June 2019

From the Builder

The Three Choirs Festival celebrated its 300th anniversary in 2015. With a brief hiatus during each world war, this is the longest-running non-competitive classical music festival in the world. The festival is so named for the three cathedral choirs of Gloucester, Worcester, and Hereford. For more information, see Lorraine Brugh’s article on the 2018 festival at Hereford Cathedral in the February issue of The Diapason, pages 20–21. The festival included a recital by Olivier Latry on the cathedral organ.

The city of Erfurt was, by the middle of the seventeenth century, the most important city in the central German heartland of Thuringia (Figure 1). With nearly 18,000 residents, Erfurt was the largest city in Thuringia and was the commercial and cultural capital of the region.¹ Following the Thirty Years War and under the electoral archbishopric of Mainz, Erfurt became a uniquely ecumenical (i.e., bi-confessional) city, with nearly twenty percent of its residents worshipping as Roman Catholics.

Fire in the steeple

Writing for a monthly journal is no place to be commenting on today’s news. A momentous story will develop during the six weeks between submission and publication leaving the telling of the event, which seems so fresh and urgent at the moment of writing, little more than a heap of yesterday’s news.

The Cambridge Companion to the Harpsichord

One of the exciting events of 2019 has been receiving my copies of both hardback and paperback editions of this 388-page compendium, a decade in the making. The softbound edition is priced at $29.99 (ISBN 978-1-316-60970-5); hardbound is listed at $105 (ISBN 978-1-107-15607-4).

The Art of the Fugue, Part 1

Robert Edward Coleberd, 86, died on December 5, 2018. Born July 6, 1932, in Kansas City, Missouri, he graduated from William Jewell College, Liberty, Missouri, with a degree in economics. He then served in the United States Army during the Korean War. After his discharge he earned an MBA degree at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. A few years later he enrolled at University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana, where he received MA and PhD degrees in economics.