ playing was praised. It is known that Professor J'zeps V'tols, for instance, said of Süda’s playing in the final examination, “What playing! Precise, clear cut, pure, and exciting in its virtuosity. One should play the organ exactly as Süda does.” In 1919, Süda became the teacher in composition and organ at the newly established Tallinn Higher Music School. He died in 1920 in Tallinn.
Süda’s compositional output comprises mainly organ pieces, which are of great importance in the development of Estonian organ music. As a brilliant executant, whose knowledge of the potentialities of the instrument was excellent, Süda used the polyphonic style with great mastery. Süda wrote the following organ works (the autographs are preserved in the Theatre and Music Museum in Tallinn): Fugue in F minor (1910), Basso Ostinato (1913–14), Ave Maria (1914), Prelude (1914) and Fugue (1920) in G minor, Scherzino (1916/1918), Gigue à la Bach (1919), and Pastorale (1920).
By the turn of the century, the first music schools in Estonia had been established: in Tartu (1897) and Tallinn (1898). In 1900, the Estonian Symphony Orchestra first appeared under the direction of the composer Aleksander Läte (1860–1948). Soon afterwards the first professional theatres were opened in Estonia’s larger towns: Vanemuine (Tartu, 1906), Estonia (Tallinn, 1906), Endla (Pärnu, 1911), and the Tallinn Dramatic Theatre (1916). In 1905, Artur Lemba (1885–1963) composed the first opera in the Estonian language, Sabina (St. Petersburg, 1906), the second version of which bore the title Lembitu tütar [“Lembitu’s Daughter”] (Vanemuine theatre, Tartu, 1908).
The choral tradition developed with great momentum. There were seven song festivals from 1869 to 1910, with more than 10,000 singers taking part in the last of these, while the composer Juhan Simm (1885–1959), who played a significant role in the organization of subsequent song festivals, founded in 1911 the Tartu university choir.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the literary movement Young Estonia (Noor Eesti) was inaugurated and presided over by the poet Gustav Suits. The motto of the movement “Let us remain Estonians, but let us also become Europeans!” became the inspiration of cultural Estonia.

5. Estonia in the period of its first independence (1918–1940)
The period between the First and Second World Wars witnessed many brilliant events in Estonian artistic life. The greatest literary achievement was the five-part epic novel Truth and Justice (Tõde ja õigus) by Anton H. Tammsaare (written 1926–33), depicting Estonian life between the 1870s and 1920s.
The Tallinn Song Festivals attracted constantly rising numbers of participants (with 17,500 singers in the 11th Song Festival of 1938). From the 1920s, operas were regularly performed in the Theatre Estonia. The concert repertoire in the 1921–22 season included such works as Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique and Till Eulenspiegel by Richard Strauss. In 1936, Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms was performed under the direction of Eduard Tubin (1905–82) in Tallinn, and in the following year the composer himself came to conduct his Firebird Suite and the Capriccio for piano there.
As mentioned above, in 1919 the Higher Music School (from 1923–93 the Conservatoire, and from 1993 the Estonian Academy of Music) was established in Tallinn. In 1919, the Tartu Higher Music School (Tartu Kõrgem Muusikakool) was opened. The Tallinn Conservatoire was directed from 1923–33 by Rector Jaan Tamm, and August Topman was the head of the organ department. Hugo Lepnurm (1914–99), who studied organ there from 1928 to 1933, recalls that Topman laid particular emphasis on preparing his students for their work in Lutheran churches. Since playing services occupied little time and yielded little income, Topman tried to prepare his students for a greater variety of activities, stimulating their interest in choral skills and teaching. Sometimes he joked, “any organist, especially in the provinces, should be able to conduct choirs and the fire brigade band, accompany guest soloists, perform operettas in the House of Culture, be the chairman or at least secretary of the agricultural society, and, if still able, play the organ well.”
In the period between the wars, Peeter Laja (1897–1970), Alfred Karindi (1901–69), Edgar Arro (1911–78), and Hugo Lepnurm were among Topman’s best pupils.
Peeter Laja first became known in 1923, when, at that time a student of the Tallinn Conservatoire, he made his debut in the Estonia Concert Hall, performing as a soloist in G. F. Handel’s Organ Concerto in B-flat (from Op. 4), accompanied by an orchestra under Raimund Kull. Laja’s programs contained compositions of both international and Estonian composers (A. Kapp, R. Tobias, P. Süda, and others).
A distinctive performer, Alfred Karindi was born in Kõnnu. He studied organ (with Johannes Kärt) and composition (with Heino Eller) at the Tartu Higher Music School, where in 1925–28 he taught music theory. From 1927, he was organist of the Tartu university church (here he played the organ that was later moved to the Estonia concert hall) and performed in concerts as organist and conductor. In 1928–32, he was a teacher and a conductor of the mixed students’ choir at the Tartu university. In 1931, he finished his studies as organist and composer at the Tallinn Conservatoire. At the beginning of the 1930s, he moved to Tallinn, where he pursued an active career giving concerts, conducting choral works, including Mozart’s Requiem (1940), and performing as a solo organist. Between 1940–50 and 1955–69, he taught at the conservatoire (from 1946 as a professor). Karindi wrote a symphony, cantatas, piano, chamber, and vocal works. His output includes a number of interesting pieces for organ, of which the central place is held by his four sonatas: No. 1 in E minor (1928), No. 2 in G minor (1932), No. 3 in F minor (1944), and No. 4 in E minor (1963).
Born in Tallinn, Edgar Arro studied the organ at Tallinn Conservatoire with August Topman (1929–35) and composition with Artur Kapp (1934–39). From 1935 to 1940 he worked for the radio. It was one of his tasks to improvise on the organ in the morning hours. Occasionally, he gave solo concerts. From 1944, he was a teacher at the Tallinn Conservatoire (Professor from 1972). Arro wrote symphonic works and oratorios, compositions for choir and different chamber ensembles and—together with Leo Normet—the popular musical comedy Rummu Jüri. Throughout his life as a composer, he had a strong liking for the organ. His first work, Sonata for Organ (1938), was written while studying at the conservatoire. In the early 1940s, it was followed by Maestoso (1943). Of his other organ music, the collection of about 56 concert pieces Eesti rahvaviise orelili (Estonian Folk Tunes for Organ) is of great interest.
A little different was the artistic life of Hugo Lepnurm during the period between the two World Wars. After graduating from the conservatoire, he served as assistant to Professor Topman (1936), but soon he moved to Paris, where he continued his studies with Marcel Dupré (in the winter of 1938–39). In Paris, the young Estonian musician got to know the work of celebrated French organists and he had the chance to listen to Rachmaninov, Cortot, and Menuhin.
During the 1920s two other large organs were built in Tallinn. One of them was the largest organ ever built in Estonia by the company E. F. Walcker & Co. and installed in the Charles’ Church (III/P/81 + 3 borrowed stops, 1923). The other was built by August Terkmann for the Holy Ghost Church (IV/P/71, 1929).23 The Brothers Kriisa were also very active, and among their notable instruments in the 1930s were Paide (II/P/20, 1933), Urvaste (II/P/25 + 1 borrowed stop, 1938), and Suure-Jaani (II/P/25 + 1 borrowed stop, 1937). This last was installed by the Kriisas behind a Johann Andreas Stein case from 1804.

The Church of Suure-Jaani
The Brothers Kriisa, II/P/25 + 1 borrowed stop, 1937

I. MANUAL (C–a³)
8' Principal
8' Viola di Gamba
8' Doppelflöte
8' Gemshorn
8' Salicional
4' Octave
4' Flauto dolce
Cornett III–V
Mixtur III–IV

II. MANUAL (C–a³)
16' Bordun
8' Principal
8' Gedackt
8' Viola d’amour
8' Voix celestes
4' Flauto
2 2/3' Quintflöte
2' Flautino
1 3/5' Terzflöte
Cymbel IV
8' Trompete
Tremolo

PEDAL (C–f¹)
16' Kontrabass
16' Subbass
16' Gedacktbass (Tr. Manual II)
8' Octavbass
8' Violon
16' Posaune

II/I, Super II/I, Super I, Sub II/I
Super II, Sub II
I/Ped., II/Ped., Super II/Ped.

II. Manual in Swell Box

Source
Andreas Uibo and Jüri Kuuskemaa, Historical Organs in Estonia, Lilienthal/Bremen (Eres Edition 2408) 1994, p. 77.
A milestone in Estonian culture was the foundation of the Music Museum in 1934 in Tallinn (from 1941 the Theatre and Music Museum); it became the custodian of archival material and manuscripts of Estonian composers, recordings of folk songs, musical instruments, and other holdings.

6. Estonia from 1940 to the end of the 20th century
With the establishment of the Union of Estonian Composers in 1941, the creative work of native musicians received official support from the government. In the 1940s, some professional choirs were founded on the initiative of the famous choirmaster and composer Gustav Ernesaks (1908–93); their performances on radio and in the concert halls of the Soviet Union were well received. In 1947, the tradition of the Song Festivals was revived after a break of nine years (the 21st Song Festival in 1990 assembled some 30,000 singers and half a million listeners).
In 1947, the theatre and the concert hall Estonia, both of which had been destroyed in the Second World War, were rebuilt. In the years 1948–49, the Tallinn organ builder Gutdorf Brothers transferred the organ of the university church in Tartu, built by Herbert Kolbe (1928), to the concert hall and installed it on the stage. In doing so, the specification was enlarged (III/P/75). This instrument was superseded as early as 1961 with an organ by Rieger–Kloss (IV/P/66). Two others by this company were installed in the Vanemuine theatre in Tartu (III/P/47, 1978) and in St. Nicholas’ Church in Tallinn (IV/P/63, 1981), which had been turned into a museum and concert hall.
In the 1940s, the work of the most important representative of the Tartu school of composers, Heino Eller (1887–1970), reached its climax. Eller wrote three symphonies (1936, 1948, 1961), five string quartets, music for piano, chamber music, and vocal compositions. An estimable pupil of his, Eduard Tubin, wrote ten symphonies, two operas, two ballets, chamber and choral music, and a Pastorale for alto and organ (1956).
The decades following gave rise to a new generation of Estonian composers who were influenced by 20th-century Western European music: Veljo Tormis (*1930), Eino Tamberg (*1930), Jaan Rääts (*1932), Arvo Pärt (*1935) and Kuldar Sink (1942–95). Tamberg’s and Rääts’s compositions show neoclassical tendencies. Pärt and Sink tend towards serial techniques. Tormis, following the tradition of Mart Saar and Cyrillus Kreek (1889–1962), is interested in folklore and prefers choral music.
Eller taught Alo Põldmäe (*1945) and Lepo Sumera (*1950), while Ester Mägi (*1922), Jüri Tamverk (*1954), Erkki-Sven Tüür (*1959) and Urmas Sisask (*1960), a composer of a number of organ works, are among the distinguished pupils of Saar.
Apart from the works presented in the collection Organ Music from the Baltic States, Volume 2: Estonia (Bärenreiter, BA 8422), the following compositions for the organ written by Estonian composers in the 20th century should be mentioned: Kaljo Raid (*1921), Sonata in Classical Style (1948); Peeter Laja, 5 Pieces (1950); Leo Virkhaus (1910–84), Organ Prelude on Psalm 108 (Be Thou Exalted) (1973); Igor Garschnek (*1958), 3 States (1980); and Arvo Pärt, Trivium (1976), Annum per annum (1980) and My Path Has Peaks and Troughs (1989).
In the post-war period, the tradition of centuries of organ-playing in Estonia manifested itself above all in the work of Hugo Lepnurm. After his evacuation, he returned to Tallinn in 1944 and continued teaching organ, solfeggio, and music theory at the conservatoire (from 1945 as a professor). He also gave many concerts in the USSR, was organist at Tallinn’s Cathedral of St. Mary, and made recordings. In 1971, he published his book On the History of the Organ and Organ Music (Oreli ja orelimuusika ajaloost). Lepnurm’s compositions are not numerous, but include a number of interesting pieces, especially for the organ: a toccata (1943/50), two cycles of variations for violin and organ (1942, 1954), and a concerto for organ and orchestra (1956). Among his pupils, the Tallinn organist Rolf Uusväli (*1930), Andreas Uibo (*1956), and Urmas Taniloo (*1953) from Tartu are well known.
An important part in the revival of public interest in early music and its authentic performance was played by Hortus Musicus, a specialist ensemble (artistic director Andres Mustonen), founded in 1972. Since 1987, the International Tallinn Organ Festival has taken place every year in the Estonian capital. The tradition of organ building is continued by Hardo Kriisa (*1940), a representative of the third generation of the famous organ dynasty. His workshop is in Rakvere.'

Notes

Godwin Sadoh

Godwin Sadoh is a Nigerian organist-composer, pianist, choral conductor, and ethnomusicologist. His latest book, Intercultural Dimensions in Ayo Bankole’s Music, will be published by Wayne Leupold Editions. Sadoh is presently Assistant Professor of Music and Coordinator of the Sacred Music program at LeMoyne-Owen College, Memphis, Tennessee.

Musical practice in 21st-century Nigeria can be broadly divided into four major genres: 1) traditional music, 2) popular dance music, 3) church music, and 4) modern African art music. Traditional music can be traced back to the historical roots of the society. It is the music that defines and identifies the people of Nigeria and their culture. The whole gamut of Nigerian culture is embedded in the traditional music, be it cultural, social, political, or religious, historiography, as well as world-view. The music permeates every aspect of Nigerian life. However, the middle of the 19th century witnessed events that transformed the entire cultural landscape of Nigeria. These events were manifested in the form of political governance through the British colonial administration, and through the efforts of Christian missionaries from America and England.
These two domineering forces introduced Western classical music to the main stream of Nigerian socio/cultural life around 1840s.1 Through the colonial and mission schools, as well as churches established by the missionaries, talented Nigerians were introduced to Western music notation, European songs, and musical instruments. It was at these institutions that Nigerians first learned to sing Western songs such as nursery rhymes, folk songs and selected excerpts from major classical works such as Handel’s Messiah and Mendelssohn’s Elijah. In addition, talented Nigerians received private lessons in piano, harmonium, and organ at these schools and churches. All these endeavors consequently led to the emergence of art music composers in Nigeria.

The Golden Age of Church Music (1900–1950)

The first generation of Nigerian composers comprised mainly church organists and choirmasters. They concentrated on writing sacred music for worship in the newly founded churches. Compositions include church hymns, canticles (responsorial prayer songs for soloist and congregation),2 chants for singing Psalms, choral anthems, and cantatas. Their works represent the first attempts by indigenous Nigerians in writing Western classical music. Hence, most of these compositions are very simple, short, and tonal. The harmonization is severely functional following baroque and classical conventions. The music was written for Western musical instruments such as piano, harmonium or organ, and the form, harmony, and style follow European standards.
Nigerian traditional musical instruments were not incorporated into these compositions during this era because they were blatantly prohibited from being used for worship by the early foreign missionaries. In other words, the only instruments that early Nigerian composers could write for were European. However, in spite of the embargo on traditional instruments, it was in this period that we began to witness musical synthesis of European and African idioms. The experiment of conjoining Western elements with traditional African music actually began in the early church. This took the form of employing indigenous languages for texts and using indigenous songs as melodic themes for compositions. Notable composers from the first generation include Rev. Canon J. J. Ransome-Kuti, Rev. T. A. Olude, Akin George, Ikoli Harcourt-Whyte, Emmanuel Sowande (Fela Sowande’s father), Okechukwu Ndubuisi, and Thomas Ekundayo Phillips (Organist and Master of the Music, Cathedral Church of Christ, Lagos, 1914–1962). Thomas Ekundayo Phillips was the first Nigerian to receive professional training in music at Trinity College of Music, London, from 1911 to 1914.

The Age of Concert Music (1950–1960)

This era was represented by the most celebrated Nigerian musician, Fela Sowande (1905–1987). Sowande continued to compose sacred music for divine services in the church, yet he transformed art music in Nigeria from a sacred entity and elevated it to the concert platform in public auditoriums, institutions of higher learning, and radio stations. He introduced solo art songs with piano or organ accompaniment, organ solo pieces, chamber music, and orchestral works to the Nigerian art music repertoire. Although Thomas Ekundayo Phillips wrote two short pieces for organ solo, it was Sowande who composed several large works for organ employing traditional folk songs and indigenous church hymn tunes. No other Nigerian composer has written such a large body of solo pieces for organ as Sowande.
Prior to this era, musical activities were confined to the churches during festive occasions such as Christmas and Easter seasons. With the introduction of vocal solos, chamber music and orchestral works, the venue of musical activities shifted from the church to public auditoriums where secular works could be performed without any inhibitions. In terms of tonality, Sowande introduced chromaticism into the musical vocabulary of Nigerian compositions. He refused to align himself with the atonal school of composers, then in vogue in Europe and America. He chose to move his Nigerian audience gradually from the tonal convention of the baroque/classical era to romantic chromaticism. Sowande must have felt that jumping from the traditional tonal system to atonality would have been too wide a leap and too radical for the Nigerian audience to appreciate. Although chromatic passages are prevalent in his organ works, Sowande left the idea of atonality for the next generation of Nigerian composers.
The second generation of Nigerian musical experience also ushered in a new form of musical integration known as pan-Africanism. Sowande, unlike his predecessors, went beyond employing Nigerian folk songs in his works; rather, he included popular tunes from other African countries into his compositions. Hence, one would hear indigenous songs from Nigeria and other African societies in his works. For instance, he borrowed a Ghanaian folk song in his African Suite for String Orchestra.3 In addition, this era introduced the concept of global interculturalism into Nigerian music language. We must give credit to Sowande for being the first Nigerian composer to go so far as to borrow spiritual tunes from the African-American culture. He uses spirituals in his solo art songs and choral anthems, as well as organ pieces.

The Age of Atonality (1960 to present)

The third generation of modern Nigerian composers consists of highly talented musicians, both composers and scholars, who received intensive training in the European tradition in several British Royal Schools of Music, as well as training in ethnomusicology in American universities. Thus, it would be correct to refer to these musicians as composer-ethnomusicologists. From the 1960s, foreign-trained Nigerian composers embarked on intensive research into the traditional music of their society to enhance a better understanding of its component materials, structure, stylistic principles, tonality, function and meaning in the society, the instrumental resources, organization of ensembles, rhythmic basis of instrumental music, organization and techniques of vocal music, melody and polyphony in vocal as well as instrumental ensemble, speech and melody, theoretical framework, and interrelatedness of music and dance. The focal point has been cultural renaissance and the search for nationalistic identity, that is, how to combine the new art music with the African roots.
It is from this period that we witness for the first time compositions involving both traditional African and Western musical instruments. Prior to this era, music notation specified only Western instruments. African instruments were not included in the scores of the early composers but rather used for supportive purposes and to create spontaneous improvised rhythmic background for vocal songs. Such instrumental rhythmic patterns were never notated until the era of the composer-ethnomusicologists. In fact, there are works from this period composed exclusively for traditional instruments such as Akin Euba’s Abiku No. 1 for Nigerian Instruments (1965). This work was composed for a dance drama, Iya Abiku, choreographed by Segun Olusola and videotaped by the Nigerian Television Authority for presentation at the International Music Center Congress on “Dance, Ballet and Pantomime in Film and Television,” in Salzburg, Austria, 1965.4 The third generation composers aim to make the music more appealing to their local audience. In other words, the Africanisms in the music are meant to captivate and draw the larger society to the works.
In terms of tonal organization, this group of Nigerian composers was tutored in the theoretical principles of the early 20th century such as the twelve-tone system, atonality, and octatonic scales. Pioneers of atonal compositions in Nigeria employed these methods in two ways. First, some of the compositions are written strictly in Western idiom following the styles of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern. Works in this category are practically European without any interjection of African traditional music. Their form, texture, instrumentation, rhythmic organization, and tonality are Western. The second category of 20th-century compositions in Nigeria incorporated some Africanisms. These compositions are partly Western and partly African. They are best described as syncretic or intercultural compositions—the amalgamation of European and African musical resources. Prominent composers of atonal music in Nigeria are Akin Euba (1935–), Ayo Bankole (1935–1976), Joshua Uzoigwe (1946–2005), and Godwin Sadoh (1965–).

Akin Euba

Akin Euba is a Yoruba composer. He studied piano performance and composition at the Trinity College of Music, London, in the 1950s. In 1966, he received a master’s degree in ethnomusicology from the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from the University of Ghana in 1974. Most of his piano compositions were written in the 1960s. Interestingly, these piano pieces are all based on Western atonality and twelve-tone row. Examples of these works include Impressions from an Akwete Cloth (1964), Saturday Night at Caban Bamboo (1964), Tortoise and the Speaking Cloth (1964), Four Pieces from Oyo Calabashes (1964), and Scenes from Traditional Life (1970).5
Euba’s compositional technique in his piano pieces is on two levels: 1) He first creates traditional rhythmic patterns on the score, and then 2) assigns melodies, which are atonal or twelve-tone, over the rhythms. In this way, the clashing dissonances are not easily perceived by Nigerian audiences. The listeners are more immersed in the irresistible rhythms emanating from the pieces, which move them to dance and easily eradicate the contemplative aspect of the musical performance. In terms of rhythmic drive, Euba’s piano works imitate dundun drum music, one of the most popular traditional ensembles among the Yoruba of southwest Nigeria.6 Another way that Euba deploys atonality in his compositions is through the use of ostinati. His approach directly imitates the traditional African technique in which the ostinato accompaniment harmonically is not in consonance with the melodic line, but rather, the ostinato is merely supplying a melo-rhythmic accompaniment. Euba uses the atonal texture to create dissonant percussive sounds as found in traditional drumming among the Yoruba. The dissonant lines help to simulate and reinforce the indigenous sonority in the music and make the piano sound like African traditional drums.

Joshua Uzoigwe

Joshua Uzoigwe belongs to the Igbo ethnic group in Eastern Nigeria. He studied piano and composition at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, London, from 1973 to 1977. He later studied ethnomusicology under John Blacking at Queen’s University, Belfast, Ireland, from 1977, and subsequently received the Ph.D. degree in 1981. Uzoigwe uses various types of pitch collections in his compositions, ranging from tetratonic, pentatonic, hexatonic, heptatonic, octatonic, diatonic scales, atonality, and the twelve-tone method. He uses these scale systems to evoke melodic and harmonic nuances of Igbo music7 in his compositions. For instance, he uses the twelve-tone row in Oja for wind quartet. Uzoigwe began to use dodecaphony while studying at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. Often, he breaks the row into minute ‘cells’ and then shuffles them around to create a very interesting work. The pitch collections are organized into basic sets to create musical form through permutation, repetition, variation, and improvisation. In addition, Uzoigwe uses twelve-tone technique and atonality in a unique way by combining melo-rhythmic patterns drawn from Nigerian musical culture with specific tone colors. Meki Nzewi defines melo-rhythm, his own term, as “a rhythmic organization that is melodically conceived and melodically born.”8
Uzoigwe’s conception of the twelve-tone method differs from Arnold Schoenberg’s. Uzoigwe defines a tone row as an “ordered set of tones which is derived from an ordered set of drums and musically deployed in certain specific procedures and its basic root is in Igbo musical system.”9 Indeed, tonal organization in Uzoigwe’s music is deeply embedded in his traditional musical practice, and his works are based on its theoretical framework. This ‘cultural-tone row’10 method is exemplified in his Ritual Procession for European and African orchestra and the Talking Drum for piano. One of the movements of the Talking Drum is based on a row of ten tones, which is associated with ukom music.11

Ayo Bankole

Ayo Bankole was born on May 17, 1935, at Jos, in Plateau State of Nigeria. He belongs to the Yoruba ethnic group. In August 1957, Bankole left Nigeria on a Federal Government Scholarship to study music at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, London. He concentrated on piano, composition, organ, harmony, and counterpoint studies. While at Guildhall, Bankole experimented12 with simple works and compositions based on 20th-century tonality. After four years of intense studies at Guildhall, Bankole proceeded to Claire College, University of Cambridge, London, where he obtained his first degree, the Bachelor of Arts in Music, 1964. While at Cambridge as an Organ Scholar (1961–64), Bankole earned the prestigious Fellowship of the Royal College of Organists (FRCO), making him the second and last Nigerian to receive the highest diploma in organ playing given in Great Britain. At the end of his studies at Cambridge University in 1964, Bankole received a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to study ethnomusicology at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1969, he was appointed Lecturer in Music at the University of Lagos, Nigeria, where he embarked on an in-depth research on Nigerian traditional music and presented scholarly papers at conferences. At the University of Lagos, he combined the role of music educator, composer, performer, and musicologist.13 In addition to his academic pursuits, Bankole founded several choral groups in Lagos and was very active as an organist in several churches, including the Cathedral Church of Christ, Lagos (the headquarters of the Anglican Communion Nigeria, and the seat of the Anglican Archbishop) and St. Peter’s Anglican Church, Lagos.

Bankole: Toccata and Fugue

Nigerian composers began experimenting with new tonal resources in their works from the 1960s. This era can be regarded as radical and avant-garde in the history of musical composition in the country. The then young composers, fired up by the new 20th-century compositional devices they were exposed to at the schools of music in London, partially abandoned the tonal system of the preceding era. I am very careful to choose the word ‘partially’ because some of the compositions in this period are also tonal. In 1960, Bankole wrote his first composition for organ entitled Toccata and Fugue.14 In his notes to the music, Bankole informs us that this work represents one of his first attempts in the world of atonality. Being his first product in this musical language, the work is more of a blending of several musical styles of the European epochs. At this early stage, while trying to break away from the ‘old order’ of tonality, the Toccata and Fugue is more of a transitional musical work between the 19th and 20th centuries. The young composer had not yet arrived in the world of atonal writing. According to him, this piece maintains structural allegiance to the king of baroque, J. S. Bach. However, while the overall structure and the process of thematic development are in strict accord with the baroque tradition, the melodic style is not. This is because, although there is no serial line to dictate melodic progression, freedom of tonality has been achieved through the preponderant use of severe neo-impressionistic chromaticism. Apart from these points, the music belongs to several ages of musical experience, absorbing Beethoven’s surprise build-up and “power-cut,” Brahms’ dark orchestration, Bach’s virtuosity (especially his powerful cadenzas) and chord clusters suggesting certain moments of Max Reger.
The composer emphatically states that, “no conscious effort is made to inject African traditional styles (or for that matter any of the styles mentioned above) into the work, and if these are felt, their roles should not be exaggerated.”15 Hence, a discussion of this piece will strictly be in Western theoretical style.
The Toccata is built on several short chromatic figures, which are later employed as themes for the Fugue. Generally, the chromatic figures consist of ascending and descending melodic cells as well as ‘jumping’ intervals. The melodic cells appear in various forms: simple eighth notes, rapid-moving sixteenth notes, and triplets. Structurally, the toccata is in three-part form. The A section introduces the main melodic cells in the manuals and the pedal. Following the introduction are various manipulations of the thematic materials (measures 1 to 35). Example 1 shows the A section of the toccata. The B section commences from measure 36 and ends in measure 47. Here the left and right hands are filled with massive chords, while the pedal is occupied with descending sequential passages. The pedal part comprises virtuosic fast-moving intervals of 4ths, 5ths, diminished 5ths, and inversion of wide leap intervals from the A section. The A section returns in measures 48 to 69. In the final section, the pedal is occupied with sequential repetition of the descending chromatic figure. Example 2 shows the B section of the Toccata.
Bankole’s choice of chords in this toccata includes open 4ths, 5ths, 6ths, octaves, diminished 5ths, minor 7ths, and tone clusters. He deliberately avoids functional harmony and conventional cadential resolutions. Some of his cadential resolution techniques include 1) octave descent in the pedal (mm. 16–17); 2) ostinato in the pedal to distillate tonal resolution; 3) sequential repetition in pedal; and 4) pedal point. With these four methods, Bankole was able to confine this composition within a contemporary milieu. Although it is not easy to pinpoint the exact key of the toccata, the piece opens with a pedal point on E and it closes with the third inversion of F-sharp chord resolving finally on E (mm. 68–69).
The Fugue has two main themes; hence, it is a double fugue. The fugal themes are derived from the ascending and descending chromatic figures (m. 9 R.H. and mm. 11–12 L.H.) as well as “jumping” intervals (m. 9 in the pedal) from the Toccata. It opens with the first theme in the left hand (mm. 1–4) and a real answer in the right hand (mm. 5–8). Following is an introduction of the second theme group in m. 11. The first and second theme groups are supported by counter subjects. The exposition closes with a reappearance of the first theme group in the pedal while the manual accompanies with the counter subject. Example 3 shows the two theme groups in the exposition.
The episode (mm. 17–75) presents the two ideas in diverse varied forms: diminution (m. 32 R.H.), augmentation (mm. 33–40 pedal), short fragments (mm. 26–27 L.H.), pedal sequence (mm. 45–49), and an alternation of modified versions of first theme and second theme groups in the pedal, while the manual accompanies with thick chords, diminished 5ths, and tone clusters (mm. 64–75). The final entry of the first and second themes appear in the pedal from measures 76 to 87. Example 4 shows an episode of the Fugue. Bankole closes the fugue with a virtuosic pedal cadenza derived from the two theme groups (mm. 88 to the end). This wonderful piece ends with an unusual dominant seventh chord resolving on C in m. 97. Bankole did his best to avoid functional harmony in this masterpiece; however, he found it very difficult to evade the sonorous nuance of dominant seventh resolution.16 Example 5 shows the pedal cadenza in the finale of the fugue.

Conclusion

Modern Nigerian composers have produced a large repertoire of art music from their introduction to European classical music in their home country and abroad. A critical study of these compositions reveals dynamic growth of musical language from the established tonality of the baroque/classical era and the romanticism of the 19th century, to the early 20th-century atonality and twelve-tone method. Indeed, the musical language of contemporary composition in Nigeria has been dynamic. At this point, it is important to stress that the third generation of Nigerian composers did not rely exclusively on atonal writing; some of their solo songs, choral anthems, piano and organ pieces, chamber music, and orchestra works are based on other types of pitch collections such as diatonic, octatonic, and pentatonic scales. Nigerian audiences appreciate the interjection of well-known songs in classical pieces, and these songs are mostly in tetratonic and pentatonic modes. Furthermore, Ayo Bankole’s Toccata and Fugue (for Organ) is one of the few exceptions in terms of thematic usages. Pan-Africanism and global interculturalism became more pronounced in the works of the third generation of Nigerian composers. Popular folk tunes, traditional songs, indigenous Christian hymn tunes, and dance band themes from different ethnic groups within Nigeria and other parts of the African continent are incorporated into art music compositions. Some of the composers even went as far as the Middle East, India, and America to incorporate musical resources into their works. Prominent features of African-American music in Nigerian art compositions include spirituals, gospel, and jazz idiom. Musical creativity in Nigeria today is nationalistic, Pan-African, and globally intercultural.

Ann Labounsky

Ann Labounsky, Ph.D., is Professor and Chair of Organ and Sacred Music at the Mary Pappert School of Music, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Author of Jean Langlais: The Man and His Music, she studied with André Marchal and Jean Langlais in Paris from 1962–1964.

Performance artists are most often remembered after their deaths through the compositions that they leave behind. Organ students learn to play works written by J. S. Bach or Franz Liszt, César Franck or Marcel Dupré, Olivier Messiaen or Jean Langlais; and thus their names and their works live on from one generation to another. For the rest, great performers are remembered during the lives of audiences who heard their memorable performances—great teachers, through the lives of their students.
David Craighead, legendary organ performer and now retired professor at the Eastman School of Music, has often lamented about the fleeting nature of fame. Some, like Arthur Poister, are remembered principally through competitions named for them, as in the Poister competition sponsored annually by Syracuse University where he taught; but even now, a few short generations after his death, there is included in the competition application a biographical sketch telling of his life and work.
For very many, there is no immortality of memory. In the words of the hymn: “Time, like an ever-rolling stream, soon bears its sons away. They fly, forgotten, as a dream dies at the opening day.” It is a sad dictum that those who do not compose most often decompose without leaving a mark on succeeding generations.
There are exceptions, of course. One thinks, for example, of opera singer Enrico Caruso or conductor Arturo Toscanini, great artists whose names continue to resound with their successor performers and audiences beyond specialists in music history. In those cases, they were people who transcended the limitations of the performance practices of their day, and thus left the arts they served transformed forever. For organists, the name André Marchal, the thirtieth anniversary of whose death is commemorated in 2010, must be added.

Marchal’s legacy
There are reasons for which André Marchal will be remembered as a transformational figure in the history of organ building and organ performance. He had an important impact on the organ reform movement in France, and subsequently in America—an influence that is only now beginning to be understood.
In particular, he influenced the Neo-classical style of organ building and aesthetics, through his association with the French organs of Victor Gonzalez. These instruments, in turn, influenced the aesthetics and registration practices of later twentieth-century French organ composers such as Langlais, Duruflé, Alain, and Messiaen. At the same time, Marchal was a forerunner in the formation of the performance practice now common today, especially in the interpretation of earlier organ works.

Life
André Marchal entered the world at the end of the French Romantic era and lived until 1980. He was born without sight to middle-class parents in Paris, February 6, 1894. Both his father and grandfather noticed his musical talent at a very early age and encouraged his study of the piano.1 At the age of nine he enrolled at the Institute for the Young Blind (Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles–INJA) in Paris, where he studied organ with Adolphe Marty, and harmony with Albert Mahaut, both students of César Franck.
At the age of seventeen he entered Gigout’s organ class at the Paris Conservatory, obtaining first prize in organ and improvisation two years later. In 1915 he succeeded Augustin Barié as organist at Saint-Germain-des-Près. In 1917 he received the Prix d’excellence in counterpoint and fugue at the Conservatory, in the class of George Caussade. Four years later he was hired as an organ teacher at INJA, where he continued to teach from 1919 until 1959. He succeeded Joseph Bonnet as organist at the Church of Saint-Eustache in 1945, where he remained until 1963.

Recital career
His long and distinguished career as an organ virtuoso began in 1923, when he gave the premiere performance of Vierne’s Fourth Symphony, with the composer present, at the Paris Conservatory. Two years later, he followed with his second public performance at the Salle Gaveau in Paris. In 1927 he toured in Belgium, Switzerland, and Germany. Again, in 1928, he gave the premiere of a work by Vierne, this time the third suite of his Pièces de fantaisie.
In 1930, he made his first tour of the United States, having no assistance from a guide and without any knowledge of English. (It was through Arthur Quimby—a student of Nadia Boulanger, and Curator of Musical Arts at the Cleveland Art Museum, who had heard Marchal perform in Paris—that the first tour was arranged.) At the Cleveland Art Museum, he played ten recitals of the music of
J. S. Bach. Seth Bingham, who taught at Columbia University, welcomed him in New York City, where he performed an improvised symphony in four movements at the Wanamaker Auditorium in New York City.2 This was followed with recitals in Chicago and in Canada. In 1938 he gave 30 concerts in the United States and Canada.
After World War II he performed in London at the Royal Festival Hall in the presence of Queen Elizabeth. On that occasion he met the English journalist Felix Aprahamian, who became a close friend and accompanied him on the tour to Australia in 1953.
His concert career spanned half a century; between 1930 and 1975 he made 19 trips to the United States to perform and teach.3 His importance as a teacher drew students from many parts of the world to study with him in his home or at INJA. It should be noted that his first American student, Lee Erwin, who made a career as a theatre organist, came to study with him just prior to his tour in 1930 and was responsible for the first recording on his house organ. His recordings, which also spanned over four decades, likewise have had a continuing impact on organists throughout the world.

André Marchal and the Organ
Reform movement
The Organ Reform movement (or Neo-classical movement as it is called in France) began in the 1920s in Germany and France, spreading to the United States in the 1930s. Albert Schweitzer was a pivotal originator. In France, it was realized primarily through the work of three men in tandem: the performer and teacher, André Marchal; the noted historian and musicologist, Norbert Dufourcq (1904–1990); and the organbuilder, Victor Gonzalez (1877–1956).

Victor Gonzalez
Victor Gonzalez, who was originally from the Castile region of Spain, began his career with the firm of Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, where he became their chief voicer. He then worked for the firms of Gutschenritter and Merklin. In 1929, after declining to assume leadership of the Cavaillé-Coll firm, he established his own firm with the help, encouragement, and financing assistance of Béranger de Miramon Fitz-James, founder of Association des Amis de l’Orgue, together with a group of de Miramon’s friends. Gonzalez’s first organ was built in 1926 for the home of Béranger de Miramon, followed the same year by an organ for the parish church in Ligugé. By 1937 there were 50 employees at the firm who worked to rebuild the Cavaillé-Coll organ at the Palais de Chaillot, and in the following year to renovate the organs at the Versailles chapel and the Cathedral of Rheims.
From 1929 until 1936, Rudolf von Beckerath worked for Gonzalez on restoration projects for organs in Saint-Eustache, Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs, Solesmes, Bailleul, the Goüin residence, and the world’s fair in Brussels in 1935, prior to founding his own firm. Though the Gonzalez name is no longer in use, he was succeeded in the business by his son, Fernand Gonzalez, and then by his son-in-law, George Danion. Fernand Gonzalez, who was killed in World War II, was responsible for the design of the Palais de Chaillot. After his death, Bernard Dargassies was charged with the maintenance of most of the Gonzalez organs.4
In 1931 Victor Gonzalez built an organ for the Condé estate of Joseph Bonnet.5 Gonzalez built this instrument very much in the Cavaillé-Coll style of that time, with two enclosed divisions, the usual plan for his house organs. He departed, however, from Cavaillé-Coll by adding a three-rank mixture on the Swell and a series of mutations. The romantic Merklin organ at Saint-Eustache, which was rebuilt by Gonzalez, and the Gonzalez organ from 1934 in the home of Henry Goüin are landmark examples of the wedding of early music to the recreated sounds of early instruments.6 These instruments included many mutation stops and mixtures, which allowed authentic performances of early music. Under the influence of Marchal and Dufourcq, Gonzalez became the leading builder in France for half a century.

Collaboration with Norbert
Dufourcq
Norbert Dufourcq’s collaboration with Marchal began in 1920, when he became Marchal’s organ student after studying for three years with Gustave Noël at the Cathedral in Orleans. Two years after beginning his organ study with Marchal, Dufourcq became principal organist of Saint-Merry in Paris, a post that he retained until his death in 1990. Dufourcq earned a degree in history from the Sorbonne (1923). In 1927 he was one of the founding members and secretary of Association des Amis de l’Orgue. Between 1932 and 1983 he was a member of the organ division of Commission of Historical Monuments. From 1941–1975 he served as professor of music history at the Paris Conservatory. (He also taught at the Collège Stanislas, Paris, from 1935 to 1946.)
During the years 1941 to 1975 Marchal performed many concerts in which Dufourcq provided the commentary. A gifted musicologist and persuasive public speaker, Dufourcq was able to give a poetic overview of the pieces performed, so that the uninitiated listener could follow. His mellifluous voice and the frequent use of the imperfect subjunctive case were noteworthy. Included in the commentaries was a series of eight concerts, entitled The Great Forms of Organ Music, with genres including prelude and fugue, toccata, chaconne, canzona, passacaglia, the chorale, partita, and fantasia. These recitals continued and included symphonic music and program music.
By 1933, Marchal and Dufourcq had become the leaders of the French national committee for the oversight of historic organs throughout France: the Commission des Monuments Historiques under the minister des Beaux Arts. Many of the nineteenth-century Cavaillé-Coll instruments, and earlier instruments by Clicquot, which were under the control of this commission, had fallen into disrepair and required renovations. This circumstance gave the commission the opportunity to rebuild those organs using the ideals of the Neo-classic design that Marchal, Dufourcq, and Gonzalez favored. Their work could be seen in the restorations at La Flèche, Saint-Gervais, Saint-Merry (where Dufourcq was organist), Les Invalides, the cathedrals of Auch, Soissons, and Rheims, the Palais de Chaillot, and the new concert organ in the French National Radio Studio 103, among many others. Many of the foundation stops were replaced with higher-pitched ranks and the reeds re-voiced. Marchal recorded on many of these instruments in the 1960s.
Influence on the Holtkamp Organ Company
This three-part collaboration among André Marchal, Norbert Dufourcq, and Victor Gonzalez, which affected the Neo-classical organ movement in France, subsequently came to the United States through the work of both Walter Holtkamp, Sr. and his son Walter Holtkamp, Jr., who wrote:

André Marchal came to the microcosm that is the Holtkamp Organ Company soon after World War II. While he had been in this country prior to the war, it was not until after that he brought his many talents to us with such marvelous results…. Both my father and I traveled to many cities of our country to sit with André Marchal at the console to evaluate our instruments. He would play and discourse upon the merits and demerits of that particular organ. From every encounter we came away with a new perspective of our work and our ideas.7
A transcript of one of these conversations with Marchal and the two Walter Holtkamps, Senior and Junior, which was recorded following a Marchal recital on the Holtkamp organ at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Cleveland, on May 10, 1957, gives an example of how the Holtkamps relied on Marchal’s advice regarding voicing:
WH (Walter Holtkamp, Sr.): André, we heard last night no 16′ Principal or 8′ Pedal Octave. My son and I would like to go to St. Paul’s and have a lesson on the use of the 16′ and what is lacking in this one.
AM (André Marchal): Your 16′ Principal is too large. There is too much gap in dynamic between the 16′ Subbass and the 16′ Principal. It is too big to be used without the reeds, and when the reeds are on the Subbass does just as well as the 16′ Principal.
WH: Perhaps this is a result of the 16′ Principal being placed against a stone wall rather than in the buffet as in the French organs.
AM: No, I noticed this same character at Baltimore, where the 16′ stands in the open. This is true on all your organs. The 8′ Pedal Octave is also too loud at St. Paul’s, Oberlin, Berkeley, Baltimore.
C (Walter Holtkamp, Jr.): I would like to know Mr. Marchal’s idea of the relationship as to loudness and quality between the Great 8′ Principal and Pedal 8′ Octave.
AM: In theory, the Pedal 8′ should be larger in scale than the Great 8′, but in use I really like the Pedal 8′ to be a little milder than the Great 8′. It could be a little more flutey.8

It is possible that Walter Holtkamp, Sr. heard Marchal’s series of ten recitals of the music of J. S. Bach at the Cleveland Museum of Art in March of 1930. In August of 1956, Walter Holtkamp, Sr. and Walter Blodgett, Curator of Musical Arts at the Cleveland Art Museum, drove to Methuen to hear Marchal play during the Summer Organ Institute, organized by Arthur Howes, and again the following year to hear him perform and record on the Holtkamp organ at MIT. Along with Fenner Douglas, in the early 1960s Walter Holtkamp and Walter Blodgett traveled to France to study the historic instruments there, including many by Gonzalez. In later years Marchal performed and taught frequently on Holtkamp organs at Syracuse University and Oberlin College. (Despite his love of Holtkamp organs, he often spoke of the similarity between the American builder G. Donald Harrison’s reeds and the French reeds that he loved.)

Giuseppe Englert
The composer Giuseppe Englert, another of Marchal’s students, who in 1954 married Marchal’s daughter Jacqueline, served as translator for the Holtkamps and Marchal during Marchal’s tours to the United States and the Holtkamps’ trips to France. The Englerts’ apartment in Paris, across the street from Les Invalides, was home to a Gonzalez organ, with a similar design to one in Marchal’s home. Maurice Duruflé admired this instrument and was inspired by it for the specification for the Gonzalez instrument in his own apartment. (The organ in Marchal’s home was originally a Gutschenritter, which was enlarged by Gonzalez.)

Marchal and performance practice
In the early 1920s Marchal continued to play in the style he had been taught by Gigout, a uniformly legato touch and a non-interpretive approach to the music of Bach and the Romantic composers. Gigout followed the tradition of the Lemmens school, learned from Widor and Guilmant. During his study of the music of the early masters, in preparation for a series of recitals of early music in 1923, Marchal rethought his approach to technique and interpretation. He was the first, in 1929, to play the two complete Masses of François Couperin. In an interview with Pierre Lucet for a series of recitals on the French National Radio in 1979, Marchal explained the process by which he changed his approach to early music and the organs upon which it could be performed:

Pierre Lucet: Maître, permit me to inquire first of all about your approach to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach:
Marchal: It [his approach] was made at two times. I was admitted to the Conservatory and at that time I listened to what was told to me, I learned technique; I was greatly in need of it. And it was from that point of view that I studied Bach. Ten years later [1921], in establishing my repertoire, I began to concertize, and relearned Bach in a completely different manner. This time I studied each piece in depth, trying to understand it in the best way possible; and having assimilated it, I tried to bring out the beauty of each piece by certain ways of playing; for example, the phrasing, the breaths, the registration. Obviously, at that time, there were few organs on which one could register well the music of Bach; we were still in the full Romantic period. But one could still look for lighter stops, clear in any case, which would permit the beauty of Bach’s counterpoint to emerge.
After having obtained my prize in organ [1913], while continuing to play the organ I worked a great deal on piano. Paul Braud, a student of Franck, took an interest in me. I became then more oriented toward the piano, which permitted me to know more music and to play more chamber music. I worked relentlessly . . . I purchased a small mechanical organ to practice my repertoire. It was at that time [1921] that I really tried to express Bach. My colleagues said: “Marchal? He plays the harpsichord”—and that was almost true, since my interpretations that were closest to what I hoped them to be were like the marvelous ones of Wanda Landowska on her harpsichord.9

This process of searching for the appropriate style for early music and the instruments that would bring it to life continued for him through the early 1930s, when he gave a series of recitals of early music on Neo-classical instruments built by Gonzalez. After 1930, Marchal played very differently from his teacher, Gigout, and the other blind teachers from INJA. It was as if he grasped the essence of the music from within himself. His style was powerful, lyrical, and always convincing. His personality was also very strong. There was a radiance about him and a “joie de vivre” that came through in every piece that he played.
His touch was a radical departure from the 19th-century seamless legato that was carried on by Marcel Dupré and his predecessors. He had an infinite variety of touches. By the 1940s Marchal had become one of the most popular performers in France. The public related easily to the musicality of Marchal’s playing and to his vibrant personality. It is not surprising that such a different style—full of authentic poetry and lyricism—would win the hearts of the French public as well as those from other countries. It must also be said that with him and all the other blind organists, there was also something captivating at seeing a blind person being led onto the stage and then left alone to play the instrument, no matter how large, completely independently. When one contemplates the style of playing during the 1920s through the 1950s, which was completely dominated by the legato Romantic style, what is utterly amazing is this new, radically different sound and interpretation. Begun by Marchal, it was later adopted by Marie-Claire Alain and others.
Guilmant and Pirro, in the monumental Archives des Maîtres de l’Orgue, 1897–1910 (volumes 1–10 available online), made available for the first time, at the end of the 19th century, the music of Couperin, de Grigny, Clérambault, and many others. Although Guilmant and Pirro recommended the use of the Cornet registration, their grounding in the 19th-century style of playing and registration prevented them from recommending for this early music a complementary early style and registration. Likewise, the six volumes of Joseph Bonnet’s Historical Organ Recitals series, published between 1917 and 1940, continued the same style of playing and registrations. Bonnet’s role in the movement, however, should not be ignored. He was intensely interested in early music but played it in the manner that he had been taught by Guilmant.
Although he had substituted for his teacher, Eugène Gigout, as organ teacher at the Paris Conservatory, Marchal was never connected to any school in France except at INJA and the summer school of Nadia Boulanger in Fontainebleau. Nonetheless, so many students requested Fulbright grants to study with him, that by the 1950s he agreed to be referred to as a school himself. In America, many other organists fell under his influence through the many masterclasses he gave at Oberlin College, Syracuse University, Union Theological Seminary, Northwestern University, the universities of Illinois and Indiana, the Eastman School of Music, and the Organ Institute in Methuen.

Marchal’s recordings
In the release on CD (Arbiter, 2003) of his first recordings, originally recorded between 1936 and 1948 at Saint-Eustache and the Goüin residence, one can easily understand Marchal’s interest in early music and in the type of instrument that would be well suited to the music of earlier periods. The lyricism, so unlike the usual style of playing during the 1940s, was notably displayed in his performance of the Bach chorale prelude O Mensch bewein dein Sünde gross. His use of free trills, so unlike the measured trills found in the playing of his contemporaries, was quite a departure from the traditional style of playing.
The subtle rubato in all the playing is striking. In the Bach Passacaglia and Fugue, the phrasing of each variation gives life to the great work. The articulation of the pedal line and the variety in the registrations gives much interest to the form of the piece. What is compelling in all of his playing is the strength of the rhythm, especially noticeable in the fugue of this work. While listening to his performances, one senses that it should not be performed otherwise, that it is right.
What we understand today of the stylus fantasticus can already be heard in Marchal’s opening performance from 1948 of Buxtehude’s Prelude and Fugue in F-sharp Minor. There is considerable contrast between the free sections and the fugal sections. His personality comes alive in his commentary for demonstrating each stop, with brief improvisations that give fine examples of this style of organbuilding. The Blow Toccata in D Minor brings out the bass in the reed registers with great clarity. Listening to these improvisations on the individual sonorities of the Gonzalez house organ in the Goüin house gives a clear picture of this aesthetic: a Neo-classical organ that, in America, we would call an eclectic organ.
Other recordings include:
Chefs d’œuvres pour orgue de J.S. Bach “10 de répertoire” en 1989. Zurich, Grossmünster 1964. MUSIDISC 203412 AD 650.
Orgues et organistes français du XXè siècle (1900–1950) by EMI Classics (2002) as well as Jeux et registrations de l’orgue, Improvisations, Toccata de Gigout, Final de la 4ème Symphonie de Vierne, Apparition de l’Eglise éternelle de Messiaen, Choral dorien de J. Alain, Saint-Merry, 1958 et 1976. EMI Classics, 1 CD, 71716 2 (1997), Saint-Merry et Saint-Eustache.
The Organ Historical Society website lists the two recordings available through Arbiter (135 and 111) with these annotations:
The works by Buxtehude, Bach, Blow, Purcell, Sweelinck and Vierne were recorded by André Marchal (1894–1980) in April 1948, on the organ at St. Eustache in Paris, then a Merklin which had been rebuilt by Victor Gonzalez in 1927–32. In 1936, the Pathé firm released a 12-disc set entitled Three Centuries of Organ Music from which Marchal’s performances of Cabezon, Santa Maria, Landino, and Palestrina are taken. These first recordings of these early works are performed on an organ designed especially for early music and completed in 1934 by Victor Gonzalez at the home of Henry Goüin in Paris. Marchal also demonstrates the organ stop-by-stop, and narrates his demonstration. Available on Arbiter-135.
Arbiter 111 is described:

This unique CD reissues the 1956 stereo recordings made by André Marchal on his 3/28 house organ built by Gonzalez. The fidelity of the recording is unusually fine, capturing Marchal’s way with 12 of the Bach Orgelbüchlein, BWV 603–612, 614–615, and Toccata, Adagio & Fugue in C, BWV 564. There are no revelations here for most of us, and the organ is located in an anechoic environment. The CD is a must for Marchal fans, who will revel in his spoken description and demonstration of the organ.
Although more difficult to locate, it is possible to find in libraries the Lumen recordings of Franck and early French music (Grand Prix du disque 1952); the Bach large fantasies and fugues by Ducretet Thomson; the Clérambault recordings at Auch Cathedral, by LDE 3231; many of these recordings contain the commentaries by Norbert Dufourcq. The Unicorn recordings from MIT (UNLP 1046–1048) of Bach and early French music on the large Holtkamp organ there from the 1950s are excellent.
Marchal’s Complete Organ Works of César Franck, originally released by Erato, has been reissued by Solstice ([email protected]). This recording was awarded the coveted Diapason d’Or. There are many unpublished recordings (some from Syracuse from 1960s, and two recordings from his last American tour in 1974 at the Church of the Assumption in Bellevue, Pennsylvania and in Rochester, New York) as well as many given on the French National Radio.

His teaching and legacy
His system of teaching usually began with having the student play a chorale prelude from Bach’s Orgelbüchlein. He usually heard a piece only one time giving all his ideas in the one lesson. For the early French music he did not use “notes inégales” during the 1960s, but by the 1970s he realized that this was, in practice, the style of this music, and adopted its use. His mind was always engaged and he heard every phrasing and nuance. His use of agogic accents to bring out the shape of a phrase was notable. Above all, he made each part sing independently of the other voices regardless of the period in which it was written. He was demanding especially with his more gifted pupils, desirous that each one achieve his/her highest potential.
His influence is continued not only in the legacy of performance practice and organbuilding. A number of publications and prizes have appeared since 1980: a thesis by Lynn Trapp at the University of Kansas (Lawrence, 1982), “The Legacy of André Marchal;” “Tribute to André Marchal” reprint of the L’Orgue Dossier I in 1997, with the addition of tributes by many American students who did not have the opportunity to be included in the original document; and prizes at the biennial Marchal competition in Biarritz.
The Académie André Marchal was founded in Biarritz, France in 1982 by Denise Limonaire to perpetuate the memory of this musical giant, his innovative style of performance, his neo-classical influence on organbuilding, and his rediscovery of early music. Susan Landale serves as president of the Académie, with Jacqueline Englert-Marchal as honorary president. Among other projects, the Académie has partnered with the town of Biarritz to sponsor the “Prix André Marchal,” an international organ competition with prizes in interpretation and improvisation. The competition is held every two years and has grown in quality and size. The ninth competition, held in 2009, accepted eighteen candidates of twelve nationalities. Americans desirous of supporting this valid and significant mission are strongly invited to become members; dues of $80 for two years may be mailed to Ralph Tilden at P.O. Box 2254, Banner Elk, NC 28604. André Marchal awards are given at Duquesne University, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for excellence in organ performance.
His impact as a teacher was important. His blind students who obtained the first prize in organ at the Paris Conservatory included: André Stiegler, 1925; Jean Langlais and Jean Laporte, 1930; Gaston Litaize, 1931; Antoine Reboulot, 1936; Xavier Dufresse, 1952; Georges Robert, 1953; Louis Thiry, 1958; Jean Wallet, 1963; Jean-Pierre Leguay, 1966 (who had studied with both Litaize and Marchal). Two other pupils who obtained the first prize who were sighted were Noëlie Pierront, 1925, and Anne Marie Barat, 1976.
His other pupils included Corliss Arnold, Linda Clark, Craig Cramer, Philip Crozier, Alan Dominicci, Norbert Dufourcq, Giuseppe Englert, Lee Erwin (the first American pupil before 1930), Robert Eshenour, John Fenstermaker, Philip Gehring, Emily Gibson, Lester Groom, Jerald Hamilton, Ruth Harris, William Hays, Allan Hobbs, Howard Jewell, Elna Johnson, Margaret Kemper, Ralph Kneeream, Suzanne Kornprobst, Marilou Kratzenstein, Charles Krigbaum, Ann Labounsky, Susan Landale, David Liddle, Denise Limonaire, Robert Lodine, Alan Long, Robert Sutherland Lord, Chamin Walker Meadows, Kathryn Moen, Earline Moulder, Margaret Mueller, Arsène Muzerelle, Lois Pardue, Garth Peacock, Stephen Rumpf, Daniel and David Simpson, Robert Sirota, Rev. Victoria Sirota, Carl Staplin, Roger Stiegler, Edith Strom, Haskell Thompson, Ralph Tilden, Parvin Titus, Robert Judith Truitt, Marie-Antoinette Vernières, Gail Walton, Nicole Wild, and Mary Alice Wotring.

Influence on subsequent
composers
His influence on subsequent composers such as Langlais, Duruflé, Alain, and Messiaen in their approaches to organ registration is likewise important to this reflection of André Marchal upon the 30th anniversary of his death. Jean Langlais studied organ with Marchal at INJA and at his home and was influenced by the work of Gonzalez in these two venues, as well as the organ at the Palais de Chaillot, where he performed his first symphony in 1943. His choice of the Schwenkedel organs of Neo-classical design, which he installed in his home and at the Institute Valentin Haüy, next door to INJA, shows this influence. The stops that he added to the organ at Sainte-Clotilde in 1962 included a Larigot 11⁄3′ on the Positif, a Prestant 4′ and Clairon 2′ on the Récit, and a Prestant 4′ and Doublette 2′ on the Pédale.10
The many Neo-classical registrations in his pieces likewise show this influence. For example, even the titles of a number of his pieces refer to these types of registrations: Dialogue sur les mixtures (Suite brève, 1947) and all the movements of Suite française (1948), which are based on titles found in classical French organ music such as Prélude sur les grands jeux and Contrepoint sur les jeux d’anches, and Suite baroque (1973).
As I have already mentioned, Maurice Duruflé often visited the home of Giuseppe Englert to study the specifications and dimensions of the Gonzalez organ, which inspired him for his house organ, also built by Gonzalez. Englert’s house organ was based on the specifications of Marchal’s house organ.11 In Duruflé’s organ works, even starting with the Scherzo from 1926, his registrations depart from the normal 19th-century models.
Marchal and Jehan Alain’s father, Albert Alain—an amateur organbuilder—were close friends and worked together on ideas for the specifications for their house organs. Similarities can be seen in the specifications of each.12 When Marchal had built his organ with a rather classic Positif, Albert Alain wanted to do the same thing.13 Jehan Alain’s first experiences of organ music in his home were influenced by the aesthetics of Marchal and Gonzalez. Jehan Alain and Marchal enjoyed playing and improvising together in Alain’s home. A very early work, Variations sur un thème de Clément Jannequin, demonstrates registrations that call for Neo-classical stops as well as the recall of early music in the title of the piece. Another work of Jehan Alain, Le Jardin suspendu, calls for a typically classical French stop, the Gros Nasard 51⁄3′ on the Positif. Marchal was among the first organists to perform Alain’s music, including Litanies, Variations sur un theme de Clément Jannequin, and Danses à Agni Yavishta, and had them transcribed into Braille notation.
Olivier Messiaen was also influenced by the Neo-classical trends in France. He changed the Cavaillé-Coll organ at La Trinité, where he was organist from 1930 until 1991, to include many mutation stops that were not part of the original specification. Even his earliest organ work, Le banquet céleste (1928), is a departure from the normal registration practices of the period, including Flûte 4′, Nasard 22⁄3′, Doublette 2′, and Piccolo 1′ for the pedal line. As he continued to compose, his works called more frequently for higher-pitched sonorities, often to imitate birds. One could say that it was a far cry from D’Aquin’s imitative harpsichord piece mimicking the cuckoo, but these sounds were all part of an interest in both the future and the past.

Conclusion
It is time to re-evaluate André Marchal’s contributions to the organ reform movement in France; his impact on organbuilding in the United States, particularly in his relationships to Walter Holtkamp and Walter Blodgett as well as Fenner Douglas; and his influence on the leading organ composers of the 20th century: Langlais, Alain, Duruflé, and Messiaen. In light of the development of early organ techniques and the number of publications that have been published and used in the thirty years since his death, it is time to listen again to Marchal’s recordings with a discerning mind and ask where his place is in the development of performance practice.
One certainly hears a wide variety of touches in all his playing. What was his “ordinary” touch? What were the main differences between his style and that of Joseph Bonnet, Alexandre Guilmant, and Marie-Claire Alain? Robert Noehren admired the sensitivity of his touch both on tracker and electric actions. It is also time to re-evaluate his influence on organ building; for example, in the composition of the Plein jeu mixture, which reserved the breaks until after middle C to enhance the clarity of the polyphonic line, and his use of different mixtures for each polyphonic composition that he performed.
Consider, too, the changes in the organ registrations in the music of Duruflé, Alain, Messiaen, and Langlais as compared to many other composers of the 20th century. The required foundations plus reeds on each manual, as a given for organ registration, changed as a result of Marchal’s impact on the Neo-classical organ in France. There is, indeed, much to ponder.
Perhaps Norbert Dufourcq, who was the most eloquent of his collaborators, best expressed the essence of his artistry:

André Marchal seemed to have found by himself the sources to which he probed the depths of his rich and attractive personality: the discovery of the works of the French organists of the 17th and 18th centuries, that of the complete works of Bach (he played almost all of it), of Cabezón, Frescobaldi, Buxtehude . . . It was for André Marchal to penetrate the secrets of a page of music, to discover the tempo, in searching the phrases, in marking the strong pulses, the weak pulses, without ever breaking the melodic line nor the polyphonic structure, without ever losing a rhythm which gave a work its forward motion, its line. One has praised the sensitivity of the Maître. It is better perhaps to speak of his sense of poetry.
To this static but mysterious and majestic instrument, he knew how to assure a poetic and lyric “aura” that he insisted on creating in a convincing phrasing with thousands of details in a style made more subtle by the use of minimal retards; of suspensions slightly brought out or by the imperious accents thrown into the center of the discourse. Goodbye to the inexpressive and neutral legato, André Marchal sought to impose on his instrument a suppleness with the use of imperceptible tensions—jolts of the soul—which did not stop. It is in this that he transformed the lens of the entire school of the organ, in France as in America . . . Under his fingers the organ no longer preached in an impersonal manner; under his fingers, the melodies rushed into the nave to touch the heart of each person. But it was never he who descended upon us. It was us, whom he seized with love, and attracted us to him.14 ■

 

Leonard Edwin Bearse Sr. died in Amesbury, Massachusetts on May 4, at the age of 73. Born in Hyannis, Bearse had his first church job at age 14, at the First Baptist Church there. He studied the organ in Germany while serving with the Armed Forces there, and studied choral conducting with Robert Shaw. He earned a master of music degree from the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, studying organ with Donald Willing. He was a public school teacher in various eastern Massachusetts towns, and held music positions in various churches, most recently as minister of music at the Congregational Church in Kensington, New Hampshire, where he played his last service on March 16. Leonard Bearse is survived by his wife, Ellen, and his children Leonard E. Jr., Bruce, and Stephanie.

Michael Cohen, age 69, died June 21 in Asheville, North Carolina. A native of Tampa, Florida, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music from Florida State University–Tallahassee. He taught music in the Florida public schools for 39 years, and was organist-music director for the Church of the Holy Spirit in Apopka, Florida, for the past 17 years. A past dean of the Central Florida AGO chapter, he was a member of the Winter Park Bach Festival Choir. Michael Cohen is survived by his partner, Carl Brown; his brother Paul (and wife Donna), and brother Joel (and partner Barry Dingman).

Robert E. Glasgow, Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan School of Music, noted concert organist, and one of the most widely respected artists in the field of organ performance and pedagogy, died on September 10 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He was 83.
Professor Glasgow taught organ at the University of Michigan School of Music for 44 years. He received his B.M. and M.M. degrees from the Eastman School of Music in 1950 and 1951, respectively, earning Eastman’s Performer’s Certificate as well. At Eastman, he studied with Harold Gleason. From 1951 to 1962, he was associate professor of organ and college organist at MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Illinois. He joined the University of Michigan School of Music in 1962 as assistant professor, and was promoted to associate professor in 1964, full professor in 1973, and professor emeritus in 2006.
In 1973, Glasgow was awarded the Doctor of Musical Arts degree, honoris causa, by MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Illinois. The New York Chapter of the American Guild of Organists named him International Performer of the Year for 1997. Glasgow returned to his alma mater in January 2002, where he was given the school’s Alumni Achievement Award. On the same occasion, he taught a masterclass, influencing yet another generation of Eastman students. Glasgow’s faculty colleagues at the University of Michigan also recognized his pedagogical efforts by awarding him the Harold Haugh Award for excellence in the teaching of performance.
For over 50 years, he successfully combined a brilliant teaching career with an impressive career as a concert organist, both in the United States and abroad. He was best known for his stirring performances of the organ literature of the 19th century, and was regarded by some as the greatest living interpreter of Romantic organ music. He was a regularly featured performer for national and regional conventions of the American Guild of Organists as well as the International Congress of Organists. He was selected to perform and teach at the American Classic Organ Symposium on the occasion of the completion of the renovation of the great Tabernacle Organ at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Dr. Glasgow’s performances of the music of Liszt, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Widor, Vierne, and especially César Franck were legendary; in one review he was given the appropriate nickname “the Philadelphia Orchestra of Organists.” In addition to a number of broadcast recordings for the BBC, Glasgow made one commercial recording for Prestant Records in 1987, Robert Glasgow plays César Franck, recorded on the Aeolian-Skinner organ in All Saints Church, Worcester, Massachusetts.
A leading educator of uncompromising standards, Robert Glasgow helped to form some of the most gifted organists in the world. His students are to be found in important church and academic positions throughout the United States. He was an artist in the truest sense, and a teacher who constantly reminded his students that they must not strive merely to be organists, but always musicians— communicating musical ideas in spite of the inherent difficulty of the instrument.
Robert Ellison Glasgow was born on May 30, 1925 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, the son of Floyd Lafayette Glasgow and Elizabeth Mary Jenkins. His death is mourned by his many devoted students, friends, and colleagues. (See the interview with Stephen Egler, “Robert Glasgow at 80,” The Diapason, May 2005.)
—Ray Henry
Rochester, Michigan

Walter A. Guzowski died September 17 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He was 68. Born and raised in Buffalo, New York, his career had a dramatic beginning. While still a high school student, he observed an organ technician tuning the Schlicker organ at his church, and informed the pastor that he could do what the technician had done, and save the church some money. Later, while doing some tuning, Guzowski slipped off the walkboard onto the chest below, crushing numerous pipes; to rectify this, his father brought him to Herman Schlicker, and Guzowski began working at the Schlicker Organ Company, where he worked (except for two years serving in the Army) until 1979. While at Schlicker he became head voicer and tonal finisher, working on a range of instruments, from two-rank residence organs to the large organ at First Congregational Church in Los Angeles. After moving to Fort Lauderdale in 1979, he founded a service business, which with John A. Steppe and Christopher B. Kane, became Guzowski & Steppe Organbuilders, Inc. in 1983. Walter Guzowski is survived by his sister Margaret, her husband Walter, and cousins and friends.

Gerhard Krapf died in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, on July 2. He was 83. Krapf was renowned for his organ, choral, and vocal compositions, his scholarly writings on the organ, his teaching at the University of Alberta (1977–87, for which he was named professor emeritus), and for designing the 1978 Casavant organ there. He contributed significantly to the development of graduate programs in keyboard and library resources at the University of Alberta; in the 1960s, he had established and built the undergraduate and graduate organ programs at the University of Iowa’s School of Music. Gerhard Krapf is survived by his wife, Trudl, three daughters, a son, a brother, sister, and four grandchildren.

John S. Peragallo, Jr. died Friday, September 12 at the Hospice of New Jersey, Wayne, New Jersey, at age 76. Born in New York City and a lifelong resident of Paterson, he took several classes at the Newark College of Engineering, and served in the U.S. Army during the Korean Conflict as a chaplain’s assistant and in the honor guard.
As a boy he helped his father in the family business, the Peragallo Pipe Organ Company, founded by his father, John Peragallo, Sr., in 1918. John Jr. joined the company in 1949. He was responsible for the construction and care of many of the pipe organs of New Jersey and the complete renovation of the organs at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York City. John Jr.’s sons, John III and Frank, have been actively involved in the family business since the 1980s and now have a fourth generation of Peragallos, Janine, Anthony and John IV, to work alongside them. The company has installed almost 700 new instruments and currently maintains approximately 400 instruments, up and down the East Coast of the United States, including the organs of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.