Teaching in 1909
This month, as part of the commemoration of the one-hundredth anniversary of The Diapason, I will take a break from trying to teach about teaching, directly, and instead write a little bit about the state of organ teaching in 1909, the history of teaching, and the role of teaching in shaping history, especially personal history. Since one column cannot possibly accommodate a comprehensive history of these matters, I will not even attempt to be comprehensive. Rather, I will give a few glimpses into organ teaching in the early twentieth century, with a mention of some teachers and institutions, and of some ideas that were current at that time. I will also discuss some of what that year or that era held in store for the future, and I will talk about connections: the kind of connections between people of different times and places that the whole phenomenon of teaching can create.
Incidentally, I should mention that some of the information I have found for this column comes from early issues of The Diapason. As you can see from the reprinted first issue, the magazine was mostly concerned, in the beginning, with the instrument as such and with builders and building. However, with each passing issue, there were more and more articles or brief mentions of matters concerning schools and teaching.
This column centers almost entirely on the United States, since that is where The Diapason is based. Many of the connections that I will mention are to Europe, which is not surprising, since that is where the organ was born and where the repertoire originated. It should not be assumed, however, that no interesting things were going on with organs and organ teaching elsewhere in the world. For example, newspapers from the early twentieth century in both New Zealand and Australia have many classified ads for organ-teaching studios.
The rise of conservatories
It was the mid-nineteenth century that saw the beginnings of professional conservatory-based music education in the United States. The first such school was Oberlin, founded in 1865. Other schools followed, such as the New England Conservatory in 1867 and the Yale School of Music in 1894. Of course, various musical subjects had been taught at universities and colleges for many decades before the establishment of these institutions.
In 1899, the Guilmant Organ School was founded in New York City, using the facilities of the First Presbyterian Church on Fifth Avenue, in particular its new Roosevelt organ. The founder of the school was William C. Carl, the organist at First Presbyterian, and—as the name of his school rather strongly suggests—a former student and great admirer of Alexandre Guilmant. He was also a friend of Guilmant, and was in part responsible for bringing him to the United States for several concert tours. Guilmant gave his permission to use his name for the new school, and the premise of the school was indeed that it would follow Guilmant’s approach to organ teaching.
This institution was celebrated as the first school in the country to focus specifically on the organ. It highlights several themes or trends in the world of organ teaching. The first of these was just a general trend towards identifying teaching organized through and carried out in institutions as being more important or in some way more valid than teaching conducted in other settings. Of course, this trend also manifested itself in the founding of the music schools mentioned above. The Guilmant School was the first in the United States to focus this notion on organ playing specifically.
(This trend is a long-term one. After all, we don’t expect to hear that Bach or Titelouze or Frescobaldi or Balbastre went to university. Mendelssohn did, but his principal musical studies were with Zelter and Moscheles, well before he enrolled at the University of Berlin. Nowadays we assume that most virtuoso performers, composers, and teachers will hold graduate degrees in their specialties.)
European leadership and influence
The second trend exemplified by the Guilmant School was looking to Europe for musical instruction. In the late nineteenth century and even more so in the twentieth century, many aspiring American organists went to the great teachers of Europe for their most advanced training. William C. Carl was a part of this story. His founding of the Guilmant School was intended explicitly to bring European training to the United States.
(Around this time The Diapason reported first that Palmer Christian, having earlier studied with Karl Straube, was about to go to France to study organ with Widor, and then later that he had returned from studying organ in France with Guilmant. It sounds like Mr. Christian had hoped to study with Widor, but discovered only when he got there that Widor at this point taught composition, not organ! Palmer Christian later worked in church music in Chicago and taught at the University of Michigan.)
And, more specifically, the Guilmant School points to the large influence that French organ teaching came to have in the United States in the twentieth century. Untold numbers of American organists studied with Guilmant, Widor, Vierne, Bonnet (who taught in the United States for a couple of years shortly after the time we are primarily concerned with here), Duruflé, Langlais, and, especially, Marcel Dupré. Both the Widor/Schweitzer edition and the Dupré edition of the organ music of Bach were standard in the United States for most of the twentieth century. These editions both include performance suggestions in the French tradition, the Dupré including those suggestions in the text of the music itself, the Widor/Schweitzer in the extensive prefatory material. Some of the organ methods that were prominent in American organ teaching during the twentieth century were firmly rooted in the French organ playing and teaching tradition. The most prominent of those was the famous Gleason Method. Harold Gleason studied with Bonnet in Paris, and then invited Bonnet to found the organ department at the Eastman School in 1922.
Of course, in twentieth-century United States other organ teachers and other organ schools also played a major role. Helmut Walcha, Günther Ramin, Finn Viderø, Michael Schneider, Harald Vogel, and others have drawn students from the United States, and in some cases done some teaching in the United States. Alec Wyton from England and Wolfgang Rübsam from Germany, among others, have lived and taught extensively in the States. However, the French influence was probably the most enduring, and the years that we are examining were crucial in the development of that influence.
Organ study at U.S. universities
At about this same time, organ programs at American universities were growing. At the New England Conservatory there were, in 1909, three organ professors: Henry M. Dunham, who had studied with John Knowles Paine; Wallace Goodrich, who had studied with Rheinberger and Widor in Europe; and Homer C. Humphries.
Yale University had appointed Harry Benjamin Jepson as its first university organist in 1896. He ended up serving for about forty years, and was succeeded by Luther Noss, Frank Bozyan, Charles Krigbaum, and Thomas Murray. In 1909, the other organ teacher at Yale was Seth Bingham, who had studied with both Guilmant and Widor, as well as with Vincent D’Indy, and who is probably best known as a composer. The Woolsey Hall organ at Yale had been built in 1901.
The President’s Report of Yale University for the 1908–09 school year states that twenty-nine students were taking organ lessons out of a total of 126 students taking “applied music” at the university. This was third in number behind students studying piano and those studying voice. Of course these were not all organ (or even music) majors.
(Here I will mention a small personal connection. Yale awarded an organ-playing prize in 1911 to Pauline Voorhees, for a performance of Mendelssohn and Vierne in Woolsey Hall. Later, she was organist at United Church on the Green in New Haven. The organ installed in that church in the mid-1960s was named in her honor. This was the first organ that I ever played, and the organ on which I took my first organ lessons.)
In 1909, the organ teacher at Oberlin was George W. Andrews, who was also a founder of the AGO. At Cornell, the teacher was Edward Johnson, and at Peabody, Harold D. Phillips of England, who had studied with C. Hubert H. Parry, among others.
In most of these schools, and others, there were, in 1909, active organ recital series. These always included regular student performances. They also typically featured recitals by (of course) the school’s own organ faculty and recitals by faculty from other universities.
Organs in high schools
At the same time, the years around 1909 were marked by a growing interest in organ on the part of high schools. The Diapason reported on the project to acquire an organ for Trenton, New Jersey in the following terms:
Trenton, NJ, is about to have its high school organ. This valuable addition to the equipment . . . is expected to serve as an example to many other high schools in the country and perhaps will lead to a partial cure for the lack of musical training which marks general education in the United States.
The article goes on to quote the principal of the high school, William Wetzel, as saying that
our purpose in securing this organ is to develop a taste for music . . . We have many foreigners in our city who . . . lament the fact that there is not in this country the same opportunity for hearing good music as in their home country . . . I should add that the money for this organ was raised entirely by the pupils themselves.
The principal also mentioned that the organ would have “the automatic player attachment.”
At about this same time, The Diapason reported on organ acquisition projects at Boy’s Central in Philadelphia, and at the high schools in Paterson, New Jersey; Oak Park, Illinois; and Auburn, New York. The Brooklyn Manual Training High School complained, in late 1911, that it had been the first in New York City to request an organ, but that schools in Manhattan had received their instruments first. Perhaps this is an early manifestation of a tendency to favor Manhattan over the outer boroughs, or at least a fear on the part of some that this is taking place!
And organ teachers
Finally, a very incomprehensive look at where a few of the mid-twentieth century organ teachers—some of whom some of us can remember having known in person—were in December 1909:
Lynnwood Farnam was twenty-four years old, having recently become organist of Christ Church Cathedral, Montréal. He was several years away from a position as a teacher at a university.
Helmut Walcha was two years old, living in Leipzig. He was more than ten years away from losing his sight.
Marcel Dupré was twenty-three years old. He was a (very advanced) student, primarily of composition. He had already won the First Prize in both piano and organ at the Paris Conservatory.
Alexander McCurdy was four years old, about fifteen years away from beginning his studies with Lynwood Farnam and his extremely long association with the Curtis Institute.
Jean Langlais was two years old. This was the year in which he lost his sight.
E. Power Biggs was three years old, and living on the Isle of Wight. We do not think of him primarily as a teacher, since he only did a little bit of teaching. I am pleased, however, by a small connection that I have with his teaching life, namely that there is one person out there (Harriet Dearden) who studied both with Biggs and with me.
Arthur Poister was eleven years old.
André Marchal was fifteen years old and beginning organ study with Adolphe Marty.
Vernon de Tar was four years old and living in Detroit.
Harold Gleason was eighteen years old.
Mildred Andrews, Catharine Crozier, and Robert Baker were all to be born soon. And there are many, many more.
