Kegg Pipe Organ Builders, Hartville, Ohio; Main Street United Methodist Church, Abbeville, South Carolina
Working in the South has its advantages. The climate can be most pleasant, but the main attraction is its people. Southern hospitality is real, and the folks at Main Street United Methodist Church certainly showed this to us in great measure.
Between 2002 and 2007, in Licheń Stary, near the geographical center of Poland, the Polish organbuilder Zakłady Organowe Zych built a monumental instrument of 157 stops. Designed by Andrzej Chorosiński, the instrument is now the largest organ in Poland and is controlled by a six-manual console.
This interview took place October 17, 2018, at Westfield House of Theological Studies in Cambridge, England.
Lorraine Brugh: I’m interested in your visits to Cambridge and what your work is here.
From A to Z: Harpsichord Notes
Seated one day at the computer, I was weary and ill at ease, and my fingers wandered idly over the noisy keys . . . oops, wrong setting. Or is it? I have just been searching a list of past winners of the quarterly Global Music Awards bestowed on independent musicians who submit their recordings for judging by a California company, and I have come across the welcome information that Asako Hirabayashi, harpsichordist and composer, won a first prize medal in the year 2018.
The Art of the Fugue, part III
This month’s installment picks up exactly where last month’s left off.
Notes on the Individual Movements
Contrapunctus 1 is a four-voice fugue on the original and simplest form of The Art of the Fugue theme (Example 1). There is no regular countersubject. The mood is forthright and powerful, but with underlying calm.
Roger Allen Banks died June 5 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. He was born October 12, 1940, in Lawrence, Kansas, and grew up in the funeral business in Wichita, Kansas, though developing an interest in music early in life. His first experience maintaining organs was with the theater pipe organ in his uncle’s basement. He attended the University of Kansas, majoring in electrical engineering, but moved with his parents to Oklahoma City in 1960 and earned a Bachelor of Arts in Music degree in 1965 from Oklahoma City University.
