In the wind . . .

John Bishop

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Monumental intimacy
In the July 2007 issue of The Diapason, this column commented on a book by Arnold Steinhardt, first violinist of the Guarneri Quartet. Violin Dreams (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006) is a sort of musical memoir—a great artist sharing his experiences as a child, a student, and an increasingly successful performer. He’s articulate, humorous, and just humble enough. He shares many wonderful reflections, and I’ve commented on the book several times subsequently. Early on he writes about his relationship with his instrument:

When I hold the violin, my left arm stretches lovingly around its neck, my right hand draws the bow across the strings like a caress, and the violin itself is tucked under my chin, a place halfway between my brain and my beating heart.
A beautiful metaphor—makes you want to run down to the church and fire up the organ. But as I commented in 2007, he’s leaving us out. He goes on:

Instruments that are played at arm’s length—the piano, the bassoon, the tympani—have a certain reserve built into the relationship. Touch me, hold me if you must, but don’t get too close, they seem to say. To play the violin, however, I must stroke its strings and embrace a delicate body with ample curves and a scroll like a perfect hairdo fresh from the beauty salon. This creature sings ardently to me day after day, year after year, as I embrace it.

Coincidentally, a friend who is violist of the DaPonte String Quartet (resident musicians in our town in Maine) recently asked me how organists relate to their instruments. She spoke of gigs she’s played in churches where she saw organists at work, wondering how you play an instrument that’s so far away from you. Of course I jumped in with these Steinhardt quotes, offering the opposite point of view. The organ is a monumental instrument. Your relationship with the instrument is as a vehicle with which you can fill a huge room with a kaleidoscope of tone colors.
I’ve always found it thrilling to hear my music come back as reverberation in a large room. I love the sensation of having a congregation barreling along with me as I lead a hymn. And I love the feeling that huge air-driven bass pipes can cause in a rich acoustic environment. So it was a gift when my wife shared this passage from I am a Conductor, the autobiography of Charles Munch (Oxford University Press, 1955):

The organ was my first orchestra. If you have never played the organ, you have never known the joy of feeling yourself music’s master, sovereign of all the gamut of sounds and sonorities. Before those keyboards and pedals and the palette of stops, I felt almost like a demigod, holding in my hands the reins that controlled the musical universe. Walking [to work], opening the little door to the organ with a big old key, looking over the day’s hymns lest I forget the repeats, finding a prelude in a good key in order to avoid a difficult modulation, choosing a gay piece for a wedding or a sad one for a funeral, not falling asleep during the sermon, sometimes improvising a little in the pastor’s favorite style, not playing a long recessional because it would annoy the sexton—all this filled me with pride.

“ . . . a certain reserve built into the relationship . . .” Funny, I think some of my best moments on an organ bench have been when I was free of reserve.

Anything you can do, I can do better
What’s really going on between Arnold Steinhardt and Charles Munch? Is it like a playground spat that winds up with did-not, did-too? Or is it the childish idea that one instrument is more difficult to play than another? I’ve certainly heard people admire the complexity of playing the organ—all that dexterity with hands and feet. But can’t you also argue that the organist is only pushing buttons?
The violinist has to create an even and convincing tone through the manipulation of the bow against the strings while making the notes happen at the same time. And, while the organ produces notes that are in tune or not in tune no matter what the organist does (as long as he’s hitting the right notes), the violinist has to put the finger on the fingerboard in exactly the right place. (No worries. They leave the fretting to the guitarist.)
The flautist adds breath control to all the complexities of manual dexterity. The trumpeter has a finicky relationship with a mouthpiece. A trumpeter with a cold sore is like Roger Clemens with a hangnail. Neither can go to work that day. And singers? Let’s not even get started with singers!
No matter what instrument you’re playing, once you’ve mastered the physical technique you can get down to making music. As I get older, I notice that on the printed page I can track the development of my technique. I still play some of my favorite pieces from the same scores I had when I was a student, hopelessly marked up with teachers’ comments and registrations for dozens of different organs. Each time I get reminded of the physical crises of 30 or 35 years ago as I play past those passages that I just couldn’t get at 20 years old. You might say it’s the reward of a lifetime to be able to breeze past those danger zones—a lifetime of practice, that is.
Learning to drive a musical instrument is a barrier between you and artistic expression. Whether you’re learning the “pat your head and rub your tummy” thing about playing the organ, developing the finger strength and control to pluck harp strings, or the incredible muscle control of the mouth of the oboist, all you’re doing is teaching your body the physical tricks necessary for it to become a conductor between your mind and the sonorities of the music.
It’s the actual music that’s so difficult to do right. Shaping notes and phrases, placing the notes in time and tempo, and following your instincts to express the architecture of the music form the essence of the art of music. And you get a whiff of that essence when the physical act of operating the machine that is your instrument doesn’t distract you.
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There is an aspect of the art of organ playing that most other musicians don’t necessarily experience. A clarinetist might own the same instrument for most of his career, seldom playing on another. That is a very personal relationship that like any intimacy includes inherent danger. Imagine the master player who discovers a crack in his instrument moments before an important performance. Or worse yet, what if the treasured instrument is lost or destroyed in a fire? I suppose more than one musical career has ended simply because the musician couldn’t face starting over with a new instrument. Yo-Yo Ma famously left a treasure of a cello in a New York taxicab. It was later recovered because he had bothered to save his receipt and the cab could be tracked down. When you get into a New York cab you hear a gimmicky automatic recording—the voice of a celebrity giving safety tips. Along with Jessye Norman reminding you to fasten your seat belt, there’s one with Yo-Yo Ma advising you to keep your receipts!
The organist is at the mercy of whoever hires him. How many of us have arrived in town to prepare a recital, only to sit down at a mediocre instrument in terrible condition? You can refuse to play, or you can recognize that it’s the only instrument the local audience knows and accept the challenge of doing something special with it. “I’ve never heard this organ sound like that!”
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Busy organists might be playing on dozens of instruments each year, but there are also many examples of life-long relationships between players and their “home base” organs. Marcel Dupré played hundreds of recitals all over the world, but he was Organiste Titulaire at Saint-Sulpice in Paris from 1934 until 1971. He succeeded Charles-Marie Widor, who had held the position since 1870. So for more than a century that great Cavaillé-Coll organ was played principally by only two brilliant musicians. What a glorious heritage. Daniel Roth has been on that same well-worn bench since 1985. I first attended worship in that church in 1998 and vividly remember noticing elderly members of the congregation who would remember the days when Dupré was their parish organist. I suppose there still may be a few. I wonder if any of them cornered Dupré after church to complain that the organ was too loud!
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It’s the real thing, baby
My work with the Organ Clearing House often takes me to big cities where I get the thrill of hearing important organists playing on mighty instruments. Both the organist and the organ have a relationship with the church building—the sound rings and rolls around the place, the organist has the knack of timing the echo, and the effect is dazzling.
But most of our organists are playing on instruments of modest size in “normal” church buildings. The effect of the beautiful pipe organ in a small country church is just as dazzling as that of the 200-rank job roaring away in a room with a 150-foot ceiling. There’s such magic to the combination of the sound of wind-blown organ pipes and human voices, even in the setting of a small country church. The sounds meld together, exciting the collective air that is the room’s atmosphere. The organ has a physical presence in the room, letting us know before a note is played that there’s something special coming. We decorate church buildings with symbols of our faith. The organ joins pictorial windows, banners, and steeples as one of those symbols.
We plan a dinner party. On the way home from the supermarket we stop at the florist to get something pretty to put on the table. Likewise, we place flower arrangements on the altar on Sunday morning. In church, do we do that simply for decoration, or are those flowers a celebration of God’s creation—of the beauty of nature? Are there candles on the altar for atmosphere like that dining room table, or is there another loftier reason? Does a choir sing an anthem to cover the shuffling of the ushers as they take up the offering, or is the anthem a true part of the experience of worship? (If so, why don’t they take up the collection during a scripture reading, or during the sermon? Why all this tramping around while the music is playing? But that’s a rant for another month!)
The organ, that instrument that makes us “music’s master, sovereign of all the gamut of sounds and sonorities,” stands in our churches declaring our devotion. The pipe organ is testament to the wide range of the skills with which we humans have been blessed. We’ve been given the earth’s materials and learned to make beautiful things from them. And for centuries the pipe organ has been part of our worship, monument to our faith, and symbol of the power of the Church.
But with the advance of technology we are deluded by dilution. We settle for plastic flowers. We buy cheap production hardware for the doors of our worship spaces. We substitute artificial sound enhancement for real acoustics. And we substitute arrays of circuits for those majestic organ pipes.
Walk through a museum and look at sculpture made of gold, jade, or ivory. Don’t tell me you can’t tell it’s special. When we experience something special, we know it’s special. Walk through a jewelry store and try to tell the difference between the expensive stuff and the fake costume stuff without looking at price tags. You will never be wrong. Of course we know the difference. If your fiancée is not a jeweler, don’t bother with a real diamond. She won’t know the difference. (Oh boy, are you in trouble.)
And buy a digital instrument to replace the pipe organ. “After all, I’m not a musician. I can’t tell the difference.” Baloney. Of course we can tell the difference. And our churches and we deserve the best.

John Bishop

Bridging generations
My mother’s maternal grandmother was born in 1884 and passed away in 1988 at the age of a hundred-and-four. We visited her each year, so I knew her well through my childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Her husband (who died many years earlier) was a silk merchant. When they were first married, she joined him on trips to China, traveling on the last clipper ships. My sons were five and six years old when she died, so for six years there were five generations of our family alive at the same time. Unusual enough, but what really excites my imagination is the fact that she was thirteen years old when Brahms died. While I know she played the piano (I have her piano and her collection of sheet music), I’m certain she never heard Brahms play—but she could have. When she was born, Chester Allen Arthur was president of the United States. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote Also sprach Zarathustra in 1883, Louis Pasteur administered a successful rabies vaccination in 1885, and the Apache chief Geronimo surrendered in 1886. My great-grandmother lived nineteen years after the first man walked on the moon. She lived through the Spanish-American War, and the Vietnam War, and the invasion of Grenada. She saw a lot of change.
I was about eight years old when my mother’s paternal grandmother died—she was in her late nineties. The family took care to note that her grandmother was alive during the American Revolution, so we can link 1775 to 2008 through the life spans of three overlapping family members.
I got thinking about the passage of generations last month when I wrote about the death of G. Donald Harrison, the great organbuilder who as artistic leader of Aeolian-Skinner created so many extraordinary instruments. I mentioned that his death occurred a couple months after I was born. A week or two after I wrote that column, we heard of the death of Sidney Eaton, a significant and eccentric but mostly unknown figure in the organ world. Sid lived in North Reading, Massachusetts, for his entire life, and was known to a few of us 21st-century Boston organ-guys as Ernest Skinner’s pipe maker. Sid told us stories that let us picture him in a workroom near Mr. Skinner’s voicing room, where he was available to make up the latest new-fangled pipe coming from Skinner’s fertile imagination. For example, why can’t we solder together two metal cones (wide-end to wide-end) and then solder that to a narrow tapered tube to form a reed resonator—the English Horn, voila! Sid claimed that he made the first.
Sid was 99 years old when he died, and it’s safe to say he was a little nutty. Maybe he spent too much time alone during his life, and maybe he blew on a few too many lead pipes. (Remember the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland? That was an early recording of occupational illnesses—hat-makers used mercury as an agent for brushing felt; the mercury damaged their brains.) A conversation with Sid Eaton was a little like a cubist painting—each sentence was both upside-down and inside-out, but if you stood back and listened from a figurative distance, you could tell what his point was.
I lived in North Reading for several years, and when I met Sid I felt I’d found a gold mine of organ-lore, and also the most easily accessible pipe-maker ever. I could stop at his house on my way home to drop off pipes needing repairs, reeds to be mitered, or for advice about how to treat a particular problem. But I could never assume a quick stop—Sid always had something on his fuzzy mind that would take longer than I intended. Once when I knocked, he came to his door in his birthday suit. I suggested he might put on some clothes, but he protested it was too hot. He sent me letters that were unique because he used five or six different colors of ink to accentuate his points, and wrote poems and drew pictures on the envelopes.
I loved visiting with him because he had so many stories about people I would never have met. He admired Mr. Skinner and was devoted to the memory of working with him. He knew that what they were doing was important, even revolutionary, and he was proud to be part of it.
I met Jason McKown in 1987 when he was in his late eighties and retiring from the organ maintenance business. He had cared for the organs at Trinity Church, Copley Square in Boston for more than fifty years, and for those at the First Church of Christ Scientist (The Mother Church) for more than thirty. But more to my current point, he too had worked directly and personally with Mr. Skinner. He helped with the installation of the Skinner organ in the West Medford Congregational Church, West Medford, Massachusetts (Opus 692, 1928). At the same time, he started caring for the Skinner organ at the First Church of Christ, Scientist in Reading, Massachusetts (Opus 236, 1915). I took over the care of those organs as Jason retired and have been conscious ever since that the only person between me and Mr. Skinner was Jason McKown. (By the way, both of those organs still have their original leather and are played regularly.) It was a privilege to spend so much time with him, and a thrill to hear the stories he had to tell. He was present when Louis Vierne played the organ at Trinity Church, Boston, and he tuned the Skinner organ at King’s Chapel in Boston in preparation for a recital played by Marcel Dupré.
Jason’s wife Ruth was a classmate of former AGO president Roberta Bitgood. She was a church organist most of her life and she often held keys for Jason when he was tuning. The McKowns were members of Centre Methodist Church in Malden, Massachusetts, where they lived—Ruth was organist there for some time. In 1972 the church purchased a three-manual organ from Casavant (Opus 3178); Jason took meticulous care of the organ until his death in 1989.
Centre Methodist Church closed in 2006, and the Organ Clearing House relocated the organ to Salisbury Presbyterian Church in Midlothian, Virginia, completing the installation in November 2007. It was fun to continue my relationship with Jason in this way, and my memories of him were strengthened by the time I spent in his church last year.
I know that many of my colleagues share with me the view that the church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris is an important destination for organists and organbuilders. Any organist attending Mass there can easily pick out the other organists in the congregation. They are the ones who obviously know the music being played. They are the ones with tears in their eyes. They are the ones reveling in the opportunity to hear such an influential organ, there to be inspired by the same sounds that inspired Dupré and Widor. The first time I attended Mass at Saint-Sulpice, I paid special attention to the elderly parishioners, knowing that some of them must have been there with Marcel Dupré as their parish organist. I wonder which of them told him that the organ was too loud!
The people of that wonderful church are well aware of its musical heritage. The last Mass on Sunday morning includes a spoken welcome to any organists who may be visiting, and the organ loft is open to visitors afterwards. What a wonderful feeling it is to climb the stairs to the loft knowing how many of our idolized musicians did so earlier. Think of the famous photo of Albert Schweitzer sitting on the bench next to Marcel Dupré . . .
In November 1974, the new Flentrop organ was dedicated in Warner Concert Hall of the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music. That was my freshman year, and a mighty exciting time it was. Marie-Claire Alain played the recital, and a terrific cast of characters was assembled to participate in the festivities, which included a round-table discussion with Charles Fisk, E. Power Biggs, Dirk Flentrop, and others. One evening, a classmate and I had the thrill of giving Mr. Biggs and his wife Peggy a tour of the conservatory’s facilities. I was eighteen years old and thought I knew a lot more then than I do now, but I sure remember how exciting it was to spend a few hours with someone so influential in my field.

The past becomes the future
Many of us who build and play pipe organs are purposefully informed by the past. We study the work and writings of composers, organists, and organbuilders, trying to understand how they thought and what they meant. We travel great distances to hear music played on the instruments and in the acoustics known by the composers. (I’ve written before about how Widor’s “Toccata” doesn’t sound the same at the First Congregational Church—you name the town—as it does in Saint-Sulpice.)
Ten years ago, I restored a beautiful organ built in 1868 by E. & G. G. Hook of Boston. It was informative to find the pencil marks of the original builder—they had very hard pencil leads, and they got them very sharp—as they gave insight into how precisely they worked. It was sometimes hard to see their marks under modern workshop lighting—I wondered how they did it without fluorescent tubes overhead. During this restoration project, the organ was 129 years old.

Keep the flame alive
Shortly before he died, Marcel Dupré wrote down a lot of his personal and musical memories in a simple book entitled Recollections, published by Belwin-Mills. In the author’s preface, Dupré writes that he had for years ignored requests that he write his memoirs, but that on the occasion of his eighty-fourth birthday he received so many encouragements that he acquiesced. It’s a simple small book, a quick and delightful read, and today there are two copies available at Amazon.com. Dupré tells stories of encounters with Saint-Saëns, Fauré, and Guilmant, among others, and of course a great deal about his teacher and advocate, Charles-Marie Widor. While these are no more than the jotted-down memories of an old man, they are of immense historical value to us.
Here’s my confession. During all the time I spent with Sidney Eaton and Jason McKown, I never wrote anything down. I remember they each had special phrases they liked to use, and particular stories they told over and over. I remember that Sid liked eating peaches, particularly because he once offered me one that was so rotten I couldn’t imagine eating it. While I know I ate dozens of workday lunches with Jason, I can’t remember anything about what he liked to eat, or what he might have said about what Mr. Skinner liked to eat. I should have a couple notebooks full of direct recollections of Mr. Skinner and I don’t. That could have filled a whole lot of monthly columns.
I hope that this confession in writing will spur me to take advantage of the next time I realize I’m with someone who forms a meaningful link to the past. And I hope you will not miss opportunities as I have. Are you close to a former teacher who’s a generation older than you? I bet that teacher has memories of his teacher, of the installation of an important organ, of an earlier generation’s opinions about musical matters. Give a gift to those who follow you. Get it written down. Or get it on tape. There are any number of pocket-sized recording gadgets available now. Invite the maître to lunch, turn on the machine, and reap an historical document that will excite and inspire future generations.

John Bishop

At arm’s length
In recent months I’ve read three books about the violin, violinists, and luthiers: Stradivari’s Genius by Toby Faber (Random House, 2004), Violin Dreams by Arnold Steinhardt (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), and The Violin Maker by John Marchese (Harper Collins, 2007). Faber is a publisher; he traces the history of six instruments made by Antonio Stradivari. Steinhardt is the first violinist of the Guarneri Quartet, writing about his lifelong quest for the perfect instrument. Marchese is a journalist and amateur musician writing about Sam Zygmuntowicz who is a revered luthier in Brooklyn, New York, and Eugene Drucker, a violinist in the Emerson Quartet, chronicling the process of the commissioning, creation, and delivery of a splendid instrument. I recommend any and all of these as excellent reads for anyone interested in musical instruments.
There is much overlap between the three books. Each includes a pilgrimage to Cremona, the Italian city where the world’s best violins were built by generations of Guarneris, one of whom taught Stradivari, the local boy who eclipsed all others by building close to 2,000 instruments in a 70-year career, some 600 of which are still in use. Each discusses and compares theories about what makes Stradivari’s instruments stand out. Each poignantly describes the intimate relationships between the player and his instrument with rich use of sexual and romantic metaphors.
Arnold Steinhardt gets right to the point. Five pages into his book he writes,

    When I hold the violin, my left arm stretches lovingly around its neck, my right hand draws the bow across the strings like a caress, and the violin itself is tucked under my chin, a place halfway between by my brain and my beating heart.

Lovely images, aren’t they? You can daydream about how the human musician and mechanical instrument become one. The organist and organbuilder in me delves into the possibilities. But wait! Steinhardt’s next sentence puts me in exile:

    Instruments that are played at arm’s length—the piano, the bassoon, the tympani—have a certain reserve built into the relationship. Touch me, hold me if you must, but don’t get too close, they seem to say.

He completes the exclusion:

    To play the violin, however, I must stroke its strings and embrace a delicate body with ample curves and a scroll like a perfect hairdo fresh from the beauty salon. This creature sings ardently to me day after day, year after year, as I embrace it.

My envy of Steinhardt’s relationship with his instrument is at least a little assuaged by the beauty-salon simile—I can picture a sticky, brittle, slightly singed concoction that smells of chemicals, or Madeleine Kahn as Lili von Shtupp in Mel Brooks’s riotous film, Blazing Saddles, rebuffing an advance saying, “not the lips.” Some intimacy. Harumph. And what about the risk of simply being jilted?
In The Violin Maker, Eugene Drucker speaks of his instrument “under my ear.” He uses the phrase a number of times, his reference to the immediacy of what the violinist hears. After all, the instrument is barely an inch from the player’s ear. I reflect on how powerful a violin’s sound can be, and wonder what long-term effect that has on the player’s hearing, but Drucker clearly considers it an advantage. In contrast, it’s common to hear an organist complain about the instrument being “in my face, the Zimbel in the Brustwerk is unbearable.” That Zimbel is intended to be heard from 50 feet away—not 30 inches; how we sacrifice for our art! A tuner will tell you that sitting inside a heavy-duty expression box tuning a high-pressure Tuba is not an experience of intimacy with music “under your ear.” Tuners, identify with me—it’s the worst when you stand up to tune the bass in octaves. When you get to bottom G, the three-foot tall tenor G is necessarily right in your ear. At least when you’re tuning a powerful reed en chamade, you can duck!
Come to think of it, the fact that the tuner climbs ladders inside the instrument somehow separates the organ from the violin!
An intimate friend
My violin trilogy refers continually to the intimacy between the builder and the player of a violin. They spend hours together discussing the ideal, and as the craftsman works on the new instrument, the client’s recordings are playing in his workshop. Given the business of organbuilding—committees, contracts, deadlines, and delays (Christmas of what year?), how often do organbuilders and organists truly work together to create exactly the work of art that will be the true vehicle for the player? If I had a nickel for each time I’ve told an organ committee that the organ should be built for the coming generations and not for the current organist, I’d have a lot of nickels.
How many organists tell of their relationships with their instruments in such colorful loving terms? Because organists cannot take their favored instruments along to distant gigs, they must make peace, love, war, or at least a truce with whatever organ they encounter.
As a church organist I have had two long-term relationships with single instruments. One was a 10-year stint with a terrible organ that seemed to want to stop me from everything I tried to do. I could hardly bear it. The other was more like 20 years with an adequate instrument, comprehensive stoplist, good reliability, and a few truly beautiful voices. It didn’t stand in the way of what I played, but neither did it offer much help. I have been fortunate enough to have several extra-organic affairs with instruments I love. These experiences have allowed me the knowledge of what it’s like to play often on an organ that’s truly wonderful. I’m willing to indulge in expanding Steinhardt’s metaphor to a monumental scale. Rather than tucking a loved one under my chin, I or my fellow organists can become one with a 10-ton instrument and with the room in which it stands.
Steeple chase
Ours is a picturesque seacoast town with 19th-century brick storefronts and several distinctive steeples. One of those, the white one on the top of the hill that can be seen from miles away, is leaning to the left (allowing jabs of political humor) and threatening to fall. Because the cost of rebuilding the steeple far outstrips the resources of the parish, townspeople have mounted a public save-the-steeple effort. We’d hate to have to see all those postcards reprinted. Last Sunday I participated in a benefit recital that featured the church’s lovely little William B. D. Simmons organ (1865?) played by six different organists. It was fascinating to hear how different the organ sounded as the occupant of the bench changed. Each player offered a favorite piece, each player placed different emphasis on different voices, and each had a different approach to the attack and release of notes. And by the way, the steeple fund was satisfactorily increased.
In a simple rural setting, it was clear to me that even though Steinhardt refers to arm’s-length relationships with instruments other than violins (and I suppose violas, though he doesn’t mention them), an organist can in fact have an artistic tryst with an instrument. But with the violin trilogy in mind, a comment made that day by one of my colleagues set me to thinking. Noting that only a few stops on the Swell have complete ranks (most start at eº), that the keydesk is a little awkward, and that there is very little bass tone, she commented that the organ is limiting. And she’s right—it is, but it’s perfect for the music its builder had in mind. If you meet the organ on its own terms, you’ll get along much better. We cannot and should not expect to be able to play the same music on every organ, and when we try, the results are less than artistic.
A place for everything, and everything in its place
In the weeks after Easter I participated in several events that involved different groups of organists. Holy Day post mortems dominated the conversations, and a common thread was how many of them had played “The Widor” for the postlude. I knew that most of these musicians play for churches that have 10- or 20-stop organs, and I reflected that playing the “The Widor” on any one of them would be a little like entering a Volkswagen in a Formula One race. Widor wrote his famous Toccata for his lifelong partner, the Cavaillé-Coll organ at St. Sulpice in Paris, a magnificent instrument with five manuals and a hundred stops—but more to the point, a huge instrument in a perfectly enormous building rife with arches, niches, and statues. (By the way, Widor’s was a common-law relationship with his instrument. According to Marcel Dupré’s memoir, he was appointed temporary organist at St. Sulpice in 1869 and was simply reappointed each year until his retirement in 1933. He served as temporary organist for 64 years!) The sound of the organ rolls around in that building like thunder in the mountains. In such a grand acoustic, the famous arpeggios of “The Widor” that cost organists’ forearm tendons 128 notes per measure are rolled into the grand and stately half-note rhythm that is in fact the motion of the piece. Eight half notes in two measures make a phrase of the melody. If you play it on a 15-stop organ in a church with 125 seats, your listeners hear 256 notes per musical phrase—an effect achieved by pouring buckets of marbles on a tin roof.
Proportion is an essential element to all art. Classic architecture follows classic proportions. A great painting or a great photograph is celebrated for the balance and proportion of its composition. A great piece of music is an architectural triumph with carefully balanced proportions. The best sculptors knew how to stretch the proportions of the human form so a monumental statue would seem in correct proportion when viewed from ground level. Leonardo da Vinci’s famous sketch Vitruvian Man is a vivid illustration of how an artist/scientist worked to understand natural proportion, and we print it on neckties and lunch boxes to prove how dedicated we are to correct proportions.
In modern suburban life we grow used to seeing McMansions—houses that belong on 40-acre estates—crammed together on cul-de-sacs. It’s really not the houses that are out of scale, it’s the fact that they are twice as wide as the distance between them that bothers us.
In my opinion, playing “The Widor” on ten stops is simply a violation of proportions and can hardly be a rich musical experience—and I have to admit that I’ve done it myself many times. Note my use of quotes. We refer to this chestnut as though dear Charles-Marie only wrote one piece, just as “Toccata and Fugue” means only one thing to many people—you don’t even have to name the key or the composer before your mind’s ear flashes a mordent on high A.
Trivializing the monumental
Recently one of my second cousins died in an auto accident. It’s a very large family, Nick was an extremely popular guy, and at his funeral my parents and I wound up in the last row of a long narrow sanctuary with a low ceiling. (Okay, I admit that my father and I were planning a quick escape to get to the Boston Red Sox Opening Day game—the Red Sox won!) The three-manual organ was in chancel chambers a very long way from us. But the organbuilders in all their wisdom had foreseen the difficulty and included a small exposed Antiphonal division at the rear of the church. I glanced at it and guessed the stoplist: Gedeckt 8', Octave 4', Mixture III. Logical enough—I’ve suggested the inclusion of just such a thing in many situations. A little organ sound from behind adds a lot to the support of congregational singing. During the prelude the organist used that Antiphonal Gedeckt as a solo voice accompanied by enclosed strings in the chancel. Trouble was, from where we were sitting, you couldn’t hear the strings—they were too far away. And when he launched “The Widor” as the postlude, the effect was downright silly. What we heard from our seat was that huge piece being played on three low-pressure chiffy stops with a subtle hint of a bass melody from far away. (By the way, the organist was a friend. He and I shared a wink when I went forward with my parents to receive Communion and we had a fun phone conversation a few days later, so I expect he’ll chuckle when he reads this!)
Arnold Steinhardt sees a bassoon “at arm’s length,” but think about it—one end of the bassoon is in the player’s mouth. You don’t have that kind of a relationship with a violin. I wonder what he thinks of the organ. I’d love to have that conversation with him. I’ve heard of orchestral conductors who claim the organ is expressionless because you can’t change the volume of a single note, but I’ve heard organ playing so expressive as to take your breath away. I look forward to hearing lots more organ music played with expression, chosen in proportion to the instrument and surroundings of the day. Join me, dear colleagues, in promoting the organ as the expressive instrument that envelops you and moves the masses with its powerful breath.

Joyce Johnson Robinson

Joyce Johnson Robinson is associate editor of The Diapason.

Christopher Houlihan may very well be the youngest organist ever interviewed by The Diapason. A Connecticut native, Houlihan—sometimes known as “Houli”—made his debut album at 19 (a recording of the Vierne Second Symphony, made before he went to France in his junior year; see the review by David Wagner in The Diapaso, January 2009, pp. 19–20). His second recording (Joys, Mournings, and Battles, Towerhill Recordings) was recently released—a significant achievement for any artist, but all the more amazing given his youth. Houlihan, who placed first in the High School Division of the Albert Schweitzer Organ Competition (see David Spicer, “Albert Schweitzer Organ Competition 2003,” The Diapason, November 2003, p. 17), is a graduate of Trinity College, where he studied with John Rose; during his senior year he made his orchestral debut with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra, performing Barber’s Toccata Festiva. Rose had insisted that Houlihan pursue some study with a different teacher, so during his junior year Houlihan studied with Jean-Baptiste Robin at the conservatory in Versailles, where he earned the French equivalent of an artist’s diploma. He also served as assistant musician at the American Cathedral in Paris, under Edward Tipton, working as choral accompanist and directing two children’s choirs. One Sunday when Tipton was away and Houlihan was to serve as both organist and choir director, the cathedral received a few hours’ advance notice that the President and First Lady of the United States, Mr. and Mrs. George W. Bush, would attend.
Houlihan’s first teacher, John Rose, described meeting the youngster prior to playing a recital—the young man and other family members came an hour early to get a bird’s-eye-view seat, in order to see the console and player up close. This initial meeting led to lessons with Rose at Trinity College, and subsequently to Houlihan’s matriculating there. Rose notes that one of Houlihan’s qualities is the ability to generate excitement about the organ and its music, to be able to communicate the music and his passion for it to an audience, and credits some of this to Houlihan’s technical mastery of rhythm and accent in way that makes the music “electrifying.” Rose feels that Houlihan’s “thirst for knowledge and learning” lead him to be “well informed about various performance practices,” yet realizing “the importance of bringing his own ideas and a fresh outlook to his interpretations. He also understands (and enjoys) the need to adapt his ideas uniquely, as needed, from one organ to the next.”
Christopher Houlihan’s fans are of all ages and include an 85-year-old retired math teacher at Trinity, along with students at the college; they have formed a group known as the “Houli Fans,” and this has expanded into marketing: t-shirts, caps, and mugs are available. Most of these students had never experienced an organ recital before supporting their friend. When he performed with the symphony during his senior year, they chartered buses to take throngs of students to the orchestra hall, where they rained down loud cheers from the balcony. Christopher Houlihan currently studies with Paul Jacobs at the Juilliard School, and is represented by Phillip Truckenbrod Concert Artists (www.concertartists.com). Houlihan can be found on Facebook and YouTube, and his website is www.christopherhoulihan.com.

Joyce Robinson: Do you come from a musical family?
Christopher Houlihan: My family isn’t musical, but my parents have always been incredibly supportive of my passion. I think my mother signed me up for piano lessons just so I would have something to do after school. At the beginning I liked it, I thought it was all right, but I kept practicing and eventually joined a church choir in my hometown of Somers, Connecticut when I was about 8, and discovered the organ. The organ in the church was an electronic organ, and the organist there always had the tremolos on, but she showed me everything she knew and encouraged me to explore. She let me practice on the instrument. I was immediately excited by it and drawn into it, and I started reading as much as I could about the organ and tried to talk to other organists, but at the same time, I had no idea how to take organ lessons. It was obvious you could take piano lessons or lessons on any other instrument, but the organ was kind of a mystery to both my parents and me. My mother loves telling the story of walking into my bedroom and seeing me at my digital keyboard, moving my feet around. She discovered I had put rows of masking tape on her hardwood floor, in the outline of the pedalboard, so that I could learn how to play the pedals. She was a bit horrified that I had put tape all over her floor, but at the same time, she thought it was pretty clever.
Then, in 1999, my mother read in the newspaper that there was an organ concert going on in Springfield, Massachusetts. We’d never been to an organ concert before, never really heard any classical organ music, but we went, and I got hooked. I still have the program from that recital, and, looking back on it, I can’t imagine having had a better introduction to concert organ music: I heard Franck’s Pièce Héroïque and Vierne’s Third Symphony for the first time that day. After the concert, we spoke with the organist, and I said, “I want to take organ lessons, what do I do?” And the man said, “Why don’t you come down to Hartford and play for me?” This was John Rose. We went to Trinity, and I played for him; I was twelve years old, and he took me on as a student. From there, it just took off—I kept studying with him throughout high school, and when it came time to look at colleges, Trinity turned out to be a very good fit for me. John never pushed for me to go to Trinity; he would have been supportive of any decision I made, but for a lot of reasons I chose Trinity, and I’m really glad I did.

JR: Is that where your interest in Vierne came from? John Rose is well known for his work on Vierne, and your first recording was mostly Vierne.
CH: Yes, it was. John has been a wonderful mentor, and he’s never forced any particular style of playing on me, and I’ve studied all sorts of repertoire with him. But I do suppose I’ve had more exposure to Vierne than many other people, certainly because of his love of Vierne. I remember working on the “Berceuse” from the 24 Pieces in Free Style; that was probably my first Vierne piece.

JR: How old were you then?
CH: I’m not sure! I was in middle school, probably 13. Then when I got to Trinity, he said “You should really learn the Vierne Second Symphony, I think it would be a good piece for you.” And I learned it, and I absolutely loved it. Vierne is very chromatic, it’s very different from most Widor . . . Some people say things like, “You should never play a complete French symphony, it’s too long, it’s trash, audiences don’t like it,” but I find it incredibly gratifying as a performer and as a listener to hear a complete symphony. You rarely go to an orchestral concert and hear the Finale from a Beethoven symphony—you hear the whole work. I think a Vierne symphony works much better as a complete piece . . . the individual movements speak much more profoundly when you hear them in the context of the whole symphony.

JR: You must have worked on quite a bit of French repertoire with John Rose before you went to France.
CH: I did.

JR: And when you got to France, did you find the approach to French music to be different?
CH: That’s a complicated question to answer, but yes, the approach was very different. I went to France because I had a strong affinity for French romantic music, but I also wanted to learn more about French classical music, as well as study modern French music. Certainly one of the most beneficial aspects of studying organ music in France is hearing and playing on French organs. But having grown up on American organs, playing primarily in drier American acoustics, and approaching music from an American perspective in general, I really had to learn a new style of playing, one that was more effective for those instruments and rooms. My teacher, Jean-Baptiste Robin, often talked to me about “taste,” which is, of course, completely subjective, but I became more aware of the fact that taste is also cultural, and people from two different backgrounds (musical and otherwise) will have very different opinions about what they consider to be “in good or bad taste.” For example, sometimes I would phrase something a certain way, or accent something a certain way, and Jean-Baptiste would remark that it sounded “American.” Well, I am American, after all!
What is true, though, is that French music sounds most “at home” on French organs. One of the most incredible experiences I had was going to Poitiers Cathedral, where Jean-Baptiste Robin is titulaire, and hearing the 1791 Clicquot organ there. When I heard French classical music on that instrument I was almost in tears, it was so beautiful. That music came alive and worked in a way I had never heard it before. The same can be said of romantic music, but to a less extreme degree, when hearing it on French romantic organs. But what I’ve come to believe through those experiences is that what is far more important than choosing the historically correct stops, or playing in a historically correct way, is the type of musical effect that comes across to a listener. If hearing Widor played at St. Sulpice brings you to your knees, then that music should have the same effect wherever you’re playing it, and, typically, in my opinion, to get that kind of effect on American organs, you have to play the music in a very different way than you might in France.

JR: So are you saying that one must register more with one’s ears than just looking at labels on the knobs?
CH: Yes, absolutely. And at the same time, you don’t have to travel all the way to France to register that way. I think you have to go with your gut—you have to look for what’s the most musical solution when you’re registering anything. It’s not what the book says is the correct registration, but what has an effect—what makes the music come alive.

JR: Was there any particular aspect of registration that you had to make adjustments for when you returned to the U.S.?
CH: There are all sorts of things one can do. One basic idea that is important to know about is the upward voicing that a lot of the French organs have, where things really sing in the treble in a way they don’t on most of our organs. There’s not an easy solution to this, but it’s something to keep in mind and listen for. The other thing is that our Swell boxes are, generally, much more expressive even on smaller organs, and you can use them in a different way for the kinds of musical effects that naturally occur without moving the box on a French organ. The reason Franck used the Hautbois with his 8′ foundations was to make the Swell more expressive . . . if the oboe isn’t needed, I leave it off. Many American organs have the only chorus reeds in the Swell, and they might be quite loud; therefore, you don’t always have to play with the full Swell on where Vierne or Widor says “full Swell.” If you’ve only got a full Swell and one more reed on the Great, you don’t get a crescendo effect; you go from loud to louder. You’ve got to allow more liberty for these things, because in the end you’re being truer to the composer’s intentions . . .

JR: Tell us a little more about your time in France. Life in Europe is usually different than it is here, so what was it like for you—your schedule, your study, your practicing? Did you spend time learning the language?
CH: I was there through the Trinity College Paris program. They have about 20 to 30 students there each semester, and through that program I took French language classes, a class on French culture, a course on art history and architecture—they offer all sorts of courses, ranging from history of the European Union, to independent studies on anything you want to learn about. I did part of my coursework through them, and Trinity gave me credit for my organ lessons at the conservatory in Versailles, and my private harmony lessons with Jean-Baptiste.
I was also lucky enough to have an incredible job at the American Cathedral in Paris, working with Ned Tipton. I was the assistant musician, which meant that I accompanied the choir on Sunday mornings, and I directed two children’s choirs—the children’s group, and a teenager group—and along with all this I had an apartment in the cathedral tower, which was really incredible! You could climb to the top of the tower, and you had one of the most spectacular views of Paris. You could see all of the major monuments, really stunning. The cathedral is on the Avenue Georges V, which is right off the Champs Elysees . . . the whole experience was very surreal and I feel so lucky to have had the opportunity. And the people at the cathedral are so wonderful. There are a lot of Americans, of course, and people from England, from Australia, and French people too!

JR: During your time in France, you performed for George and Laura Bush at the American Cathedral in Paris. Can you recall that day?
CH: I’ll certainly never forget it. It actually began on a Saturday afternoon when I got a knock at the door of my apartment. Now, my apartment was 83 steps up a cement spiral staircase, so I didn’t get very many knocks on the door . . . I was fairly surprised to discover the dean of the cathedral and two French police officers with enormous rifles standing in front of me. They explained who would be coming for a visit the following morning. To complicate things, Ned was away, the adult choir hadn’t had a rehearsal the previous Thursday, and we had the children’s choir scheduled to sing that morning too. Unfortunately, we had to keep the news completely secret for security reasons, so I couldn’t let the choirs know what would be happening. Sunday morning was a little hectic . . . security came and set up metal detectors, dogs sniffed through the whole building, and of course, they didn’t care that I had a choir to rehearse! We wound up with about 15 minutes to run through the anthems, but we pulled it off pretty well.

JR: What were your studies like with Jean-Baptiste Robin?
CH: Robin was an excellent teacher and I learned a great deal from him. At his recommendation, we spent the year working almost exclusively on French music, and nothing could have made me happier. Each week I would prepare a different piece, by de Grigny, Marchand, Couperin, or one of the other French Baroque composers. We worked a great deal on Franck, of course, on Alain’s Trois Danses, as well as one of Robin’s own pieces, Trois Éléments d’un Songe.

JR: What made you choose Juilliard for graduate study? For that matter, why even bother with graduate study, because you had already made a recording, you were signed to professional management before you even got a bachelor’s degree, if my calculations were correct?
CH: True. I chose Juilliard because I really wanted to work with Paul Jacobs and I have had a wonderful time studying with him. I’ve been lucky at this point to have studied both at Trinity and at Juilliard, and have had vastly different experiences at both schools. At Trinity, the focus was on studying music in a broader context—a liberal arts school; I took classes in all sorts of things: science, math, philosophy—it was wonderful, and I made friends with all sorts of people studying all different subjects, and I can’t say enough positive things about how that can affect one’s perspective on making music. But I really felt I was ready to study music in a much more intense environment, and Juilliard was a great choice for that. I love being in New York City, being at Juilliard, and working with Paul. It’s been very rewarding.

JR: Has it been an opportunity to learn a lot of new repertoire, or just refine what you already know?
CH: One of the unique things about the Juilliard program is that we’re required to perform a new piece each Thursday morning in our organ studio class, which is open to the public. And that was definitely a big draw to go there, to learn a lot of repertoire. It can sometimes be difficult to learn a piece very deeply when you’re going through so much music so quickly, but you can always bring things back to Paul and work on them more, and of course work on them more on your own, which is where the real music happens, spending time getting to know the music very intimately. To touch on the last question again, even though I’ve been lucky to have these opportunities to record a CD and study in France and work under management, which I’m incredibly grateful for and excited by, I believe one never really stops learning. Juilliard has been a wonderful place for me to grow more as a musician, and I hope to continue to do that for the rest of my life.

JR: You have a website, and a presence on Facebook—do you find that these media help build your audiences?
CH: I’m not sure, but I do think they’re incredibly important tools. How many people are on Facebook now? I have no idea, but there’s no reason not to take advantage of it and to be communicating in the world where most people are interacting today. I don’t know if my online presence necessarily helps build my audience, but it certainly doesn’t hurt it. It certainly helps attract younger people.

JR: Do you notice that your audience has a younger demographic than that of other organists?
CH: I don’t think so, not yet at least, but attracting younger people to classical music is something I feel very strongly about. And one of the greatest things I experienced at Trinity was bringing my friends who weren’t musicians to my organ concerts, and getting them excited about it. They responded very positively.

JR: Would that be the Houli Fans?
CH: The Houli Fans grew out of that, from friends of mine who weren’t musicians, but who came to my organ concerts and got excited by the music and discovered something far more fantastic than they ever expected to. I would have never guessed some of my college friends would greet me by humming the opening bars of Vierne’s Second Symphony—or talk to me about how fascinating a Bach fugue was. Houli Fans has caught on in a very organic way, and audiences everywhere I go are interested to hear more about it. At Trinity, students came to the concerts and saw that I loved performing, thought the music was exciting, and they responded by getting more people to come! This is such a good sign for organ music, to see people, of any age, who don’t know anything about organ music responding to it. I think in a way the organ may stand in a better place now than it ever has, I suppose you could say—it has been so dismissed and ignored for so many years, that now it stands to be rediscovered. We’ve all been in situations where people ask about being an organist. They really don’t know what that is, they don’t know what that means, what we actually do. When they hear exciting classical organ music, they’re so wowed by it—it’s true. I’ve played recitals this year and people come up to me and say, “This was my first organ concert and it was way better than I ever expected!” I tell them, “Now go tell somebody else. And come back again and bring them!” Once people discover what’s going on, they’re excited by it. And that’s a really good sign.

JR: Do you see any special role for technology such as iPods or YouTube to advance organ music, or are those just tools like a CD would be?
CH: I think what’s important is reaching as many people as you possibly can. And people are on Facebook, on YouTube—a lot of people are using these things, and if we ignore them (and I’m not suggesting we necessarily are), you’re ignoring a big part of your audience. So I think it can absolutely help. YouTube is a fantastic resource for hearing and seeing performances—it’s an incredible archive of music and musicians and organs and all kinds of music, not just organ music, and quite a tool for marketing and advertising. Everything links to something else, and people can see you and discover other organ music and other performances.

JR: Well, back to the Houli Fans. What are they up to these days?
CH: We have shirts and hats and coffee mugs, and people are really responding well to it. Everywhere I’ve been this year I hear “Oh, I’m going to join the Houli Fans” and “I’m your newest Houli Fan” and things like that. And I find that both musicians and non-musicians want a very fun way to connect with the performer and somehow be involved in the performance. It’s fun!
And there’s nothing wrong with having a little bit of fun, or with classical music being fun. It’s been fun for centuries!

JR: You also have an interest in musical theater. Do you have much time for that any more?
CH: No, not right now, in graduate school, and with a busy performance schedule. But I did a lot of it in high school—I was music director of several shows. That was a lot of fun, and actually a really great learning experience. And I did a lot of it in college, too—music directing, performing on stage, singing, dancing, and all of that. I really enjoy it. At the moment I don’t have plans to do it professionally, but it’s a small passion of mine. I particularly love the music of Stephen Sondheim, and, coincidentally, I’m going to be inaugurating the organ at the Sondheim Center for the Performing Arts in Fairfield, Iowa.
I think there’s a lot that musicians can learn from theater, both from straight drama and musical theater, about how to approach a musical score, similar to the way an actor takes a script and analyzes everything that’s going on to create a character, and perform that character night after night. I try to approach music the same way—take the score and truly consider how to create a musical experience—in a way . . . a whole play. Not necessarily a story, but create the kind of experience I’d like to have as a listener. I think there’s a lot we can learn from theater and the other arts.

JR: Of what you’ve worked on so far, is there any particular repertoire you found a difficult nut to crack—you mentioned finding the character and learning how to bring that out; is there any music that’s been, say, a little more opaque for you?
CH: One of the most incredible things about the organ literature, and one of the most daunting, is the centuries that it spans. All this repertoire and all these different styles—personally, I think it’s impossible to be fluent in and to perform all these styles in a convincing way. Maybe it’s possible; I’d like to be wrong. When I’m learning a piece in a different style that I haven’t studied before, I try to approach it with respect for the scholarship that’s been done on it and its performance practice, but also perform it in a way that feels honest to me, so that I can perform it and convince the audience of the music. I don’t think there is much value in performing something just because you think you should—that you should play so-and-so’s music. Well, what if you don’t like so-and-so’s music? A lot of people may like so-and-so’s music, and a lot of scholars may say it’s important . . . But I don’t have to perform everything under the sun.

JR: In one of Gavin Black’s regular columns in The Diapason, one of his points was that if you don’t really like something, why waste your time learning it? Life’s too short—unless you’re in a competition and it’s required.
CH: At the same time, I’ve learned some pieces—I’m not sure I can name a specific one—where I’m not sure about it at the beginning, or I think I’m not going to like the piece. But then after I learn it I think, “Wow, now that I’ve studied it, and learned more about what the composer was trying to do, and found ways to make it come alive for my own performance, it really is a good piece.” And sometimes I decide to learn a piece, starting off by thinking it’s a great piece, and then after becoming more familiar with it, decide “This isn’t right for me.” It works both ways.

JR: You’ve already recorded two CDs—are you preparing any other recordings? What are your other plans for the future?
CH: I hope to be able to keep recording, and I hope to be able to continue performing. I really enjoy traveling and meeting new people, but most importantly, I love performing and bringing music to an audience. I believe it’s more like making music with an audience. Sometimes I even tell that to the audience too—I thank them for making music with me, since I can’t do it by myself, and since I get so much joy from performing. Eventually, I’d love to be teaching and sharing my love of organ music with others in any way I can.

John Bishop

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Aeolus
Ruler of the winds. That’s who he was. According to Greek mythology, he was son of King Hippotes and custodian of the four winds, keeping them in the heart of the Lipara Islands near Sicily. At the request of other gods, Aeolus would release gentle breezes or fierce gales, depending on the circumstances. He was something of a vendor to the gods. The Greek hero Odysseus visited Aeolus, who gave him a parting gift of the four winds in a bag to ensure his safe return to Ithaca. During the voyage, Odysseus’s crew was curious about the contents of the bag. When they were finally close enough to actually see Ithaca, Odysseus fell asleep. Members of his crew opened the bag, releasing the winds, and the ship was blown disastrously off course.1
It’s not for nothing that there was an organbuilding company named Aeolian, later merged with the Skinner Organ Company to form the august firm of Aeolian-Skinner, builder of many of America’s greatest pipe organs. The Aeolian myth is the heart of the pipe organ.

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I love wind. We live near the ocean where the wind can have the special quality of having moved unobstructed for hundreds, if not thousands, of miles. Sometimes it’s gentle and refreshing, sometimes it’s bracing and challenging, and sometimes it’s downright scary—but it’s always blowing and feels like a friend to me. Maybe this is a reaction to having spent thousands of hours in the deep and dark recesses of church buildings, toiling and moiling on recalcitrant machines. Leaving a building at the end of the day, I love that wonderful feeling of air moving around me. I picture the day’s dust and debris wafting from my erstwhile hair, something like Charles Schultz’s creation Pigpen, friend and confidant of Charlie Brown.
I love harnessing the wind to make a small sailboat go. With tiller in one hand and main-sheet in the other, the feeling of owning the wind—of inviting it to draw me where I want to go—is a thrill. I can see the approach of a puff—an extra burst of wind—making tracks on the water coming towards me so I can loosen the pull of the sail at just the right moment to retain control of the boat. I know the marks on the water are a little behind the leading edge of the puff so the puff actually hits my sails before the rougher water hits the hull. If I’m sailing across or into the wind, I’m aware of its power moving past me. If I’m sailing with the wind at my stern and everything’s going right, my boat moves at close to the same speed as the wind, so it seems relatively calm.
When I was kid, I learned about the principles of lift by holding my flat hand out the car window as my parents drove. If I cupped my hand a little so my knuckles were higher than the tips of my fingers, my hand would be pulled upwards. I now know that I was simulating the curved upper surface of an airplane’s wings, causing the air above my hand to move faster than the air under it. The faster moving air created a lower pressure above my hand, causing it to lift. My curved hand gave the same effect as the curve of my boat’s sails. The sails are mounted upright—so the air moving faster across the convex curves of the front of the sail draws the boat forward. The only time the wind actually pushes the boat is if the wind is from behind. Otherwise, the boat is being pulled forward by that pressure differential.
As a student at Oberlin, I was privileged to practice, study, and perform on the school’s wonderful Flentrop organ. It was brand-new for my freshman year, right in the heart of our twentieth-century Renaissance, the revival of classic styles of pipe organ building. While many of us were used to the solid wind of early twentieth-century organs, that instrument had a flexible wind supply, terrific for supporting the motion of Baroque music, but a certain trap for the inattentive organist. Approach a big chord wrong, and the sagging of the wind would remind you of the feeling you get in your stomach going over the top of a roller-coaster hill. If you played with a firm hand on the main-sheet, watching the wind like a hawk, you’d return safely to the dock boosted by your friend the wind.
I don’t do the thing with my hand out the car window any more because I’m almost always the one driving. Judging from my neighbors on many highways, I should keep my hands free for texting, flossing my teeth, or putting on makeup. But I don’t text or brush my teeth while I drive, and I never wear makeup.

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Harnessing the wind has been a human endeavor for millennia. There are images of sailing vessels under weigh on coins dating from about 3000 BC, and by 500 BC sailing ships had two masts and could apparently carry 200 tons of freight. The Persians developed windmills for grinding grain around 500 BC. And the earliest form of the pipe organ dated from around 250 BC.
Just as wind draws a sailboat rather than pushes it, the wind itself is usually drawn instead being “blown.” Meteorologists tell us of high- and low-pressure areas. A low-pressure area represents a lighter density of air, and high-pressure air flows toward it. A “sea-breeze” is formed by convection. If a coastal area warms up in the sun around midday, the air above the land rises and cooler air from above the water flows in to take its place. So most winds are “flowing toward” rather than “blowing away.”
The motion of air that we know as wind is one of the greatest forces on earth. If a gentle wind blowing over the table on your porch can send a plate of crackers flying, think of how much aggregate force there is across ten or twenty miles of porches. You could move a lot of crackers. This might not be the place for political or social opinions—but I’d rather see windmills than strip mines. Both are bad for birds and both interrupt the landscape, but one doesn’t lead to smog or acid rain. And let’s not even mention spent nuclear fuel rods. Spent wind is fully recyclable!
Harnessing the wind is the work of the organbuilder. We create machinery that moves air, stores it under pressure, distributes it through our instruments, and lets it blow into our carefully made whistles. The energy of the moving air is transformed into sonic energy. As one mentor said to me years ago, air is the fuel we use to create organ tone. Ever wonder why a wider pipe mouth, open toe, or open windway creates louder tone? Simple—more fuel is getting to the burner.
When I sit in a church listening to a great organ, I imagine thousands of little valves flitting open and closed, and reservoirs and wind regulators absolutely tingling to release the treasure of their stored fuel into the heavens as glorious sound. They may be machines, but when they’re doing their thing during worship, they take on what seems like human urgency.

§

Wendy and I have been enjoying the use of an apartment in New York City’s Greenwich Village that belongs to friends of my parents. Yesterday we went up to Midtown to attend an Easter festival service at St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue. We chose the early Mass at 8:00 because the church’s website assured us that the music would be the same as at the later version but the crowds would likely be less. Preludes with organ and brass started at 7:30, including music of Pelz, Howells, Gabrieli, Dupré’s Poème Héroïque, and Richard Strauss’s Feierlicher Enzug—a mighty amount of music for that hour of the day. The Mass setting was the premiere of John Scott’s Missa Dies Resurrectionis.
John Scott must be the greatest addition to American church music since electric organ blowers. His superb musicianship, immaculate sense of timing, welcoming leadership of congregational singing, touching rapport with the boys of the choir, concise and unobtrusive conducting, and by the way, marvelous organ playing made our two hours in that beautiful church as meaningful and memorable a musical experience as I can recall. The new Mass setting was gorgeous, moving from recognizable folk tunes to riffs reminiscent of Olivier Messiaen in the Sanctus. (Is it OK to say Messiaenic when describing Easter music?)
I love noticing the way the sound of an organ can change with different players. Dr. Scott was conducting for most of the Mass, and we were treated to the wonderful playing of associate organist Frederick Teardo and assistant organist Kevin Kwan. Dr. Scott slid onto the bench for the postlude, Gigout’s Grand Choeur Dialogué, and off we went. Oopah! It was my impression that Scott’s years at London’s cavernous St. Paul’s Cathedral prepared him to treat the magnificent sanctuary of St. Thomas Church as an intimate space. Such rhythm, such drive, such energy, such clarity. Wonderful.
And speaking of wind . . .
There were six extraordinary brass players (plus percussion), about 30 boys and 20 men in the choir (I didn’t count, so I’m probably not accurate), ten clergy and attendants, and maybe a thousand congregants. Quite a hoopla for eight in the morning. The Great Organ in the chancel has 159 ranks, and there’s a gorgeous Taylor & Boody organ in the gallery with 32 ranks. Add us all up and we were burning a lot of fuel. It’s beautiful to me to stand in the midst of all that sound, thinking of it in terms of wind.
The word inspiration has two distinct meanings: the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially something creative; and the drawing in of breath. These two meanings come together dramatically during festival Masses in our great churches.
When we worship in great churches like St. Thomas in New York, we are surrounded by opulent works of art. The reredos created by sculptor Lee Lawrie is 80 feet tall, 43 feet wide and contains more than 80 figures. (If we say it’s a 159-rank organ, do we say it’s an 80-saint reredos?) The stained-glass windows are spectacular, including a rose window of unusually deep colors that is 25 feet in diameter.
Most churches that own fancy stained-glass windows have to face expensive restoration projects at some point. The effects of air pollution corrode a window’s metal components, and simple weathering compromises a window’s structure and its ability to keep out the elements. I was maintaining the organs at Trinity Church, Copley Square in Boston when the magnificent windows by John LaFarge were removed for restoration. There were more than 2,000 pieces of glass in some of those windows, and it was just as complicated to restore them as to restore a large pipe organ. And while I think there’s less that can go wrong with a reredos than with a window or a pipe organ, I’m sure that at least that great heap of saints has to be cleaned one in a while—a job that would involve the careful choice and use of cleaning solvents and solutions, a big assortment of brushes, a hundred feet of scaffolding, and a fancy insurance policy. Imagine the fiscal implications of dropping a bucket of water from 80 feet up in a place like that.
But seldom, if ever, do we hear of a place like St. Thomas Church replacing their windows or reredos. The original designs are integral with the building, and it would hardly cross our minds to say that styles have changed and we need to overhaul the visual content of our liturgical art every generation or so to keep up with the times. Just imagine the stunned silence in the vestry meeting when the rector proposes the replacement of the reredos. “It’s just too old fashioned . . . ”
We hardly bat an eye before proposing the replacement of a pipe organ. Across the country, thousands of churches originally equipped with perfectly good pipe organs have discarded and replaced them with instruments more in tune with current trends, more in sync with the style and preferences of current musicians, and ostensibly more economically maintained.
Why is this? Simple. Windows and statues are static. They stay still. The sun shines through them and on them, air (and all that comes with it) moves around them, but physically they stay still. A pipe organ is in motion. When you turn on the blower, reservoirs fill, wind conductors are stressed by pressure, leather moves, the fabric of the instrument creaks and groans as it assumes its readiness to play. When you play a note, valves open, springs are tensioned, air flows, flecks of debris move around. When you play a piece of music, all those motions are multiplied by thousands. The Doxology (Old Hundredth) comprises 32 four-part chords. That’s 128 notes. Play it on a single stop and you’ve moved 128 note valves, plus all the attendant primaries, magnet armatures, stop and relay switches. Play the same 32 chords on a big organ using 90 stops (nothing out of the ordinary)—11,520 valves. And that’s just the Doxology. I’ll let you do the math for a big piece by Bach or Widor that has lots of hemi-demi-semi-quavers. I suppose Wendy and I heard the St. Thomas organ play millions of notes yesterday in that 8:00 Mass. There would be another identical Mass at 11:00, an organ recital at 2:30, and Solemn Evensong at 3:00. A wicked workday for the musicians, and a fifty-million-note day for the organ. Just think of all those busy little valves—millions of tiny movements to create a majestic body of sound.
And the organ wears out. Over the decades of service that is the life of a great organ, technicians move around through the instrument tuning, adjusting, and repairing. Musicians practice, tourists receive demonstrations, liturgies come and go. That organ blower gets turned on and off dozens of times each week. The daylight streams through the windows, but the daylights get beaten out of the organ.
I’ve been in and out of St. Thomas Church many times. I’ve heard plenty of brilliant organists play there, and I’ve never been disappointed by what I heard. But I’ve known for years that the chancel organ is in trouble. It has played billions of notes. It’s been rebuilt a number of times. And it’s simply worn out. It’s a rare church musician who would intentionally offer less than the best possible to the congregation—or to God—during worship. And musicians of the caliber one hears at St. Thomas are masters at getting water from stone. As an organbuilder with a trained and experienced ear, I’m aware of the organ’s shortcomings. But as a worshipper, I’m transported.

§

I single out St. Thomas Church because we worshipped there yesterday. I know those responsible for the organ, so I know something about its real condition. And prominent on the church’s website is an appeal for gifts to support the commissioning of a very expensive new organ. There were even letters from the rector and organist inserted in the Easter service booklet repeating that appeal. An elderly woman, impeccably dressed and obviously of means (she was wearing the value of a fancy car on her fingers), arrived a little after us and joined us in our pew. When the processional hymn started, she let loose a singing voice of unusual power and beauty. I whispered to Wendy, “She’ll give the new organ.” We chuckled, but a piece of me says I could have been right. I hope so.
Our church buildings are designed with expensive architectural elements. Including steeples, towers, stained-glass windows, to say nothing of Gothic arches and carvings in wood and stone, they all add mightily to the cost of building a church. But once it’s all there, we think of it as a whole. It would be hard to look back on the history of St. Thomas Church and say the tower was actually unnecessary. Of course they built a tower.
The organ is right up there on the list of expensive indulgences. How can we say we actually need such a thing? But how can we imagine Easter without it? There’s still plenty of wind available. At least there’s no fuel bill. 

 

Lorenz Maycher

Note: All letters, photos, articles, and other memorabilia used here are from the personal library of Dr. Alexander Boggs Ryan, housed at Trinity Episcopal Church, Longview, Texas, and Kilgore College, Kilgore, Texas. The letters were first publicly presented at the Gregg County Historical Society, Longview, Texas, by David Ford during the 2012 East Texas Pipe Organ Festival. All spelling and punctuation has been retained as found in the original letters.

 

Introduction

Marcel Dupré and Alexander Boggs Ryan—By one who knew them both

Marcel Dupré (1886–1971) had many American pupils, notable among whom were Emory Gallup, Carl Weinrich, Clarence Watters, and Dora Poteet. Although the foregoing were better suited to his approach than some others, there is no doubt that Clarence Watters and Dora Poteet were shining examples of his tradition and that they in turn passed this legacy on to their pupils in a way that insured reverence and respect.

Alexander Boggs Ryan (1928–1979) possessed an enviable and, in some ways, unique musical pedigree. Quite apart from his excellent piano background and well before he came to Dupré, he had received the Great Tradition (the Parisian organ school’s “apostolic succession”: Bach to Kittel to Rinck to Hesse to Lemmens to Guilmant & Widor and their pupils) from Dora Poteet Barclay. Helen Hewitt, one of Lynnwood Farnam’s pupils at the Curtis Institute, would become another early influence. (Although Farnam lacked a direct connection to the Parisian organ tradition, he was on intimate terms with many of its great lights. Farnam was in and out of many famous organ lofts and established bonds with Albert Dupré, Henri Mulet, and Charles Tournemire among others. He and the Duprés often met at Claude Johnson’s country house. As is well known, Vierne’s Sixth Symphony is dedicated to him.)

When Boggs arrived in Paris in 1952, Marcel Dupré was in the final years of his professorship at the Conservatoire. In previous decades his organ class included a glittering roll-call of greats, from Olivier Messiaen to Jeanne Demessieux, to name only two. In the immediate post-war period alone there had been, among the women, Françoise Renet, Marie-Madeleine Chevalier, and the fabulous Suzanne Chaisemartin; among the men, Pierre Labric, Jean Costa, and the unforgettable Pierre Cochereau. Beginning in 1954, Dupré would place the organ class in the hands of his faithful Rolande Falcinelli and assume the title of director of that august institution.

Much nonsense has been written and muttered-about concerning the so-called Olympian aloofness of Marcel Dupré but the facts, as well as the testimonies of his pupils, tell a very different story. It is true that the moment he began playing, one felt strongly the presence of an artistic giant—a god of music. In that respect his playing was quite unlike any other of my acquaintance. Privately, he was the most affectionate and loving master that one could possibly imagine, full of fatherly care for every aspect of one’s life and thought. High standards and unremitting work were necessary but he inspired and guided with a unique, genial humor and sweetness.

Boggs, I believe, was an almost ideal subject for study with Dupré. With his superb pianism (very important to the master) and his familiarity with the Parisian organ school, he was able to imbibe the maximum benefit from study in Meudon. Boggs’ fine Southern manners would have been appreciated by the Dupré family. In addition, he brought Dupré repertoire that would not have been part of the usual conservatory organ class drill (i.e., the Reubke Sonata). The notoriously miserable organ in the Salle d’Orgue had recently been replaced by a new, electric-action instrument. Dupré was able to provide this venue for Boggs’ début in 1953.

As a fitting coda to his years of study, Boggs earned his DMA at Ann Arbor in 1963. He studied with Helen Hewitt’s classmate, Robert Noehren, another member of Farnam’s celebrated Curtis organ class.* Marilyn Mason was also an influence, with her connection to Palmer Christian, a sometime pupil of both Straube and Guilmant.

Alexander Boggs Ryan had an acute sense that this great cloud of witnesses had contributed in many and various ways to his musical footprint. In my opinion, his best years as a player were, roughly speaking, a ten-year period from 1954 to 1964. Everything that he played seemed to contain a leading soprano line and cantabile legato, including Reger, a composer that benefited greatly from his relaxed, lyric approach. 

—Karl Watson

Staten Island, New York 

 

*In the years before his early death, Lynnwood Farnam taught the first organ class at the then newly founded Curtis Institute of Music. The members of the class were Lawrence Apgar, Robert Cato, Helen Hewitt, Alexander McCurdy, Robert Noehren, and Carl Weinrich. 

 

Letters

CONSERVATOIRE NATIONAL
DE MUSIQUE

PARIS, le 22 February 1955

14, RUE DE MADRID, 8E

LABORDE 20-80

LE DIRECTEUR

I have pleasure to state that Mr. Alexander Boggs Ryan who has studied organ with me during a year has proved a most interesting and satisfactory student. Through steady and intelligent work he has made continued progress. He has a fine brilliant technique and undeniable musical gifts.

He has been through an exhaustive repertory of classical and modern works with me and given a fine organ recital which has won him applause in the organ hall of the National Conservatory of music in Paris. Serious and earnest in his work, of perfect good-breeding, I am confident he will fulfil with distinction any post he may be entrusted with.

(signed) Marcel Dupré

 

§

 

40 BOULEVARD ANATOLE-FRANCE

MEUDON (S. &-O.)

November 12th 1961

My dear friend,

I returned from concerts in Germany last night and found your good letter for which many thanks. I was glad to hear your news about your work and activities.

I am sending you the photos dedicated. When I have a little time, I will look up whether I have the signature of Philipp and Widor, but I am leaving to-night for a concert tour in England and have still much work on hand.

The concert for Liszt’s commemoration was not a recital, but a concert with orchestra at Palais de Chaillot. Two transcriptions of mine for organ and orchestra were performed, with myself at the organ and the Pasdeloup orchestra: Fantasy on “ad nos” and the transcription of the piano work “St. Francois de Paule marchant sur les flots.” Both had a great success.

Yes, the long-playing record of Dora Poteet was sent to me. Her death has been a great sorrow for us. She was such a remarkable artist and a fine woman.

I also have the photo taken at St. Sulpice with Widor, Philipp and myself, but thank you all the same for your
kind thought.

I certainly was most happy about the wonderful reception I had in Detroit and it was so good to see again so many old students such as yourself and so many friends who had come from quite a distance.

With affectionate thoughts from Madame Dupré and myself and best wishes for continued success,

Yours ever,

(signed) Marcel Dupré

 

§

 

40 BOULEVARD ANATOLE-FRANCE

MEUDON (S. &-O.)

OBS. 14-45

March 27, 1962

My dear friend,

Many thanks for your letter. It was kind of you to write about the article on Alexandre Guilmant.

Thanks for the interesting programs you sent me and for the French program for your third recital.

I congratulate you on your recent fine appointment at Western Michigan University and am very happy to see that your hard work and talent are being acknowledged. I shall always be interested in the progress of your musical career.

The centenary of the organ of Saint-Sulpice will be commemorated on May 3rd. It was dedicated on April 29, 1862 by César Franck, Guilmant and Saint-Saens. So, I shall play some of their music, also my Passion-Symphony etc. The organ is always magnificent.

With warmest regards,

Sincerely,

(signed) Marcel Dupré

 

§

 

40 BOULEVARD ANATOLE-FRANCE

MEUDON (S. &-O.)

OBS. 14-45

April 25, 1962

My dear friend,

Many thanks for your kind letter, for the interesting programs you gave in New-York and for the photo at the organ in Detroit. I am returning the other two which I have inscribed according to your wish.

With every good wish,

Cordially,

(signed) Marcel Dupré

 

P. S. In 1956, I recorded several works for the Westminster Co. on the St. Sulpice organ, among which my “Stations of the Cross.” I know the Company has had financial difficulties, and I have, of course, never got any royalties, but this is not what I am concerned about. I have written to them to inquire whether my “Stations of the Cross” were available, but they never replied. The recording of that big work means a lot to me and I should be more than sorry if my work came to nothing.

Do you know anything about it or could you kindly make some inquiries? Many thanks in advance.

 

§

 

40 BOULEVARD ANATOLE-FRANCE

MEUDON (S. &-O.)

OBS. 14-45

May 10th 1962

My dear friend,

Many thanks for your letters and for the information about the Westminster Co. and their successor. I am writing to them.

How kind of you to have got my “Stations of the Cross” as a gift to me. I shall let you know when the record comes. I have the two other records.

I am sending you the program of the St. Sulpice organ centenary. The concert was a tremendous success. Thousands packed the church and the organ sounded more gloriously than ever.

Concerning the rebuild of Notre-Dame, the rebuild is not completed yet. The new console has been connected with the organ, but the combinations are not ready yet, nor the new stops. So, at the present moment, but for the new console, the organ is as it was.

As for Saint-Sulpice, I keep my own beautiful console and organ as they are, as they were when I started playing there as Widor’s assistant over fifty years ago.

I am sorry not to be able to send you a program of the bi-centennial of Liszt, but I have none left.

With kindest regards and best wishes,

Yours cordially,

(signed) Marcel Dupré

 

§

 

40 BOULEVARD ANATOLE-FRANCE

MEUDON (S. &-O.)

OBS. 14-45

October 14, 1962

My dear friend,

I am just back from Holland, where I gave four recitals during the week and find your letter, for which I thank you. I am delighted to hear you are doing so well both in your teaching and concerts. Thanks for the interesting clippings you sent.

I am glad to hear you will play at Rockefeller Chapel, Chicago during Lent. Such a magnificent organ! I shall think of you playing my “Stations.”

As regards the Variations of the Symphonie Gothique, it was Widor’s wish that one of them, the Canon in trio form, should be omitted. He considered it as too scholastic, so I always complied with his wish.

When I write to Marriott, I will certainly put in a good word about you.

You inquire about my activities? The next will be the performance of my Oratorio, “La France au Calvaire,” for choir, soloists, organ and orchestra, at Palais de Chaillot on November 4th at the Pasdeloup concerts.

Then I am leaving for Switzerland on November 10th. I have another busy year ahead. A new organ work of mine will be released this month.

We both keep in the best of health.

With every good wish,

Cordially,

(signed) Marcel Dupré

 

§

 

Tuesday, 12 February 1963

Dear M. Dupré:

This is my first communication to you in 1963, and I trust that this finds you and Mme. Dupré feeling well and busily engaged in activities that you both love so much.

We have had a terrible winter so far: much more snow than in former record years. I’m not used to it, of course, originating from Texas, but am confronted with the facts at hand.

I hope to finish my Doctorate at the University of Michigan by June. I’m working on my third and final recital, which will be all French. It includes some of your “Stations” as well as your “Noel Variations.” In addition, I’m preparing a document on all three recitals, which will contain program notes and an analysis of some 30 works.

Is M. Legouix (the second-hand music dealer) still alive? The reason I ask is that, when I studied with you ten years ago, I bought a considerable amount of music from him in rare editions—mostly German publications that had long been out of print. At that time I studied the Reubke “Sonata” with you, which I performed at the Conservatoire. I tried to locate an “original” of that work, originally published by J. Schuberth & Co., Leipzig. This organ-work was not among Legouix’s holdings at the time, although he promised to get me a copy. I have never heard from him since.

Now, the point is this: I would like, if possible, to get these compositions from Legouix. They are all works by Julius Reubke, and would be helpful in the preparation of my document. They include piano works, also. They are the following, and I’d appreciate your giving M. Legouix a call on the phone in order that he might make some inquiries for me. For this favor, I’d be
most appreciative:

Titles, as they appear in German:

Organ: 1) Sonate in c moll. Der 94ste Psalm. J. Schuberth

Piano: 2) Sonate in c moll. Der 94ste Psalm. Edition Cotta

(transcribed for piano by August Stradal, Stuttgart, 1926)

Piano: 3) Sonate in B moll. J. Schuberth

Piano: 4) Scherzo (not certain of publisher, probably J. Schuberth)

The above enumeration indicates one copy of each, as to get will take some work on the part of M. Legouix.

Cher maître, I realize that you are a busy man. If you do not have time to attend to this for me, just send me the address of M. Legouix. I don’t have it, or would write to him direct.

Am off for recitals in Chicago, Wichita (Kansas), Columbus (Ohio), and New York City during March and April. Wish me luck.

Sincerely,

(signed) Alexander Boggs Ryan

 

P. S. I forgot to tell you. My information states that Stradal also made an organ edition of the Reubke “Sonata,” in which he made some corrections (notes) indicated by Liszt. This was also Edition Cotta, and I’m interested in this, too. So tell Legouix about it. Thanks.

 

§

 

40 BOULEVARD ANATOLE-FRANCE

MEUDON (S. &-O.)

OBS. 14-45

March 18th, 1963

My dear friend,

I apologize for this belated answer to your letter, but we have been away a good deal.

We found Legouix address, which is:

4 Rue CHAUVEAU-LAGARDE

8e

Madame Dupré called at the shop this afternoon and was received by Madame Legouix from whom she heard that her husband died seven years ago accidentally. But she is carrying on his work with some help. She could not tell me whether she had the works you ask for, but is going to make some research and let me know. She took my phone number and has your list of works in hand.

So, as soon as I have some news, I will let you know.

Cordially yours,

(signed) Marcel Dupré

 

§

 

40 BOULEVARD ANATOLE-FRANCE

MEUDON (S. &-O.)

OBS. 14-45

October 2, 1963

My dear friend,

As soon as your letter of August 7 arrived I wrote to Madame Legouix saying you had never heard from her and asking whether she had been able to find any of the rare editions you wanted.

Her reply to my letter came yesterday only. (She may have been away during the summer vacation.) A very short reply it was as you may see, at the back of the first letter you wrote in February. (“With my apologies for not finding this.” L. Legouix) I am sorry it will prove disappointing for you.

Our most sincere congratulations on your Doctor’s degree from the University of Michigan.

We were shocked to hear about Parvin Titus’ terrible accident but were somewhat relieved when we were told recently by Mr. Cunkle, the editor of “The Diapason,” that he was getting better. But his poor wife!

With affectionate regards from both,

(signed) J. Dupré

 

§

 

December 3, 1963

M. and Mme. Marcel Dupré

40, Boulevard Anatole France

Meudon, S.- et - O.

France

My dear friends :

It is with a sense of extreme regret that I have just read of the passing of your daughter, Marguerite, on October 26, 1963. I had no idea that she had been desperately ill, and there was no indication of this in Mme. Dupré’s letter of early October.

Herefore, please accept my sincerest sympathies in this your hour of extreme sorrow. Please convey to Marguerite’s husband and her children my heartfelt shock upon receiving this news.

I am looking forward to seeing you next summer, as I contemplate my first trip to Europe in ten years.

Very sincerely,

Dr. Alexander Boggs Ryan

Chairman of the Organ Dept.

Assistant Professor of Music

Western Michigan University

ABR/leh

 

P. S. In as much as Marguerite and the late Dora Poteet Barclay were close friends some twenty-five years ago, I shall inform Dora’s husband of this tragedy; for surely he will want to write to you.

 

§

 

40 BOULEVARD ANATOLE-FRANCE

MEUDON (S. &-O.)

OBS. 14-45

January 6, 1964

Dear friend,

Many thanks for your letter of sympathy in our great sorrow. We are heart-broken, for our beloved Marguerite always filled our lives with happiness. Life will never be the same again for us. But we have to go on for the dear children she has left us.

Mr. Dupré is very courageous, though, and has resumed all his duties. Music helps us and I am always looking forward to St. Sulpice on Sundays.

We are going next week to Frankfurt, where a group of organists is to give a concert of M. Dupré’s works, and the day before, he will be giving a recital of French music.

We have read the programs you sent us with great interest, always touched about your devotion to your master’s music.

Affectionately Yours,

J. Dupré

 

§

 

Mr. & Mme. Marcel Dupré

40, BOULEVARD ANATOLE 

FRANCE

MEUDON (S. &-O.)

Telephone 14-45

Observatoire

Undated handwritten notecard

Dear friend,

Many thanks for your nice card and for the interesting press notices. We are happy to know your concerts are so successful. We both keep well and Mr. Dupré is as busy as ever with concert playing, composition and teaching. He has made some new recordings for Philips recently—a disc of Bach Chorales.

 

§

 

40 BOULEVARD ANATOLE-FRANCE

92 – MEUDON

027-14-45

Friday 23 July 1971

My dear friend,

Your letter reached me this morning and I was profoundly moved by all you wrote from your heart. Yes, I have received letters and telegrams by hundreds from all over the world and am far from having answered them all. But yours, which came apart, gets this returned answer.

The sudden passing away of my beloved husband was a terrible shock. On Whit-Sunday, May 30th, he was playing his two masses at St. Sulpice, ending at 12 o’clock with an improvisation on the Easter Alleluia which a friend had requested, and a few hours later, at the end of the afternoon, all was over. After St. Sulpice, we had driven back home, had a quiet lunch together, then he read his Sunday paper and said suddenly: “I feel a little cold; I am going to lie down on my bed.” Shortly after, he lost consciousness and passed without any pain. When the Doctors arrived, there was nothing to be done; rupture of abdominal aneurism.

I am heart-broken. After our many years spent together in such close union, the loss of that wonderful companion, so great, but so simple, so kind, so loving is so hard to bear. 

But I thank God for his peaceful end, a blessing for him, this end he deserved after his great life of devotion to his art, to his students, to his friends, and his humanity. Everybody loved him. 

I try to get some strength from so many happy memories of our life, particularly from the very last ones. On April 22, he played for the last time in London, at the Albert Hall for the celebration of the centenary of the Hall in which he had given his first concert abroad in a concert hall fifty years before, in December 1920. He had such an ovation from the impressive crowd: 7000 people. We were both deeply moved. I am sorry I have no programs of the Albert Hall.

Then for his 85th birthday, there was a most moving evening at St. Sulpice: his oratorio “De Profundis” was sung during the first hour, then a big group of his former pupils at the Conservatoire where he had taught for 28 years, gathered around him in the centre of the church; Messiaen, Langlais, Cochereau, Mme. Durufle, etc., etc., read beautiful tributes before him.

A week later, on May 13th, Rolande Falcinelli who succeeded him as the head of the organ class when he was appointed Director of the Conservatoire gave a recital with his 2nd Symphony and he concluded the recital by a great improvisation.

The funeral took place at St. Sulpice on June 3rd, in the packed church. The service was so beautiful, with the Requiem Gregorian Mass which I had requested.

He was buried in our little cemetery in Meudon, a few minutes from our home, with our darling Marguerite. We both used to go to her grave every day. Now I go alone until I join them.

Marguerite was our only child. The girl you saw at the concert last year was a cousin from Rouen.

Now, I am trying to be courageous for my three grandchildren, all three students and who still need me. They are sweet kids and their grandfather loved them so.

With many thanks for your sympathy,

Sadly Yours,

J. Marcel-Dupré

 

P. S. I don’t get The Diapason and would be so grateful if you would send me a clipping of the article.

 

§

 

French Institute

(Institut de France)

Academy of Arts

(Académie des Beaux-Arts)

Funeral of Marcel Dupré,

Member of the Musical Composition division,

held in St. Sulpice Church

Paris, 3rd June 1971.

 

ORATIONS

By

M. Jacques Carlu,

President of the Académie des Beaux-Arts

And

M. Emmanuel Bondeville,

Permanent Secretary of the Académie des Beaux-Arts

 

Paris,

MCMLXXI

Institute publication

Printers to the Institute:

1971 No. 13

Firmin-Didot & Co.

Rue Jacob 56.

 

ORATION

by

M. Jacques Carlu

President of the Académie des Beaux-Arts

Madame,

My dear colleagues,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is with deep emotion that I come here today, bringing in the name of the whole Académie des Beaux-Arts, a last farewell to our illustrious colleague and friend Marcel Dupré, who has been taken away so suddenly from the affectionate companionship of his family and his countless disciples and admirers.

On this sad day, it is not only the French Institute and our society which shares your mourning, Madame, but also the whole world of music or as one can truly put it, all the musicians in the world, for, in the unanimous opinion of his peers, Marcel Dupré must be classed in the first rank among musicians, composers and organists of all time.

Member of the music division of the Académie des Beaux-Arts 15 years, he was one of the most remarkable figures in its long history.

Without any doubt Dupré was a great artist, as his whole life and career bear witness, and his immense musical output will presently be described for us by his lifelong friend and companion, and fellow native of Rouen, our permanent secretary, the musician Emmanuel Bondeville, with all his wide knowledge and the brotherly affection he felt for the musician who has passed away.

But one didn’t have to be a musician to admire Marcel Dupré, for although not everyone is gifted with a good ear, you only needed to have a heart in order to love the man.

For among all those who in many countries have drawn near to Marcel Dupré, is there a single one who could forget the man, the friend, or the master? He was so innately good and infinitely gracious, always ready to share the fruits of his experience and his immense talent.

Whatever the circumstances he could never be selfish or insensible—his natural and unvarying kindliness would not allow it. So the great artist Marcel Dupré was surrounded by much admiration and loving respect among all the circles he frequented.

Rarely can France have possessed a better ambassador for the art and culture of our country, hence the warmth of the welcome which greeted him on his numerous tours abroad, especially in the United States.

Happily he is not dead altogether since a large part of himself will never pass away. Then Death, where is thy victory? For he will pass through this supreme test and emerge still greater; and the glorious reputation which he leaves us is as the sun shining from the world beyond the grave.

Thinking of the life of the soul in the kingdom of shade which is now his, where is the new Paul Valery who can describe for us in the style of “Eupalinos” the fascinating discussions which Marcel Dupré will be able to have with his well-loved J. S. Bach, and with all the giants of music whom he will meet in the Elysian Fields.

For us, it remains to measure the enormous void created by the disappearance of our dear and illustrious colleague. One can succeed to the post of a Marcel Dupré, but one can never replace him.

In this day of sadness, Madame, may I express to you and your children the deep and sorrowing sympathy felt by the members of the Academy of Arts, all of whom share your grief. But as the great Christian orator Massillon, who belonged to the Academy more than two centuries ago and whose statue stands before us in this Square of Saint-Sulpice, said in one of his famous sermons: “the feelings which a sudden death arouse in our hearts are feelings of a day of grief, as though death itself was a matter of a single day.”

Dear Marcel Dupré, our friend and colleague, you rest assured that our grief will be unending.

 

ORATION

pronounced by

M. Emmanuel BONDEVILLE

Permanent Secretary of the Académie des Beaux-Arts

Madame,

My dear Colleagues,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

How can one call to mind the great figure of Marcel Dupré without recapitulating the main stages of the career which marked his astonishing and ineluctable ascendance?

He had this great privilege of the strong, of following with sureness the ordained path, climbing it with firm undeviating steps, and reaching the higher summits by an unbroken ascending curve.

He always remained close to his roots. The rue du Vert-Buisson, at Rouen, was an excellent musical centre. The province and regions provide generous facilities for the arts, for study, practice, and the faith which gives life meaning and nobility.

Albert Dupré, the organist of St. Ouen, which possesses one of the finest organs in France, used to run a choral society “Perfect Harmony” (L’Accord Parfait), which enabled the music-lovers of Rouen to become familiar with the masterpieces of music, notably the great works of Bach. His wife, Alice Dupré, a cellist, possessed a lively musical intelligence.

In such a home, an exceptionally gifted child found the most favourable climate possible for the flowering of his talents. Without having frequented that blessed dwelling, called simply “le Vert-Buisson” (the green bush)—the name of the street—by the people of Rouen, one could not possibly assess how much ardour, hard work, and faith, the love of a difficult art can muster in order to achieve the most important objectives, which are to arouse curiosity, to consolidate knowledge, and to create enthusiasm.

For his enlightened parents applied the utmost care in nourishing the talent of Marcel Dupré, which declared itself early. At the age of twelve, he performed the opening recital on the organ at the church of St. Vivien. He soon became a living legend for the young musicians of the town. My mother was always talking to me about him, with the ardour of an admiring music-lover, who hoped to inspire her young offspring at an early age with sound reasons for working, hoping, and admiring in his turn.

These reasons quickly multiplied. Recitals succeeded one another, keeping always the same high standard of perfection. Prizes accumulated, marking the fruits of a complete musical training, including as they did prizes for performance on the piano and the organ, and the Grand Prix de Rome for composition. At the same time, to hear Marcel Dupré praising the teaching of Guilmant and Widor, was a lesson in their contribution to music, but it was also a lesson in modesty, a spiritual quality which this great man never forsook.

In spite of these successes, which gave as much pleasure to those who loved him as they did to himself, an even higher summit was to be reached in 1920, when Marcel Dupré played in ten recitals the whole of the organ works of John Sebastian Bach, from memory.

This wasn’t merely a feat of stupendous prowess, but a manifestation of something even greater, for Marcel Dupré had performed these recitals with the meticulous care which he insisted on applying to every act, whether of interpretation or of creation. “Do you know,” said his father one day to me, “that before giving these recitals, Marcel consulted all the editions, and all the available manuscripts of the works of Bach, particularly those in the Berlin library?”

The news of these concerts was to spread like lightning. One of the most impressive figures of the art of sound had revealed himself.

At the same time, Marcel Dupré brought the art of improvisation to an undreamt of level of proficiency. Here, too, there was no room for mere facility. A rigorous mastery led to fullness of expression. Each work revealed the fathomless resources offered by a simple theme, but instead of this result being achieved by patient work at the desk, the edifice of sound sprang forth from an act of spontaneous creation.

It is true that the act of improvisation had had some impressive exponents. César Franck had made an unforgettable impression on those who heard his improvisations on the organ at St. Clothilde during the Magnificat.

Dupré’s teacher, Widor, was equally admired. But his pupil’s contribution gave the king of instruments a still greater primacy. Alone of instruments, the organ enables a single player to build a whole cathedral of sound on the spot, using a variety of tone colours to rival the orchestra. As he unceasingly developed his talent, Marcel Dupré attained a breadth of expression hitherto unknown.

His tours of America began at that time, and soon set the seal on his reputation as the premier French organist; he amazed his transatlantic audience by improvising a complete symphony in four movements for the first time in the history of organ music.

He knew fame. This manifested itself in many ways, sometimes the most unexpected and simple ways, which were all the more moving, like the time when a young Australian came to work in my family and asked, on her arrival, “Where can one hear the organist Marcel Dupré?”

The composer didn’t relinquish his work. Rarely can the improviser and the composer have been so perfectly matched as in the person of Marcel Dupré, for his spontaneous impulses, like his reflective and poignant meditations, were as perfect as the written composition.

To list his works, which ranged from the instrumental solo to the lyrical fresco, would take up the whole of this speech. In any case there is available for reference the very thorough bibliographical study by his learned pupil, Canon Robert Delestre. But, to continue along our path in the company of the Master, we can halt at the Preludes and Fugues, which, composed as early as 1912, represent an astonishing enrichment of organ technique.

Speaking of these works, Marcel Dupré, the innovator, fully master of his bold strokes of composition, said “All I did was to follow Bach’s example . . . There’s no place for academicism in fugue, whatever one may think.”

In subsequent works, the “Suite Bretonne,” the “Symphonie-Passion,” the “Chemin de la Croix,” he went on to develop more fully this rich style of composition, to cite a few examples, for his extremely orderly mind yet found room for bold experiment. A short time ago, reading through scores by young composers, he showed me the interest which lay in examining new techniques by listening for their structure, their quest for new sounds.

Very early, the main lines of his life were set. With what mastery he mapped out his route! He was never to deviate from the chosen path: he embellished it continually.

The former pupil of Diemer, of Guilmant, and of Widor was to become Professor of Organ at the Conservatoire and Director of the illustrious institution.

What were his merits as a teacher? We have no need to enumerate them. On the 7th May last, at St. Sulpice, after hearing his “De Profundis,” his former pupils paid him homage and their famous names show that the continuity of his work and mission are assured.

A few weeks ago, he went back to Rouen and visited again the house of his parents, “le Vert Buisson,” and played the organ at St Ouen.

The world’s most glittering successes had never altered his affection for those he always revered, his family. He always spoke of them with moving tenderness.

He was so discreet and secret in his inmost thoughts that, in order to know him well, one had to be favoured with his affection. How his face shone when he spoke of his family. He expressed himself then with a contained warmth which was stronger than loud bursts of sound, for this master of sound was also master of his heart. When he gave his affection, how comforting was his welcome! Whether it was in his joyful home at Saint-Valery-en-Caux or the great organ room at Meudon, his arms were wide open to welcome those who in their turn followed the same path. They knew, of course, that a superior being was receiving them. 

The rarest gifts were magnified by an uncompromising conscience, and a strict application to work, so as to achieve a constant elevation of talent and thought. Those of us who have sat next to him on the organ bench at St. Sulpice know what is genius.

His finest praise was spoken by his former pupil, now famous, Olivier Messiaen, who, speaking of his master, Marcel Dupré, called him “the modern Liszt.”

Liszt, the noblest figure in the history of music, a generous spirit and a discoverer of new sounds—he combined a stupendous virtuosity with compositions which broke new ground in their development of the resources of music. Let us keep in our minds this brief and complete tribute.

When his admirers mourn him all over the world, you, Madame, who have been his attentive and so much loved partner in life, will receive the greatest comfort from his hands. You know that his name will remain what he made it—that of one of the greatest of men.

40 BOULEVARD ANATOLE-FRANCE

92—MEUDON

027-14-45

May 26, 1972

Dear friend,

Many thanks for your good letter from Hamburg. I will be happy to see you during your short visit in Paris.

Will you come to Meudon on Monday May 29, about 3 p. m. You have got a train from Montparnasse station at 2:51 p.m.

Nearly a year has elapsed since my beloved husband left us. This month of May with all its last-memories of our life is so sad!

With affectionate wishes,

J. Marcel Dupré

 

Special thanks to Linda Ryan Thomas; to Trinity Episcopal Church, Longview, Texas, Bill Bane, organist-choirmaster; and to Kilgore College, Kilgore, Texas, Dr. William Holda, president, and Jeanne Johnson, chair of music and dance, for allowing access to Alexander Boggs Ryan’s complete personal library, and for granting permission to reprint these letters and memorabilia.

Lorenz Maycher is organist-choirmaster at First Presbyterian Church, Kilgore, Texas, and founding director of the East Texas Pipe Organ Festival. He is a frequent contributor to The Diapason, which has published his interviews with Thomas Richner, William Teague, Nora Williams, Albert Russell, and Robert Town, as well as his series of articles “From the Clarence Dickinson Collection.” Maycher is also director of the Vermont Organ Academy, a website promoting articles and recordings devoted to the Aeolian-Skinner legacy.

Karl Watson was a pupil of Alexander McCurdy at the Curtis Institute and, during 1970, of Marcel Dupré in Meudon. He has served both Protestant and Catholic churches on the East Coast.