In the wind . . .

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Hometown loyalty
Local loyalty is legendary amongst native Mainers, those who have lived in Maine and nowhere else. There’s the story about the man from “away” who settled in a comfortable house with a backyard fence that separated his property from Eben’s (short for Ebenezer)—Eben had been born and grew up in that house. They were cordial neighbors for years, but our man was always aware that Eben continued to consider him an outsider. Forty years into their friendship, our man asked Eben, “We’ve been neighbors for forty years. Surely by now you must consider me part of the town.” Eben was quiet for a long moment, and then said quietly, “If the cat had kittens in the oven you wouldn’t call ’em biscuits.”
Some fifteen years ago I was renovating an organ in a small town in Maine. An elderly local organist was interested in the project and visited the church several times as I worked. He wanted me to see the organ in his church—an instrument built in the 1920s when his aunt was organist there. He had succeeded her some fifty years ago and was the proud steward of the little organ. I asked if he had lived there all his life. He replied, “not yet.”
I’ve lived in Boston all my life. Well, not really. I spent almost ten years in Ohio, first as an undergraduate and then as director of music at a church in Cleveland and working with organbuilder John Leek in Oberlin. Now although we vote in Boston, my wife and I divide our time between my hometown and mid-coast Maine, an area that I have grown to love. And I spend so much time away from home on Organ Clearing House projects (I’m coming to the end of five weeks in New York City) that I don’t seem to be at home for more than a few days at a time.
But I still consider myself a Bostonian. I’m proud of the city’s role in our country’s history. As a descendant of Paul Revere, I was brought up keenly aware of the sites of critical Revolutionary battles and the wealth of historic sites and buildings scattered throughout the area. We live a few hundred yards from the USS Constitution, familiarly known as Old Ironsides, the Navy’s frigate commissioned in 1797, now the oldest ship in the U.S. Navy. The Old North Church (“ . . . hang a lantern aloft in the North Church tower as a signal light; one if by land and two if by sea, I on the opposite shore will be ready to ride and spread the alarm through every Middlesex village and farm . . .”—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Paul Revere’s Ride) is in our neighborhood.
I have been an avid fan of the Boston Red Sox, where until about 1990 the team was made up largely of loyal “lifers.” Carl Yastrzemski played his entire 23-year career for the Red Sox. That seems a gentler era in professional sports when a hometown hero stayed home and was admired over the decades. Dwight Evans seemed headed for such a career until the Sox released him as a free agent in 1990 after eighteen years at Fenway Park. He retired after playing one season for the Baltimore Orioles and that apparent disloyalty on the part of the Sox was the beginning of the end of my unabashed fandom. That feeling was iced followed the thrill of the Red Sox’ long-awaited World Series victory in 2004. (They hadn’t won the World Series since 1918, the year they sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees for $100,000 so Red Sox owner and theater impresario Harry Frazee could fund the first performances of No, No, Nanette.) No sooner had the dust settled over Fenway after the 2004 Series, than Sox hero Johnny Damon was traded to the hated New York Yankees. Don’t tell me it’s just a game!

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Boston has always been an organ town. It was right around 1800 when the Puritans gave in to the evils of church music, and a small pipe organ was installed at King’s Chapel on Tremont Street in Boston. Within a few years, William
Goodrich and Thomas Appleton were building organs in Boston. In 1827, two young cabinetmakers from Salem, Massachusetts (the town famous for the witch trials of 1692) finished their apprenticeship with William Goodrich and opened their own organbuilding shop in Boston. Elias and George Hook started slowly, building fewer than ten organs a year for the first few years, but forty years later they were rocketing along at a fifty-five-per-year clip.
I love to think of the spectacle of a nineteenth-century workshop building that many organs. The instruments were shipped all over the country—how did they manage the correspondence for that many instruments without telephones and self-stick stamps, let alone fax machines and (God forbid) e-mail? How did they organize the flow of materials to their workshop? It takes tons of lumber, metal, and countless other materials to build an organ. The in-street trolley tracks that carried human passengers around Boston during the day were the routes of horse-drawn rail cars that brought rough materials to the workshop. The same carts transported the completed organs to barges, steamships, and railroads. Rural northern New England is pretty difficult to navigate today. There are few large roads, many hills and mountains, and lots of narrow bridges that cross treacherous rivers. It’s hard to imagine hauling a large pipe organ to northern New Hampshire, Vermont, or Maine when teams of horses or oxen were the engines of the day.
And picture the rural church receiving its new Hook organ. A couple workers travel from the factory with the organ. The trip takes weeks. They enlist the help of locals for the heavy lifting and complete all facets of the installation. Since the trip took so long, they must have stayed on the job until they were sure the organ was perfect. There would be no relying on a routine two-month check-up to correct anything that went wrong with the new organ.
I suppose that before the workers left the completed installation, they would visit all the other churches nearby, offering the company’s services for more new instruments. There are Hook organs built in the 1860s and 1870s all around the country, including the Deep South. Was it awkward for the Yankees from the Hook factory to cross the Mason-Dixon Line with their organ shipments in the years following the Civil War? I imagine their wives spent sleepless nights worrying for their safety. And how did the southern organists and church committees get in touch with the sales department at Hook? Did Hook advertise in newspapers all across the country? We have copies and reproductions of the Hook catalogue and sales brochures (you can purchase them online from the Organ Historical Society).

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When I was a teenager, I had my organ lessons on a new organ built by Fisk (First Congregational Church, Winchester, Massachusetts). I had organist duties at the First Congregational Church of neighboring Woburn, Massachusetts, which had a terrific organ by
E. & G. G. Hook, with around 30 stops on three manuals, built in 1860. My family had a summer home on Cape Cod in a town that was home to a small Hook & Hastings organ, and another by William H. Clark.
You may not have heard of William H. Clark. He had been organist of the First Congregational Church in Woburn, playing on the same terrific Hook organ as I. In the late 1860s he moved across the square to the Unitarian Church, where in 1870 he oversaw the installation of an even larger three-manual Hook organ. The Unitarian Hook is the instrument that was relocated to Kirche zum Heiligen Kreuz in Berlin, Germany, and so beautifully restored by Hermann Eule of Bautzen. Stephen Kinsley was the chief voicer at the Hook factory—today we would call him tonal director—and the great and good friend of William Clark—good enough that Clark was able to woo him away from Hook into an organbuilding partnership. William H. Clark Company was located in Indianapolis. They built about a dozen organs, including the one I knew so well on Cape Cod, another in Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Bethlehem, Ohio—an instrument that I helped John Leek restore in the late 1970s.
Those were all wonderful organs, but I know I took them for granted. As an incoming freshman at Oberlin, I realized that my classmates had had no such luck. One guy played a pipe organ for the first time when he auditioned at Oberlin. All his high-school experience had been on electronic instruments. I was dazzled by the then brand-new Flentrop organ in Warner Concert Hall, but quite a few of the organs I played there were much less than what I had grown up with. Growing up in Boston, I had been fortunate to hear E. Power Biggs play recitals on “his” Flentrop organ at Busch Hall (then called the Busch-Reisinger Museum) at Harvard University. I heard the dedication concert of the Frobenius organ at First Church in Cambridge. Few people knew much about the Danish organbuilder Frobenius in the 1970s, and the organ was a knockout. I heard Fisk organs at Harvard, King’s Chapel and Old West Church in Boston, and another dozen or so in the suburbs.

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You may have noticed that all the organs I’ve mentioned so far are trackers. There is no American city where the revival (I like to say Renaissance) of the pipe organ was more active than in Boston. When I was in high school, companies like Fisk, Noack, Andover, and Bozeman were building exciting and fascinating new organs at a rapid rate. My several mentors took me to workshop open houses where I first experienced the ethic and mystery of the organbuilding shop. And skillful organists populated the area’s organ benches, playing recitals followed by receptions and parties that all helped me learn to appreciate the pipe organ, not only as a musical instrument but as a community and way of life.
It wasn’t until after I graduated from Oberlin that I had any meaningful experiences with electro-pneumatic instruments. I worked with John Leek replacing leathers in a large Aeolian-Skinner organ in Cleveland and in several other smaller instruments, notably one by E.M. Skinner in original condition. When I returned to Boston after my Ohio hiatus, I took on the care of the Skinner/Aeolian-Skinner organ at Trinity Church, Copley Square, and the Aeolian-Skinner (4 manuals, 237 ranks) at the First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church). Being around those organs exposed me to some of the finest musicians and helped open my eyes to the range of tone and expression for which those organs are famous.
And those Skinner organs are products of Boston. Traveling on the Southeast Expressway (Route I-93 south of Boston) you can still read “Aeolian-Skinner” written on the wall of a large brick building, directly across the highway from the headquarters of the Boston Globe. The large erecting room at the south end of the building was sacrificed for the construction of the highway, precipitating the company’s move to Randolph, Massachusetts, and signaling the beginning of the end of the company. But in the “glory days,” Ernest Skinner himself worked in that building, developing the rich orchestral voices for which he is still famous. (Or we might say, after the tracker-action blitz of the 1970s, voices for which he is again famous!)
Skinner was fascinated by the ergonomics of the organ console—though I suppose the word ergonomics was not part of our language until after his lifetime. He watched organists as they played and perfected the dimensions and geometry of the console. He worked hard to lessen the distance between keyboards—no small feat given the need for piston buttons large enough to use easily (piston buttons that easily conflict with the sharp keys of the keyboard below). The design of the Skinner keyboard included tracker-touch springs, lots of ranges of adjustment for travel, spring tension, and contact point. The stop knobs had distinctive over-sized ivory faces, with names engraved in a font (another word that Skinner didn’t know) that was both elegant and easily legible. He was proud of his combination actions, and with good reason, as he developed them in the first years of the twentieth century—among the first mechanical machines that functioned as programmable binary computers.
He invented the whiffletree expression engine, inspired by the rigs developed to hitch teams of horses to a carriage. The horse-teams would perform better if each individual had freedom of motion, and each individual’s relative strength could complement the others. By extension, Skinner’s expression machine has individual power pneumatics for each stage that are hitched together using the same geometry as the team. Good observing, Mr. Skinner.

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I’ve mentioned several organbuilders who contributed to the culture of Boston. Others include George Stevens, George Hutchings, S.S. Hamill, Robert Roche, Nelson Barden, and the Spencer Organ Company. Extending the area to northern New England, you can add the names of Robert Waters, Jeremy Cooper, Stephen Russell, and David Moore. Extend the area to central Massachusetts and you can add Stefan Maier and William A. Johnson (later Wm. Johnson & Sons). Add them all up, from Goodrich to Fisk, from 1800 to 2010, and you get a total of something like 8,500 pipe organs built in Boston and surrounding areas. It’s a terrific heritage—a rich variety of musical imagination and creation that includes some of the finest organs ever built. But in sheer numbers, it pales in comparison to the world’s largest organbuilder, M.P. Möller, a single company that produced 13,500 organs in less than 100 years, all in the same town.

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It’s a beautiful town. The Italian North End has scores of terrific small restaurants. The Freedom Trail (United States National Park) is an organized walking tour of two-and-a-half miles that covers sixteen important historical sites. The Museum of Fine Arts has impressive collections of ancient Roman and Egyptian art as well as the expected glories of high European Art. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum comprises the private collection of an individual, opened to the public following her death. The Boston Symphony Orchestra under the direction of James Levine is as good as a great orchestra can be, and the Aeolian-Skinner organ at Symphony Hall (right across the street from the Christian Science Mother Church) has recently been renovated.
There’s plenty to do on the water. Boston Harbor Cruises operates tours ranging from an evening hour or two to a full day whale-watch cruise. You can take a fast ferry to Provincetown and back in a day. And if you visit in the fall, you can add a couple days of coveted foliage-touring in New Hampshire and Vermont.
The website of the Boston Chapter of the American Guild of Organists
(bostonago.com) has a good listing of organ recitals and related events. Emmanuel Church (Episcopal) on Newbury Street is the only place in the United States where you can hear a complete Bach cantata with orchestra every Sunday presented as part of worship service. The music is presented by the resident ensemble Emmanuel Music, a highly respected and accomplished group of some of the city’s finest musicians. Visit www.emmanuelmusic.org to see their schedule of performances. As Newbury Street is the city’s high-end shopping district, you can count on finding an exquisite Sunday brunch to complement the wonderful music.
Come to Boston, the pipe organ capital of America.

The Holtkamp Organ at the University of New Mexico

A native of Los Angeles, Arlene DeYoung Ward is currently coordinator of the piano lab and the piano proficiency program, and teaches organ along with John Clark at the University of New Mexico, Department of Music. Ms. Ward is a veteran of more than 100 solo organ and harpsichord recitals, including the complete works of J. S. Bach. In addition, she has published articles in both The American Organist and The Diapason on the subject of the Orgelbewegung. Most recently, she has completed two CDs, featuring music of J. S. Bach and organ music of Spain and Spanish America. Current recordings in progress are Music for Flute and Organ, with flautist Laura Dwyer, and Nineteenth Century Masterworks for the Organ. Ms. Ward has been a featured organ concerto soloist with both the Symphony Orchestra of Albuquerque and the Los Alamos Sinfonietta, has been heard nationally on The Pacifica Foundation Network as soloist in the American Guild of Organists (Los Angeles Chapter) 20th-century organ music series, and has toured in Oulskapar, The Netherlands, and Darmstadt-Eberstadt and Hamburg, Germany.

“Most of what I have learned about organs has come from working on organs or from observing organs. But I have had two principal teachers. The first was John Swinford of Redwood City, California. He taught me about organ tone. The second was Walter Holtkamp, Sr. He taught me that an organ should be articulate above everything else. And he did a fair job of teaching this lesson to the country as a whole.”--Charles Fisk1

“Someday people will realize that the organ is a keyboard instrument and not just a big vat of sound.”

--Walter Holtkamp, Sr., 19542

Any discussion of organs designed by Walter Holtkamp, Sr., must begin with the profound influence of the Orgelbewegung (Organ Renewal) movement in Germany during the first three decades of the twentieth century, as well as its French manifestations with Nadia Boulanger. The Orgelbewegung strongly influenced the work of Walter Holtkamp. One of Holtkamp’s organs, designed shortly before his death in 1962, resides in Keller Hall at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and is the organ featured and pictured in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2001), Volume 18, page 635.3

But before we trace the history of this instrument, its visual impact and articulate good sound, here follows a history of the movement that inspired its creation.

The Orgelbewegung (Organ Renewal) Movement

The portrayal of 20th-century church music’s regeneration, effected primarily in Germany in the 1920s, should be viewed only as an attempt to trace the outlines of an age which justifiably has been called “the Renaissance of church music” (O. Sohngen). As the Renaissance of Humanism stood upon the shoulders of its predecessors, so does this newest epoch of Protestant church music have its roots in the past. Consequently, we are obliged to shed light upon the diverse historical determinants and principal features in the development of the “Renaissance,” whose influence extends to the present and perhaps even into the future. The rebirth owes a great deal more to the hymnologists, liturgists, restorers of church music, and liturgical reformers in musicology, as well as to one or another 19th-century creative musician, than was immediately apparent to the new generation around 1930.4

--Adam Adrio

The various trends and movements that characterize the music of the 20th century are usually considered under the heading of New Music.5 New Music may perhaps be regarded simply as anti-Romanticism. One group particularly known is Les Six in France, a group that formed a front against the romantic concept of things artistic. Another manifestation is the movement generally known as neo-Classicism. Although Ferruccio Busoni is usually considered its prime mover,6 neo-Classicism experienced its real beginnings with Igor Stravinsky in his Octet for Wind Instruments (1923). Perhaps the chief exponent of neo-Classicism was Paul Hindemith, with his mastery of contrapuntal technique. Heinrich Strobel, a major biographer of Hindemith, shows the affinity of the neo-Classical movement to the aims of Les Six.7 [Briefly summarized, neo-Classical works exhibit a kinship with Bach and earlier composers through the consistent use of contrapuntal texture and imitative procedures; a decided preference for motor rhythms; the choice of comparatively short themes with sharply defined rhythms; the reduction of orchestral resources and color; and the rejection of the idea of program music. Thus, compactness and structural clarity are principal aims of neo-Classicism.]

Since it came into being at about the same time as neo-Classicism, exhibits a similar reaction to the excesses of the 19th century, and shares its retrospective nature, the German “Renaissance of church music” and within it the Orgelbewegung8 must be regarded as parallel movements within a more limited sphere. Rochus von Liliencron stated in 1900: “The New . . . can be discovered only through reverent contact with the old church art of the 16th century and the Protestant of the 18th; but for the purpose of permeating the music to today with the exalted, genuinely religious spirit of the old art, rather than of imitating it insensitively.”9 The Orgelbewegung, then, was primarily a reaction against the Klangideal of the 19th-century organ, a return to the organ music of the Baroque masters, and a renewal of interest in polyphony and the organ as a vehicle for compositional activity.10

Albert Schweitzer, in his 1906 essay “Deutsche und franzosische Orgelbaukunst und Orgelkunst,”11 favored a reform in organ construction to make available an organ that would be more compatible to the works of J. S. Bach and his predecessors. As history often has a habit of doing, the political turmoil in Europe culminating in World War I prevented the idea of reform in organ building until the 1920s. A major step in the direction of the Orgelbewegung was taken when Willibald Gurlitt, together with the organbuilder Oskar Walcker, undertook the construction of the Praetorius-Orgel in 1921 at the University of Freiburg in Breisgau. This instrument was constructed according to the specifications which Praetorius set down in his Syntagma Musicum II:  Organographia (1619).12 In the aftermath of the Praetorius-Orgel, a number of other old organs in Germany were discovered, including those built by Arp Schnitger (Jakobi-Orgel, Hamburg, 1688-1692) and the Silbermann-Orgel in Freiburg.

Beginning in 1925, several organ conferences were held in Germany, with the purpose of clarifying the direction of the Orgelbewegung for organbuilders. As Friedrich Hogner has suggested, however, the effect of these would have been lost if they had ended with a mere revival of the classical organ masters, important as that was, and had not operated as a fruitful stimulus to contemporary composers.13 The French were not only aware of the efforts of their German neighbors; beginning in the middle of the 19th century they had experienced their own renewal of composition, organbuilding and, through the Lemmens school, brilliant technique. Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979), arguably the most influential teacher of composition of the 20th century, was not only aware of the efforts of the Orgelbewegung, she became deeply involved in it. An organist herself, Boulanger was an organ recitalist of considerable fame as well as a composer and one of the first professional female conductors. An important figure in American musical life as well, she toured the country as an organist in 1925, giving the premiere of Copland’s Symphony for Organ and Orchestra,14 and lived here during World War II, conducting the Boston Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra and New York Philharmonic, and teaching at Wellesley, Radcliffe and Juilliard.15

The Holtkamp Family--Early Works

In the United States, wave after wave of German immigrants arrived during the second half of the 19th century, settling through the American Midwest with especially large communities in the Dakotas, the Texas hill country and the Ohio River valley. For generations they remained faithful to their religious heritage, language and customs. In fact, during the 19th century, so many new Americans spoke German rather than English that German almost became the official language in several areas, losing, for example, by only one vote in the Texas legislature as the language of that state.

Several members of the Holtkamp family emigrated from Ladbergen, Westfalen, Germany to the United Stated in the 1850s and 1860s. Heinrich Herman Holtkamp settled in Illinois;16 Heinrich Wilhelm and his brother came to New Knoxville, Ohio. The latter Heinrich Holtkamp and his wife Mary produced eight children, and it is their son Herman Heinrich “Henry” Holtkamp (d. 1932) who was the first organbuilder in the family.17

The Holtkamp Organ Company traces its lineage back to 1855, when G. F. Votteler established a shop in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1903, the first organbuilding Holtkamp, Herman Heinrich “Henry,” moved to Cleveland to join the then retiring Henry Votteler. Briefly named the Votteler-Holtkamp-Sparling Company, control of the firm eventually passed to Herman’s son, Walter Holtkamp (1894-1962), in 1931.18

The young organbuilder Walter had already been profoundly influenced through contact with musicians who had in turn been inspired by their teacher, Nadia Boulanger. Chris Holtkamp, in a phone interview, spoke of his grandfather’s musician friends who had worked with Boulanger. Exposing her students to the real literature of the French and German Baroque and the new ideas about organbuilding, these young organists and composers returned from Paris, sought out Walter Holtkamp and encouraged him to “look into this,”19 and a new era of organ building in the U.S. began. Although of German descent, Walter Holtkamp, Sr. had never attended any of the famous Orgelbewegung conferences in Hamburg or Freiburg, but learned about the new movement and its “sound ideal” through his French connections.

After 1918 and the end of WWI, the American economy was experiencing a “boom” cycle in the decade referred to as the “Roaring Twenties.” “The craze for ever-larger, more opulent organs, filled with luxury stops designed to tickle the ear, and conceived as one-man symphony orchestras, seemed to take over. The competition was on for possession of the largest and most extravagant instrument. The pipes of these organs were then buried in chambers out of sight, sometimes behind heavy curtains or carvings. This development tended to lose sight of the classical nature, its functional character, its . . . dignified tradition.” In addition, American organists tended to play transcriptions of symphonies in their recitals, to a great degree ignoring the great literature composed for their instrument in previous centuries.20

Walter Holtkamp, now strongly influenced by the new ideas and rediscovery of early music, advocated several seemingly radical notions: Pipes, he said, should be out in the open, clearly visible to the eye. To bury them in “chamber-tombs” is like asking a violinist to play from a closet backstage with the door closed, “like trying to woo a lady by correspondence,” he said. With pipes displayed in the open, fewer would be needed. Holtkamp’s success in obtaining very open positions for his organs gave them a presence and spontaneity that made him famous. So he insisted on smaller, leaner instruments, carefully designed to make each rank distinctive in its own right but essential to the total ensemble of tone--as his German contemporaries called it, the Werk-Orgel. Moreover, he demanded the highest quality materials and workmanship. The metal pipes were to have a high content of pure tin, the ivory on the keys was to be thick-cut and heavy, as ivory absorbs perspiration while other materials allow moisture to collect in puddles, to the distress of the player. (It is duly noted that it is now illegal to import pure ivory into the U.S.)

In 1933, Walter Holtkamp addressed the American Guild of Organists and the Association of Pipe Organ Builders with a pronouncement that is regarded as the starting point for a return to integrity in organ design in the U.S. He said, “The watchword should be smaller organs of finer quality, in advantageous positions. They are more of a pleasure to build and certainly more of a pleasure to listen to. The mammoth thing may satisfy the ego of the purchaser, but it sins against all the dictates of good taste and the laws of musical sound.”21

Following the philosophy of the early Orgelbewegung and the ideas of Boulanger and her disciples, Walter Holtkamp first designed several portativ organs for use in smaller church buildings--a vision for a rich, authentic pipe organ sound at a price that could compete with the newly-emerging electronic organ. The result was a totally self-contained, single-manual, three-stop pipe organ. Holtkamp said that the portativ organ was typical of his urge to natural, functional expression. Besides adapting the pipe organ to the smaller setting, the early portativs incorporated design features that were to become hallmarks of even the largest Holtkamp organs.

In several early Holtkamps, tracker key action was used (this was by no means the only action for later organs). Most important, however, was the placement of the organ pipes within the space where they would be heard, rather than in rooms or chambers adjacent. Only about a dozen of these early Holtkamp portativs were built; several, though, are still in use and can be seen and/or heard at the Smithsonian Institution, the Cleveland Museum of Art and (still in constant church use) at Faith Lutheran Church, Jacksonville, Illinois. This latter instrument has been recently enlarged by  Chris Holtkamp, who saw to it that the visual design of the new pipes complemented the design of the existing, that the woods and finishes of the cabinetry were carefully matched, and the integrity of the original portativ was not compromised.22

As the Holtkamp Organ Company became ever more famous, another surge of organbuilding came after the Second World War. This time, colleges and universities around the country were demanding high quality organs. The upsurge in serious historical musicology in the 1950s and ‘60s would result in many institutions of higher learning greatly desiring organs that brought to life the excitement of the early music so avidly being rediscovered, and which could, in addition, do justice to new music as well. Among those institutions with funds newly available to achieve these goals were such prestigious schools as Amherst, UC, Emory, Furman, Hollins, Indiana, Juilliard, MIT, Northwestern, Oberlin, Ohio Wesleyan, Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, Salem, Sweet Briar, Syracuse, Wellesley, Yale and Duke.23 Is it any wonder that the University of New Mexico should desire the same for their new performing arts complex of several halls?

The University of New Mexico and its Holtkamp Organ

Following World War II, universities around the country were again booming, along with the economy. UNM was certainly no exception, as students poured in. For a time, the various departments in Fine Arts were scattered around campus. By the middle 1950s Tom Popejoy, President of the University from 1948-1968, Edwin Stein, Dean of the College of Fine Arts, and Joe Blankenship, Chairman of the Music Department, had determined that the university needed a true Center for the Arts, with several performing and exhibit halls, rehearsal halls, an art museum, classrooms, libraries, faculty offices--in fact, everything that a first class university should have. Even more astonishing to those of us working in universities today, there were funds available to make all of this happen, and fairly quickly: a 2000-seat auditorium (Popejoy Hall) and a 324-seat Recital Hall (later named Keller Hall in memory of Walter Keller, Music Department Chair (1967-70). Any music or art department needs seem to have been funded within the 10-year period that the Center for the Arts was conceived and built. This included a fine organ for the Recital (or Keller) Hall, with 51 ranks and 2,471 pipes.24

At a time when university music departments across the country were sharing the excitement of musicological research and the rediscovery of neo-Baroque organbuilding principles, this was a rare opportunity for a brilliant builder, Walter Holtkamp, to work together with the architect Edward Holien and acousticians Bolt, Baranek and Newman, to build what was considered to be the very best possible marriage of instrument and building--a contrast to the problems innate in building an organ for an already existing space.

Accordingly, Edwin Stein contacted Walter Holtkamp in March 1960; Holtkamp was retained as the designer of the organ in January 1961 and completed the design between January and April, 1961. Several other organs were at various stages of design and building during this same time, and a comparison of their specifications shows where Walter Holtkamp’s creative energies had taken him. Tragically, Walter Holtkamp died in February of 1962, at the relatively young age of 68, while still realizing his considerable creative powers. Organs conceived during the late period in addition to the one for UNM included St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, Lakewood Presbyterian Church, St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Mountain Brook, Alabama, the Unitarian Church in Arlington, Virginia,25 and Westwood Lutheran Church in St. Louis Park, Minnesota.

This final project was another opportunity to work with the architects (Sovik, Mather and Madsen) and once again with the acoustical engineering firm of Bolt, Baranek and Newman. The organ at St. John’s Abbey was the last large contract, completed in November, 1961, before Walter Holtkamp’s death.26 St. John’s organ was placed in a monastically austere, not to mention large, church, and the brothers felt that the organ might be dwarfed by the scale of the room. Never conceived for concert use, but rather to serve the monastic community at prayer, the pipes were placed behind a red cloth screen, acoustically transparent, chosen primarily for architectural considerations. The brothers at St. John’s Abbey consider this organ to be Walter Holtkamp Sr.’s magnum opus. One should comment, however, that the Holtkamp at St. John’s was first played by the great Flor Peeters at its inaugural.27 It is most useful, now, to compare the specifications of this sister organ with the one in Keller Hall at UNM--only slightly smaller, but in this instance, one meant to be played in concert and to be seen.

At this point in the creation of the organ in Keller Hall at UNM, some construction delays occurred, and the organ was not completed until December of 1967. St. John’s was indeed the final opus totally designed and installed by Walter Holtkamp, Sr. These last half dozen or so organs designed by Holtkamp were then completed by his son, Walter Holtkamp, Jr., who insured the integrity of his father’s design. Another important figure, then, in this installation at UNM came to be the new Department Chair, Walter Keller, who was a keyboardist (harpsichord, piano and organ) and musicologist of some note. Thus there was a virtual guarantee that the vision of those 20th-century builders of the Orgelbewegung would come to fruition at UNM.28

Our Holtkamp in Keller Hall was inaugurated in grand fashion, with a conference and series of lectures by the composer-author William Schuman. The inaugural recitals in what was then called Recital Hall, now Keller Hall, were given in February and March, 1968. Featured artists were Catharine Crozier, Wesley Selby and the UNM choirs, brass and string orchestra together with Wes Selby.29 The original recordings of those programs are now available on CD, thanks to recording engineer Manny Rettinger (UBIK Sound).

I am pleased to report that our newest generation of young students, particularly those in our Music Appreciation courses (more than 1,000 of them in several sections!), really love our Holtkamp organ. It is exciting to me as both teacher and performer to have a full house of excited 18-year-old students come to organ recitals--our new audience of the future for the next generation of concert organists.

The Holtkamp at UNM is in marvelous condition, helped by the temperature control designed into the building and the commitment of the Music Department to preserve the organ with the help of the Mountain States firm for tuning and maintenance. It has been continuously played since its installation, by numerous students of Wes Selby and Wes Selby himself, now Professor Emeritus of Organ and Theory, as well as numerous guest artists over the years, organ instructor Edwina Beard, and by myself. With our excellent recording system in the hall, new CDs continue to be made with this instrument. The author is grateful to Wes for his oral history and contributions to this article. It is Wes’s picture that accompanies this article, playing the instrument in its, and his, early days at UNM. The author is also grateful for the extensive interviews and oral history contributions by Professor Emeritus Dr. William Seymour.

Jerome Butera is editor of THE DIAPASON.

One of America’s leading concert organists, Todd Wilson is head of the organ department at the Cleveland Institute of Music. He also teaches at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio, and serves as organ curator of the Norton Memorial Organ (E. M. Skinner, 1931) in Severance Hall, Cleveland, Ohio, the home of the Cleveland Orchestra. He has recently been appointed as Artist-in-Residence at Trinity Cathedral (Episcopal) in Cleveland, and as House Organist at Stan Hywet Hall and Gardens in Akron.
For nineteen years he was director of music and organist at the Church of the Covenant (Presbyterian) in Cleveland. From 1989 through 1993 he was also head of the organ department at Baldwin-Wallace College Conservatory of Music in Berea. Prior to these positions, he served as organist and master of the choristers at the Cathedral of the Incarnation in Garden City, New York. In New York, he taught on the faculties of Adelphi and Hofstra Universities and was organist of the George Mercer School of Theology.
Todd Wilson has been heard in concert throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan. In 1992 he was a recitalist for Austrian Radio in Vienna, and he has performed for the American Guild of Organists national conventions. He has recorded on the JAV, Delos, Disques du Solstice, and Gothic labels.
Todd Wilson has won numerous competitions, including the French Grand Prix de Chartres, the Fort Wayne Competition, the Strader National Scholarship Competition, and the national competition sponsored by the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles. A sought-after adjudicator, he has been a member of the jury for many of the world’s most prestigious competitions such as the Nuremberg Competition (Germany), the Calgary International Organ Festival and Competition, the St. Albans International Organ Festival (England), the Grand Prix de Chartres and the Toulouse Festival Competitions (France), and the American Guild of Organists National Young Artists Competition. Todd Wilson is represented by Karen McFarlane Artists, <www.concertorganists.com&gt;.
I met with Todd at the Church of the Covenant in Cleveland in May 2008 and at Trinity University, Deerfield, Illinois in April 2009.

Jerome Butera: Tell us about your childhood and early training. Where did you grow up? Did you come from a musical family?
Todd Wilson: I grew up in Toledo, Ohio. My father was an amateur musician—he played the French horn in his early years and always loved the horn. During the years I was growing up, he didn’t have the time to keep up his playing. Then, much later, ten years before he passed away, he went back to horn playing and enjoyed it greatly. My early musical recollections are LPs of Sousa marches and the Mozart horn concertos played by Dennis Brain. My dad played those all the time. To this day I still adore Sousa marches and all the standard horn repertoire.

JB: Did you start with piano lessons?
TW: Yes—my real start in music was at age nine or so. The church we attended was Trinity Episcopal in downtown Toledo, which had a wonderful Skinner organ and in those days a thriving men and boys choir. When I was in the fourth grade I was recruited for the choir. The choirmaster was a wonderful man named Wesley Hartung. He came to our house, we all sat down in the living room, and he said “I think Todd would be a good boy for the choir.” I was just transfixed by the whole thing—I loved the choir, the camaraderie, the singing, and the organ. This was quite a grand old Skinner organ that had many beautiful sounds and a thrilling 32-foot Bombard that shook the whole building.
You can imagine this 9-year-old drinking all this in. I went to Wesley Hartung and said “I want to play the organ.” I can still remember him looking down at me and saying “You shouldn’t even touch the organ until you’ve had many years of piano.” So I said “OK, let’s get going with the piano right away.” He was a wonderful teacher, a very strict old-school teacher, and you didn’t pass one piece until every “I” was dotted and every “T” crossed and you could play it perfectly from memory. Everything had to be just so. He started me off by setting the bar very high, and I’ve always been hugely grateful for that.

JB: Did you study organ with him also?
TW: No, unfortunately he passed away before I was able to start on the organ. I always kept up the piano, and to this day I still love playing the piano. The literature and the feel of the piano—it’s so good for the fingers. I continued piano study with Hugh Murray, who was the organist at Rosary Cathedral in Toledo, and started the organ in high school with a wonderful man also there in Toledo named James Francis, who was the organist at Collingwood Presbyterian. Collingwood Church has a Holtkamp, Sr. organ from about 1955 in the balcony—Rückpositiv on the railing, all exposed, so it was the opposite of the big Skinner organs that I had experienced at that time.
I can still remember walking in for that first lesson with Jim Francis when I was a freshman in high school. I remember the sound of the organ and the feel of it—I remember being struck by how different and how clear this organ was. That was another little turning point for me as an organist—my first exposure to a “modern organ,” as it were.

JB: What kind of teacher was he?
TW: He was a terrific teacher, very encouraging to me. He allowed me to play some things that were a little beyond what I should have been doing through high school, but at the same time that stoked my enthusiasm in a big way. I remember I did a recital my senior year in high school and really worked hard on it—that was the first full organ recital I played. Jim Francis was a wonderful man and fun—a very different personality than Wesley Hartung. He was younger with a vivid sense of humor.

JB: Were you playing at a church in high school?
TW: Yes, all through high school I always had little church jobs around Toledo, and Jim would set me up with substituting here and there. I remember a few jobs where an organist would be out for several months. Jim would get wind of it and recommend me.

JB: That’s great experience; you got to see a lot of different organs.
TW: Different organs, different services, different denominations, hymnals and all that. My senior year in high school I had a nice little Methodist church that was my first time being responsible for a choir week by week. I still keep in touch with a few people from that choir. There was a nice two-manual organ and the choir was right in front, and I got to do lots of standard choral literature, Palm Sunday cantata, all sorts of things like that. For a senior in high school to be in charge of planning, rehearsing, performing, publicizing—it was all a valuable and exciting experience.

JB: What led you to the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music?
TW: Jim Francis had studied there in the early ’50s with Wayne Fisher, with whom I went on to study.

JB: What kind of teacher was Wayne Fisher?
TW: He was a remarkable teacher. I was so lucky when I think back on it, to have stumbled on these fabulous teachers—my folks didn’t know much about organ teachers so they weren’t in a position to choose one who was better than the next, and I didn’t know enough—it was all just mostly dumb luck to follow on these people one right after the other. I always felt very fortunate about that. Jim Francis suggested I should go down to Cincinnati for a high school summer music institute. I went for two summers in high school, and Wayne Fisher and I hit it off right from the beginning.
He was a fabulous teacher. He was one of those bachelors whose students were his family, and it was a multi-generational family. He kept in touch with all the students from years before; there’d be parties and it was such fun. I would say that I worked very hard and played very hard in those college years. I practiced like mad and learned a lot of things then that are still at the core of my repertoire—because I learned them so well in those years and memorized them solidly.

JB: As a player, was Wayne Fisher flamboyant or scholarly?
TW: No, not scholarly, he was not of that scholarly generation. He grew up in the ’20s and the ’30s and studied with Dupré in France in the ’30s; his bachelor’s degree was in piano, and his master’s degree was in organ. So he had wonderful fingers, very live fingers I would say—he was that kind of player. His playing at its best was full of rhythm, full of vitality, full of color. He was a musician who loved the organ and played it very well, but his interest in music and I think his general approach to music was not that of an organist only. He had a huge record collection, and only a small bit of it was organ. He was a great fan of the piano literature and Rachmaninoff in particular. I remember Wayne Fisher telling me about traveling in the early ’30s to hear Rachmaninoff play a solo recital at Severance Hall in Cleveland.

JB: Todd, you’ve been in Cleveland for almost 20 years. Can you tell us a little bit about the positions you had before you came to Cleveland?
TW: I had always been much involved with and enthusiastic about the English cathedral repertoire and Anglican music in general. I really wanted to go to England and spend some time soaking up things day by day in an English cathedral. During my master’s degree preparation I thought more seriously about that, and several people helped me out, Gerre Hancock in particular.
I wrote letters to several English cathedral organists asking if I could come over and hang around. Nowadays that sort of thing is pretty common, but in those days there weren’t so many opportunities. I remember Jim Litton had done that early in his career and John Fenstermaker had as well. I talked to both of them and they suggested a few people to write to.
One of them was Allan Wicks at Canterbury Cathedral. Of the folks I wrote to, the first one who wrote back and said yes was Allan Wicks. So, after finishing my master’s degree, I spent about a year in Canterbury, playing some and accompanying some, watching the rehearsals day by day, and listening to every service the choir sang. I helped out in various ways and also had the chance to travel around England and Europe and hear the music in other collegiate chapels and cathedrals.
It was during that fall that I thought I should enter the Chartres Competition. I was feeling burned out from competitions because I had entered a lot of them in college, and I thought I’d do one more and really give it my best. So I worked hard that summer preparing. There were three rounds, and you had to play everything from memory, and it was a very demanding competition. I was very fortunate to win, and that enabled me to play some concerts around France—it was great fun. But I spent that year mostly in England, based at Canterbury, and it was a wonderful experience.
When I came back to the U.S., I took the job that my former teacher had had at Collingwood Presbyterian Church in Toledo for a year. I was able to do lots of things because I was full of youthful enthusiasm, and we did concerts and many ambitious programs that I never had the resources to do at a church before.
But I really wanted to be in an Anglican situation, so I was very happy a year or so later to get the job at the Cathedral of the Incarnation in Garden City, New York. That’s a cathedral with quite a long and interesting history—not a terribly large building, but very beautiful. I loved working with the men and boys choir. The years there were some of the happiest of my life. I still look back with the fondest memories and still keep in touch with some of the kids who were in the choir—those were very special times.

JB: Did you go from Garden City to Cleveland?
TW: Yes, after brief stays back in Cincinnati and in Paoli, Pennsylvania (outside Philadelphia). Our first child had been born in Garden City, but even in those days, of course, Long Island was a very expensive place to live, and we paid what seemed a fortune for a small one-bedroom apartment. We came back to Ohio where housing prices and the cost of living in general were much more modest and still are.

JB: In Cleveland you were able to combine Church of the Covenant and the Cleveland Institute of Music. Was that a joint appointment?
TW: There was the possibility of it. I started teaching at CIM the second year I was here. Karel Paukert who had taught at CIM was ready to give that up, and it was very nice that it worked out.

JB: And you were able to have some of your organ students as organ scholars at the church.
TW: We’ve had church music interns over the years at several churches here in Cleveland––Covenant being one of them—a terrific succession over 20 years of wonderful students, several of whom have gone on to fine careers of their own.

JB: Was the choir an all-professional group?
TW: No, it’s a mixed group, with usually ten paid singers. We often had some students who sing with us, but I tried to have section leaders who were not students to lend continuity over the years. We had some wonderful singers who stayed with us for a long time.

JB: How do you balance the demands of your church work, teaching schedule, recitals, recordings, and family—what’s your secret formula?
TW: As you well know, it’s never easy and it’s a constant juggling act. It’s very rare that I feel I’ve done a perfect job of it.

JB: What do you enjoy doing the most?
TW: I enjoy all of those things. As an “older” father with kids spanning quite a number of years, I love the time with each of them. It’s a challenge to do everything and feel like you’re doing your best all the time. Sometimes when you’re doing that many things you feel you’re stretching yourself a little thin. Often it’s good for us to be stretched; you realize it forces you to be economical with your time and make really good use of a limited number of hours.
I love the teaching, I love the church work; the balance of those two things over the years has been very rewarding. We’ve had some terrific students who have been such a joy, and the annual cycle of the church year has been very helpful, sort of an anchor in life. I love playing the Sunday service. No matter how scattered you may feel in other ways, having the chance to play great hymns on a wonderful organ with a really good choir—it keeps you grounded. So much inspiring choral literature comes up again and again; you think of all the wonderful Advent anthems, and you think “oh boy, it’s about to be Advent again,” and the same for every season. I’ve enjoyed all of that tremendously.

JB: When did you come under management?
TW: A long time ago—just before Karen McFarlane moved the agency to Cleveland, it must have been about 1982 or so. I was in Garden City. I remember quite vividly Karen called me and asked if we could have lunch, and we met at a little deli in New York. She invited me to be part of the management, which I accepted very gratefully, and have been happily a part of the management ever since.

JB: You’ve played recitals all throughout the United States, Europe and Japan, including some of the significant orchestra hall installations—Walt Disney Hall, the Meyerson, and here in Severance. Could you single out a few especially memorable recitals on fine organs?
TW: Well, there are so many organs that are really a delight in various ways. I always find that question a little hard to answer, because I usually forget to mention some organ. In recent years I certainly loved playing the Disney Hall organ because I was able to play with the L.A. Philharmonic—and I especially love playing with orchestra. I think for any of us those gigs are always infrequent, especially when you get to play with a top-level orchestra in a beautiful hall on a wonderful organ. It’s rare that all those things happen to come together. So that was a real treat. I played a number of years ago for the OHS national convention at Girard College in Philadelphia, and that was a big thrill. Just recently I have to say the new Fritts organ at St. Joseph’s Cathedral in Columbus is sensational—certainly one of the great organs I have played in this country or anywhere else.

JB: Tell us about your role as organ curator at Severance Hall and about the restoration.
TW: I wasn’t really a part of the restoration. They invited me to take this position as curator when the organ was done, and it’s a joy to be connected to such a fine organ in a beautiful hall, and with one of the world’s great orchestras.

JB: And you’ve done recordings here too, haven’t you?
TW: A couple of recordings. The Musical Arts Association of the Cleveland Orchestra asked me to do one of Christmas music, which I believe is still the only solo recording of that organ, and then a couple of years ago a CD with Michael Sachs, the principal trumpet player of the Cleveland Orchestra. We did a recital at Severance of organ and trumpet things and recorded that program.

JB: I’m looking over your discography, and there’s such a range. You’ve done the complete Duruflé works, a disc of Widor, Jongen, Langlais, Bonnet, Demessieux and Dupré, the complete Thalben-Ball, the complete Frank Bridge, a 2-CD set for Delos (In a Quiet Cathedral), Double Forte with David Higgs, and National Cathedral Live. You’ve mentioned the trumpet and organ CD here and you’ve done an organ and cello recording with your daughter Rachel. Tell us about that one.
TW: That was really fun to do, and we did it in your neighborhood at St. Luke’s in Evanston. Rachel is my oldest daughter, and she recently graduated from Ohio State University. She studied cello from about age five and is a very gifted cellist, really a beautiful player with a very fine ear. Her ear is certainly much better than mine. I remember when Rachel was nine or ten she’d hear a soloist in a choir, someone I’d think was singing magnificently, and she’d say “you know, that note was a little sharp.” It sounded fine to me, but that’s the kind of ear she has.

JB: The list of recordings represents, one would have to say, a very eclectic repertoire. Do you find yourself drawn to any particular period of music or any particular composer?
TW: I think as the years go by my interests in music and organ music are more and more eclectic. I’ve always enjoyed playing 19th and 20th century music, and I suspect that if I were going to name any area I might say that, but I certainly would not want to be limited only to that repertoire.

JB: You’ve had experience with Skinner organs and have played many Ernest Skinner and Aeolian-Skinner organs—do you have particular fondness for that type of organ?
TW: I enjoy them very much, and appreciate all the remarkable craftsmanship and the beautiful sounds, often very extraordinary sounds. But I enjoy playing lots of different organs, and as the years go by I am more and more persuaded of the great value of playing mechanical-action organs on a regular basis. So I wouldn’t want to limit myself to playing electric-action organs by Skinner or anyone else. Mechanical action makes you more aware of details that even with your best efforts you’re not sensitive to in electric-action instruments. You listen in a different way, your perception is much heightened, I think. I’ve certainly noticed that in teaching. I can see such a difference in students when they play regularly on a mechanical-action organ.

JB: Do you have any comments on the current organ scene—the renewed interest in Cavaillé-Coll, certainly in Skinner and Anglican-style organs, as well as the continued interest in historical building styles?
TW: It all seems to me very healthy. I remember so well growing up that there were very rigid camps: this was OK, and that was not OK, and there was very little sympathy or empathy between those various camps.
There’s not much of that anymore, and so many fabulous organs are being built in all these different styles, with a remarkable degree of quality and musicality. It’s all very good. It’s wonderful as players, as musicians in the broadest sense, to be able to play all these different kinds of organs with an appreciation for what it takes to play a particular type of organ really well. It makes us broader and more complete musicians. The organ profession is much livelier, I think.

JB: Do you have any observations on the general style of teaching and playing from your college days to where you are now?
TW: I think the teaching and the playing reflects that same thing. The standard, the versatility, and the knowledge required to be an adaptable organist nowadays are a great deal broader than they were 30 years ago, and that’s all to the good.

JB: Has your playing changed in the last 30 years?
TW: I hope so! It’s hard to be your own best judge, but one learns so much through teaching. It’s listening, it’s thinking how does this music work, what is it all about, how can I help this student to zero in on that. Of course, you deal with that in terms of your own playing as well, and I think the instruments are a great prod to better playing, better teaching, better listening with all these different styles. You travel around and play recitals and you’re going to play a wide variety of organs nowadays in all the styles that you mentioned.

JB: Now you’ve also done some silent film accompaniment. Tell us how you got involved in that.
TW: I’ve always enjoyed improvising, and the first year I was in Cincinnati was Gerre Hancock’s last year there before he went to St. Thomas in New York. Another influence for me was Jim Francis, my teacher in Toledo. When I went down to Cincinnati as a high school student, he said “Now you’ve got to visit Christ Church and hear Gerre Hancock play.”
I was so bowled over, I can still remember that first service I heard. It was the middle of the summer, nothing big going on, but his service playing was such a departure from anything I had heard before. I was smitten by it, and have been a huge admirer of Gerre’s ever since. We had him here at Covenant for a weekend a year ago. He worked with the choir and improvised and gave a talk at our AGO annual dinner. It was such a treat for me to have him work with the choir—we did a whole program of his music.
Hearing Gerre play really fired my interest in improvisation, and I’ve always kind of dabbled in it. I started doing the silent films at Covenant on our summer concert series. Sure enough a lot of people showed up, and one thing led to another. Every so often someone asks me to do a silent film.

JB: What music do you play for that?
TW: My repertoire of films is not very large, so I usually have some themes for each film and I do leitmotifs, a kind of quasi-Wagnerian approach. I have a little theme for each main character, drama themes, and love scene themes; but mostly I try to have some identifiable themes for the main characters and then fill in around that. And then it’s fun to put in little snippets of standard organ literature depending on the audience. If I’m playing for an AGO chapter, I try to put in dibs and dabs of famous organ pieces, just sneak enough in that they might guess what that is.

JB: You’ve referred to your cellist daughter Rachel; can you tell us more about your families?
TW: Anne and I had two children, Rachel and Clara; Clara just finished her sophomore year at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and is working on a pre-med track. She’s a fine pianist and loves to play. I’m married to a wonderful woman, Jenny Eppich, who is an urban planner, and we have two children: Ben who just turned nine, and a little daughter Ruth who is four.

JB: Are they musical children too?
TW: Ben has a very sweet voice, and I think he could be a fine member of a boys choir. He matches pitch well and also plays the trumpet. We did Britten’s St. Nicolas a while ago at Covenant, and Ben sang the boy Nicolas to great acclaim—that was a very special moment for me as his proud papa, as you can imagine.

JB: You’ve had an interesting year. Tell me about the time at Indiana University.
TW: It’s been an interesting and challenging year! I taught at CIM one day per week, and continued as curator of the organ in Severance Hall, while commuting to Bloomington and teaching there for three or four days each week. I enjoyed teaching at IU, but ultimately we were not able to move to Bloomington on a permanent basis. I sure became a fan of books on tape during those long drives back and forth!

JB: What are some of your goals now in Cleveland?
TW: I look forward to the continued evolution of the CIM organ department. We have a wonderful new president of the school, and it really is the start of a new era there. We’ve been fortunate to have terrific students, and I enjoy working with them as performers and church musicians. It’s an ongoing pleasure to look after the organ at Severance Hall, certainly one of the most beautiful concert halls in the world. I’m thrilled to be part of the music program at Trinity Cathedral! It’s a beautiful building with two Flentrop organs, a very lively and diverse congregation, and a superb new musician in Dr. Horst Buchholz. Another fun new project will be to create a concert series and other uses for the newly restored Aeolian organ at Stan Hywet Hall in Akron. Stan Hywet is the amazing Tudor Revival-style home built by F. A. Seiberling, the co-founder of the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company. The house organ is located in a spacious and remarkably beautiful music room.

JB: Do you have any recording projects on the horizon?
TW: I’m making a recording on the new Fritts organ at St. Joseph’s Cathedral in Columbus, Ohio. It’s a sensational organ, pretty eclectic, really more so than Fritts’s earlier work—very successful and very exciting. You can play quite early music, Renaissance and pre-Bach, and everything right down to the present day. It’s a very large and complete 3-manual organ in a superb acoustic. We’ve already recorded the music for organ, cello, and English horn, and I’ll record the solo pieces in the next few months.

JB: What’s on the recording?
TW: The Reubke Sonata, which people have been after me to record for a very long time. It’s been one of the cornerstone pieces of my repertoire since college days. So often people ask after recitals if I’ve ever recorded it, and I never have. When I played that organ in Columbus I thought it would sound fabulous there. So, the Reubke, some Widor, a piece for organ and cello by Craig Phillips, and Calvin Hampton’s Variations on Amazing Grace for organ and English horn, which is a piece I’ve always been very fond of and I don’t believe there’s any commercial recording available. This will be on the Delos label.

JB: Any humorous experiences you would care to share?
TW: I don’t have the best memory for funny events, except when they happen to float to the surface prodded by something else. I was recently reminded of one quite funny story, which is funnier now that I look back on it some years later.
This would have been ten or twelve years ago when we got a new console at Covenant, a movable console that’s been such a joy to play, built by the Holtkamp company. The organ is essentially an Aeolian-Skinner. In the mid-90s Holtkamp provided a console and made a few tonal additions as well. We had a dedication service for new console, with fancy music and blessings. Tom Trenney was my student assistant at the time, and we both played lots of stuff.
There is a big hooded trumpet in the rear balcony that’s by far the loudest stop on the organ—a wonderful stop, and it plays from the gallery Swell. One of our frequent habits was to put that on with the Unison Off so we could have it available when we wanted it, but it wouldn’t play through the normal Swell to Great coupler. Unbeknownst to us, there was a little electronic bug in the console, and all the gallery Swell played through the front Swell coupler—so when we had that big trumpet ready it turned out to be playing all the time. The console is positioned around the corner and we really couldn’t hear all that well. So, I think we played nearly every verse of every hymn with that great big Chamade trumpet on without knowing it—which would have been deafening in the congregation and most atypical certainly. The grande dame of the congregation said after the service that the organ now had “that Holtkamp edge.” Chick Holtkamp and Karen and everybody laughed greatly afterward.

JB: What are some of your non-musical interests?
TW: I treasure time with my family, as the years seem to pass ever more quickly. We all especially look forward to our annual summer get-away to Wellfleet, Cape Cod. Jenny and I love bike riding and gardening together. I’m an avid reader, particularly of anything historical. Sports-wise, I am a lifelong baseball fan, and also enjoy golf, even though my golf game has gone mostly downhill since I was in high school. Pie baking has become my cooking specialty, and I hope to find time to broaden my cooking repertoire in the years to come.

JB: Todd, thank you for the interview. We wish you continued success and will follow your career with great interest.

Photos of cats

Read recently on Facebook:

“We each have in our hands an instrument with nearly limitless computing power that gives me instant access to worlds of information, and we use it to publish photos of cats.”

My iPhone is sitting on my desk. It’s seldom more than a few feet away from me. It’s my link to the world. I get nervous when the battery is low. Imagine how awful it would be if the phone went dead while I was on the subway in the middle of a game of solitaire. I’d have to sit there and stare at a carload
of nutcases.

The iPhone (or any so-called “smart phone”) is a fantastic tool. It enables me to stay in touch with co-workers and clients when on the road. The ability to take a photo and send it away instantly is a fantastic aid when sorting out mechanical issues at projects. Need to send the specs of a blower motor to a repair shop? Take a photo of the engraved plate. Poof. I can make and change airplane, train, and hotel reservations. I keep my calendar and contacts organized. I can access bank accounts to transfer funds and pay bills. I can create and send invoices for service calls as I leave the church. You’d think that such a gizmo would have nothing but positive effects.

But there’s a hitch. They’ve turned us into a race of navel gazers. On any street corner you’ll see people standing still, staring into their phones. People stop suddenly while walking to go into their phones. The other day on the street, I was hit in the shoulder by a woman who was gesticulating while arguing with someone on the phone. And another tidbit from Facebook—a friend posted a photo of a woman dressed in yoga togs on the down escalator from New York’s Columbus Circle to the Whole Foods store, balancing a huge stroller laden with toddler with one hand, the other hand holding the phone to her ear. Sounds like child neglect and endangerment to me.

People talk on the phone at restaurant tables with friends, they talk on the phone at the cashier in a grocery store, they talk on the phone in the middle of a business meeting. Do those phones help us get more done, or do they keep us from getting anything done?

And worse, if we let them, our phones will affect the flow of human thought in generations to come. I did perfectly well without a smart phone until I was in my forties, but my kids have pretty much grown up with them. And our grandson Ben, at eighteen months old, is adept at managing touch screens—giggling as he swipes to change photos, touching icons, all the while staring intently at the thing. Thank goodness his parents read to him, and I hope he grows up learning conversational skills that seem to be eroding today. 

Innovation

The last century has been one of innovation. Many of the most important developments have come with significant downsides. The automobile has given us unlimited mobility, but it has torn up the landscape and poisoned the skies. The technological revolution has given us connectivity that we could not have imagined a generation ago, but it has compromised good old-fashioned face-to-face human contact. Image a guy breaking up with his girlfriend by text message. It happened in our family! Suck it up and face the woman, bucko.

Also, mass production and mass marketing has led to homogeneity. People in Boston and Tucson buy the same candlesticks at Crate and Barrel, as if there were no cultural differences between those regions.

These concepts apply to our world of pipe organs. In that world, the second half of the twentieth century was dominated by a debate about innovation. We argued in favor of the imagined purity of historic instruments and wondered exactly how they sounded when played by the artists of their day, or we argued in favor of the convenience of registration devices, the effect of expression enclosures, and the flexibity of organ placement made possible by electric actions. Both sides made cases about how unmusical were the instruments favored by the other camp. 

The result of the decades-long debate is generally a positive one. It’s true that many wonderful historic organs, especially early twentieth-century electro-pneumatic organs, were displaced and discarded by new tracker organs. But after all, that trend was a simple repeat of one sixty years earlier, when hundreds of grand nineteenth-century instruments were discarded in favor of the newfangled electro-pneumatic organs in the beginning of the twentieth century. 

Described in terms of the history of organbuilding in Boston, we threw out Hook organs in the 1910s and 1920s to install Skinners, and we threw out Skinners in the 1960s and 1970s to install Fisks and Noacks. What goes around, comes around.

Homogeneity

Until sometime in the second half of the twentieth century, each organbuilder’s work was unique. Any serious organist, blindfolded, could tell the difference between a Skinner console and an Austin console. The profile of the keycheeks, the weight and balance of the keyboards, the layout of the stop controls, the sound of the combination action, and the feel of the pedalboard were all separate and distinct.

I had a fascinating conversation with a colleague one night in a bar, during which we discussed the evolution in organbuilding toward homogeneity. Supply houses have become increasingly important to us, which means, for example, that our consoles have that “Crate and Barrel” syndrome. For example, there’s one brand of electric drawknob motors widely favored in the industry. They work beautifully and reliably, and they’re easy to install. So many firms building both electric and mechanical action organs use them on their consoles. They’re great, but they smudge the distinguishing lines between organbuilders.

There are several firms that supply keyboards to organbuilders. There is a hierarchy of quality, and builders can make choices about which organs should have what keyboards. If you’re renovating the console of an indistinct fifty-year-old organ, it doesn’t make much sense to install fancy keyboards at ten-thousand a pop, when a thousand-dollar keyboard will work perfectly well. But when comparing organs of high quality, we notice when different builders are using keyboards from the same sources. Again, the lines are smudged.

But here’s the thing. If a basic component of an organ is developed at high quality and reasonable cost by a specialist, the organbuilder can cross that off his list knowing that it will function perfectly and reliably, freeing him to put his effort into another part of the instrument. Ideally then, each hour saved by the purchase of ready-made parts can be put into voicing and tuning.

Ernest Skinner put lots of time and resources into the development of his famous Whiffle Tree expression motor. Today, there are three or four suppliers who manufacture electric expression motors with digital control systems. They use the motors developed for wheelchairs, and the controls allow the organbuilder to program the speed and distance of each stage. When shutters are opening, it’s great when the first step can be a tiny one, with the subsequent stages getting larger and larger. And even Mr. Skinner knew that it was an advantage when closing the shutters, for the last stage to be slower than the others to keep the shutters from slamming. He did it by making the exhaust valve smaller in the last stage so the power pneumatic wouldn’t work as fast. We do it by programming a slower speed.

When organbuilders get together, you hear chat about who uses which drawknobs, which expression motors, which solid-state relays and combination actions. We compare experiences about the performance of the machines, and the customer support of the companies that sell them.

Human resources

A fundamental difference between today’s organbuilding companies and those of a century ago is the size of the firms. Skinner, Möller, Kimball, Hook & Hastings, and others each employed hundreds of workers. The American church was powerful, and as congregations grew, new buildings were commissioned by the thousands. There were decades during which American organbuilders produced more than two thousand organs each year. And because the market was so strong, the price points were relatively higher than they were today. So when Mr. Skinner had a new idea, he could put a team of men on it for research
and development. 

Today there are a couple firms with more than fifty employees, but most organ companies have fewer than ten. A shop with twenty people in it is a big deal. In part, this is the result of the ethic of hand-craftsmanship championed during the twentieth-century revival. “Factory-built” organs had a negative stigma that implied that the quality of the artistic content was lower in such an instrument. And there can be little argument that in the mid-twentieth century, thousands of ordinary little work-horse organs were produced.

But the other factor driving the diminishing size and number of independent companies is the decline of the church. Congregations are merging and closing, and other parishes are finding new contemporary forms of musical expression. Electronic instruments now dominate the market of smaller churches. And it’s common to see congregations of fifty or sixty worshipping in sanctuaries that could seat many hundreds. Century-old coal-fired furnaces equipped with after-market oil burners gulp fuel by the truckload. And an organ that would have cost $50,000 in 1925 now costs $1,500,000. That’s a lot of zucchini bread at the bake sale.

I think these are compelling reasons in favor of the common use of basic components provided by central suppliers. Ours is a complicated field, and it’s unusual for a small group of people to combine every skill at the highest level. When I talk with someone who has done nothing but make organ pipes all his life, I marvel at his depth of understanding, the beauty of his drawn solder seams, and his innate sense of π, that mathematical magic that defines circles. He can look at a rectangle of metal and visualize the diameter of the tube it will make when rolled and soldered. The organ will turn out better if he doesn’t also have to make drawknobs.

The comfort of commonality

When Wendy and I travel for fun, we sometimes stay in quaint bed & breakfast inns, enjoying their unique qualities, and chuckling about the quirks and foibles of the innkeepers. But when I’m traveling for business, trying to maximize each day on the road, I prefer to stay in brand-name places. I want to check in, open my luggage, and know that the plumbing, the television, the WiFi, and the heating and air-conditioning will work properly. I want to find a functioning ice machine, and I expect a certain level of cleanliness. Besides, I like amassing rewards points.

Likewise, I’ve come to understand that traveling organists benefit from finding the same few brands of console equipment wherever they go. If you’re on a concert tour, taking a program of demanding music from church to church, you get a big head start when you come upon an organ with a solid-state combination system you’re familiar with. 

Peter Conte, Grand Court Organist of the Wanamaker Store in Philadelphia, played the dedicatory recital on the Casavant we installed at Church of the Resurrection in New York, and I took him to the church to introduce him to the organ. Seconds after he sat on the bench, he was delving through the depths of the menus of the Peterson combination system, setting things the way he wanted them. He knew much more than I about the capabilities and programmability of the organ.

Recently I was talking with a colleague who was telling me about the installation of a new console for the organ he has been playing for nearly forty years. He told me how he had to relearn the entire organ because while it had much the same tonal resources as before, he was able to access them in a completely new way. It was a succinct reminder of how sophisticated these systems have become, and how they broaden the possibilities for the imaginative organist.

So it turns out that for many, the homogeneity of finding the same combination systems on multiple organs allows organists a level of familiarity with how things work. It takes less time to prepare complex registrations, which is ultimately to the benefit and delight of the listener.

The top of the world

Many of us were privileged to hear Stephen Tharp play the massive and magical Aeolian-Skinner organ of The First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church) in Boston as the closing event of this year’s national convention of the American Guild of Organists. The majestic building was crammed with thousands of organists and enthusiasts. I suppose it’s the most important regularly recurring concert of the American pipe organ scene. And what a night it was. The apex, the apogee, the zenith —the best part—was his performance of his transcription of Igor Stravinski’s Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring). It’s a wildly complex score, but luckily, Stephen is a complex and wild performer! He didn’t play as though it were a transcription, he played as though it were an orchestra. He made 243 registration changes in the course of about thirty-three minutes. That’s roughly 7.4 changes a minute, which means thumping a piston every 8.1 seconds. Try that with two stop-pullers on a big tracker-action organ! For that matter, try that on a fancy electric console with all the bells and whistles. If there ever was an example of how a modern organist is liberated by the possibility of setting thousands of combinations for a single concert, we heard it that night.

Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty…

Last May, Daniel Roth, organist at the legendary church of St. Sulpice in Paris, played a recital on our Casavant organ in New York. Besides the thrill of hearing such a great artist play our instrument, a very deep part of that experience for me was a conversation with Mr. Roth about his research into the life and work of his predecessor, Charles-Marie Widor. It’s a lovely and oft-repeated bit of pipe organ trivia that Widor was appointed as temporary organist there in 1870, and retired in 1937 having never been given a permanent appointment. I don’t know when the first electric organ blower was installed there, but let’s assume it was sometime around 1900, thirty years into his tenure.

There are 1,560 Sundays in thirty years. So Widor played that organ for thousands of Masses, hundreds of recitals, and countless hours of practice and composition while relying on people to pump the organ’s bellows. I’ve seen many photographs of the august Widor, and I don’t think he shows a glimmer of a smile in any of them. He must have been a pretty serious dude. But I bet he smiled like a Cheshire Cat the first time he turned on that blower and sat down for an evening of practice by himself. ν

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

The upper class
I’m thinking about virtuosity these days. Last Tuesday, October 10, the New York Times published a tribute to Joan Sutherland following her death on the 8th. That day (noted as 10-10-10) happened to be my mother’s birthday and I enjoyed the coincidence as I remembered a family episode from the late 1960s. My parents are great music lovers and the instrument of choice when I was a young teenager was the then cutting-edge KLH stereo with amplifier and turntable in one sleek little unit and separate speakers. It seemed super-modern in those days of the console hi-fi built in the shape of a credenza. My father, an Episcopal priest, had a routine of closing himself into the living room on Saturday nights with a little analog typewriter on a card table and writing his sermon to the Saturday night live broadcasts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra hosted by Richard L. Kaye on WCRB, 102.5 FM.

Joan
My mother was devoted to recordings by Joan Sutherland as confirmed by the Winchester, Massachusetts police department. When our house was burglarized, mother was asked over the phone if she could identify the stereo. Not being much of techno-wiz, all she could say was she knew there was a Joan Sutherland record on the turntable. Good enough to reclaim the prized machine.
The piece in Tuesday’s Times, written by the paper’s long-time astute and influential music critic Anthony Tommasini, shared story after story of triumphant debuts, thunderous ovations, immense technical facility, monumental stage presence (in every sense of the word), and a flexibility of stylistic intuition and pure ability that allowed this one artist to be revered as perhaps the greatest living interpreter and presenter of the operatic roles of Handel and Wagner—two musical worlds that are afterworlds apart.
Miss Sutherland was also humbly self-deprecating, referring to her figure in her autobiography as flat in the bust but wide in the rib cage. Tommasini quoted her as saying that certain dresses “could make her look like ‘a large column walking about the stage.’”

The supremacy of youth
I had a brief personal contact with her. When I was an undergraduate organ major at Oberlin, I was, naturally enough, accompanist to a gaggle of singers. Joan Sutherland was to give a recital in Akron, about two hours away, and I rented a car from the college fleet to haul a bunch to hear her. We had terrific seats very close to the stage so my youthfully discerning and supremely knowledgeable companions could witness every tic. I don’t remember what she sang or who was the accompanist, but I sure do remember that, inspired by a couple little bubbles we heard in the Diva’s voice, one of my flock greeted her in the receiving line asking if she had a cold.
Another lovely moment with virtuosi in my Oberlin career was the morning after the long-awaited artist recital when Itzhak Perlman sat in the student lounge chatting with the students. A lot of classes were cut that morning. I’ll not forget his bright smile and twinkling eyes as he casually shared thoughts about music-making while drinking vending-machine coffee.

Re-creation as recreation
Vladimir Horowitz was one of the greatest virtuosi of the twentieth century, and while I never had an opportunity to hear him in live performance, I’ve seen and heard plenty on television and recordings. He was inspiring to watch. His posture had his face close to the keyboard and his hands were pure magic and mystery. The piano was made a chameleon with a range of tones as great as any hundred-knob organ. Of virtuosity, Mr. Horowitz wrote,

In order to become a truly re-creative performer, and not merely an instrumental wizard, one needs three ingredients in equal measure: a trained, disciplined mind, full of imagination; a free and giving heart; and a Gradus ad Parnassum command of instrumental skill. Few musicians ever reach artistic heights with these three ingredients evenly balanced. This is what I have been striving for all my life.

I love the use of the word re-creative, implying that once the music is created by the composer, the performer with free and giving heart can re-create the music. Earlier in the same quotation, Horowitz writes,

Classical, Romantic, Modern, Neo-Romantic! These labels may be convenient for musicologists, but they have nothing to do with composing or performing… All music is the expression of feelings, and feelings do not change over the centuries… Purists would have us believe that music from the so-called Classical period should be performed with emotional restraint, while so-called Romantic music should be played with emotional freedom. Such advice has often resulted in exaggeration: overindulgent, uncontrolled performances of Romantic music, and dry, sterile, dull performance of Classical music.
The notation of a composer is a mere skeleton that the performer must endow with flesh and blood, so that the music comes to life and speaks to an audience. The belief that going back to an Urtext will ensure a convincing performance is an illusion. An audience does not respond to intellectual concepts, only to the communication of feelings.
He speaks directly to the conundrum inspired by concepts like Historically Informed Performance. It’s essential to play music with deep knowledge of the practices of the times in which it was created, but never at the expense of the “communication of feelings”—the imparting of depth and delight to the listener. To any listener.

Biggsy
As a teenager growing up in the Boston area, I had quite a few opportunities to hear E. Power Biggs play recitals, especially on the beautiful Flentrop organ that he had installed in the hall formerly known as the Busch-Reisinger Museum (now called Busch Hall), a reverberant stone space on the campus of Harvard University. That organ was perhaps best know then (and still is today?) for the series of recordings, E. Power Biggs Plays Bach Organ Favorites, a fabulously successful series of recordings that gave both organ aficionados and professionals a new perspective on the music of Bach. I never questioned it then, and the group of organists I traveled with didn’t talk much about Virgil Fox except as some decadent music killer. Of course, now I realize that those two artists represented two wildly divergent points of view, both valid and both influential.
In his book Pulling Out All the Stops, Craig Whitney, former senior editor of the New York Times, presented an eloquent history of the relationship-feud-competition between Biggs and Fox. It continues telling the story of the twentieth-century American pipe organ by chronicling the lives and careers of Ernest Skinner, G. Donald Harrison, and Charles Fisk—a great read that still makes a terrific Christmas gift for anyone you know who’s interested in the organ.
In the fall of my freshman year at Oberlin, the new Flentrop organ in Warner Concert Hall was dedicated with a recital played by Marie-Claire Alain. A galaxy of stars of the organ world were there for an exciting weekend of discussions, lectures, and concerts, and I was fortunate to be chosen with a classmate to give Biggs and his wife Peggy a tour of the conservatory building and its organs. It was thrilling to spend that time with them, and while Biggs’s arthritis meant he was not up to playing, he had us demonstrate practice organs for him. We ended the evening sharing beers.
My girlfriend at the time was still in high school in Winchester. She didn’t believe my story, so went to meet Biggs at a record signing at the Harvard Coop, and Biggs corroborated for me: “Oh yes, he was the bearded one.” (I’ve had the beard since high school—it’s never been off.)

Yo-Yo
In the panoply of living virtuosi, perhaps none is more esteemed and admired than Yo-Yo Ma. He took the world by storm as a very young man, playing all the important literature the world across. The rich tone he produces from the instruments he plays warms the heart and feeds the soul, and his mature collaborations with other musicians have proven his versatility and inquisitiveness. And I’ll not soon forget his self-deprecation made public in his appearance on Sesame Street. The cool-dude, dark-shades, saxophone-playing Muppet, Hoots the Owl, greeted the great musician, “Yo, Yo-Yo Ma, ma man!” Wonderful.
A few minutes ago I took you to Winchester, Massachusetts, where my father was rector of the Parish of the Epiphany, a thriving and dynamic place with a wonderful music program and an organ built by C.B. Fisk. It happened that Yo-Yo Ma and his family lived in town. His wife was a Sunday School teacher and his children were part of the place. He asked my father for an appointment at which he asked if he would be allowed to play in the church on Christmas Eve. Dad responded showing the respect for church musicians that has so inspired me, “You’ll need to speak with Larry, the organist. Planning music here is his responsibility.” Larry Berry did not have to consider for very long.
Dad remembers that as he and the other clergy were robing for that special Christmas Eve service, a couple obviously unfamiliar with the familiar knocked on the obscure back door that opened into the clergy robing room. “Is this where the concert is?” asked the boor. One of the clergy replied, “Actually, we’re celebrating a birth here tonight.”
Yo-Yo Ma also appeared a couple times to play for the children’s Sunday morning chapel service, to the amazement and excitement of the Sunday School teachers. I was not present for any of those experiences, but I’m still touched by the humility that would lead such a great artist to make such a gift.

Jimmy
Wendy and I have seats at Symphony Hall for the “Thursday A” series of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. James Levine has been music director of that great band since the retirement of the organ-deploring Seiji Ozawa, and we’ve been treated to some of the most extraordinary music making since “Jimmy” came to town. His programming is innovative and imaginative, and his rapport with the orchestra is obvious and thrilling. Our seats are in a balcony above stage right, so every time he turns to the concertmaster we feel we can hear everything he says—he’s talking and singing all the time as he conducts. His consummate musicianship is communicated with the musicians of the orchestra, and through them to the audience. There’s something very special about the sound of Levine’s music. Mr. Levine is well known for the admiration his collaborators feel for him, made abundantly clear in the up-close interviews of Metropolitan Opera stars during the HD-simulcasts of the Met’s performances.
A pure example of Levine’s facility happened on Saturday, October 9. That afternoon at 1:00 he led the Met’s performance of Wagner’s Das Rheingold and flew to Boston in time to lead the BSO and Tanglewood Festival Chorus in Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony at 8:00. Holy cow! And this from a man who missed much of last season because of serious illness. Hey Jimmy, what do you want to do tomorrow?

There’s nothing to it
The thing about virtuosity is that it takes infinite effort to make it look easy. And when it can look easy it sounds good. A student musician might tackle a great masterwork and exult that he “got through it” when the performance was finally over. “Getting through it” is not the apex of the musical or artistic experience.
I think it’s correct to say that a virtuoso is born. Unless one is endowed with particular gifts, one cannot become a virtuoso. But he who is born with those gifts and doesn’t embrace them by dedicating his life to nurturing and developing them squanders what he has been given. The musician who plays scales and arpeggios by the hour achieves the appearance of effortlessness. The musician whose power of thought, concentration, and memory allows him to absorb and recall countless dizzying scores achieves the ability to knock off performances of multiple masterworks in a single day. Have you ever stopped to wonder at the spectacle of the great performer having to “cancel due to illness,” only to be replaced at the last minute by an artist who dashes across the country, roars from the airport to the concert hall, combs his hair, washes his hands, and walks on stage to play a concerto with a strange conductor, a strange orchestra, and a strange piano? There’s nothing to it.

§

I feel privileged that my work brings me in contact with some of our greatest instruments and therefore, some of our greatest players. These thoughts on virtuosity are fed by the many thrilling moments I’ve had chatting with a great player at the console of a legendary organ. He draws a stop or pushes a piston and rattles off a passage, tries it on another combination, tries it with different phrasing or inflection. His conversation reveals that he is always thinking, always questioning, always searching for the actual essence of the music. There’s a depth of understanding of the relationship between the instrument and the acoustics of the room, between the intentions of the composer of the will of the re-creative performer.
Wendy and I have just gotten back to our sublet apartment in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. This afternoon we heard Ken Cowan play the dedicatory recital of the large new Schoenstein organ at St. James’ Episcopal Church on Madison Avenue at 71st Street. There was a large-screen video monitor set up on the chancel steps showing Ken’s work at the console with three different angles. There’s a great debate about whether or not this detracts from the experience. I love it. The organ is alone in its concealment of its players. Excepting the relatively few concert venues where the console is placed on the stage, most organists are completely hidden from view when they play. The extreme is the organ with Rückpositiv in a rear gallery. (I remember one concert where the organist was sitting on the bench before the doors were opened and announced he was about to start by playing a simple chord on a Principal. The audience never even laid eyes on him before he started. I can understand the desire to allow the music to speak for itself, but isn’t the performance of music a human endeavor and a human achievement?)
It’s great fun to watch an artist like Ken work the console, and seeing it on a clear screen adds greatly to the experience in my opinion. And of course, if you don’t like it, you don’t have to watch! The orchestration of Ken’s playing is the point. And of course, the Schoenstein organ is symphonic in design and intention—a great marriage between artist and instrument. It was a wonderful concert—fascinating programming and great artistry in a beautiful church building.

§

This little string of remembrances, inspired by Joan Sutherland’s obituary, seems to be about the humanness of music-making. Some great musicians are haughty and unapproachable. I was once eating in a restaurant at the same time (not the same table) as Lorin Maazel, then conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. He stood out because he stood up—when the waiter was ready to take his order he stood and announced the orders of everyone in his party. I don’t know if they knew beforehand what they would be eating. It seemed to me to be the performance of “a very great man.” I doubt he would have graced the Sunday School class of a suburban Episcopal church.
When a great virtuoso connects with the audience as a human being everyone learns a lot. As Horowitz said, it’s about communicating feelings. ■