February 2009

The Community Chapel on Squirrel Island, Maine, has completed its first summer organ resident program

French Eclat in the Roanoke Valley, Thomas Baugh, organist; 2004 Fisk organ, 32 stops, Christ Episcopal Church, Roanoke, Virginia. Raven Recording OAR 850

The Organ Music of Gerald Near; Steven Egler, organist; 1997 Casavant, 61 ranks, Central Michigan University. Disc 1: Choraleworks (complete), disc 2: Suite in Classical Style and Sonata in F-sharp Minor. White Pine Music, WPM 203

Fabry, Inc., Antioch, Illinois: Memorial Chapel, The Culver Academies, Culver, Indiana

Parkey OrganBuilders,
Duluth, Georgia
Church of the Good Shepherd,
Lookout Mountain, Tennessee

Clarence Dickinson (1873–1969) had one of the longest and most influential careers in the history of American church music. Reminiscences, Part Two, begins with Dickinson’s arrival in Berlin in 1898 and traces his musical studies in Europe with Reimann, Guilmant, Moszkowski, and Vierne, his meeting and falling in love with Helen Adell Snyder, and his return to Chicago, where he became an overnight success as organist-choirmaster at St. James Church and founding conductor of the area’s most prominent choral societies.

Professor Marilyn Mason’s Historic Organ Tour 55 last July featured visits to Budapest, Vienna, Salzburg and Prague, all enchanting cultural capitals or significant cities of the former Hapsburg Empire.

Remember and abide by the definition of a correct practice tempo: slow enough.

If organbuilders use pipe-organ jargon thoughtfully as they create new instruments (or rebuild old ones), they provide insight for the musicians about how the organ is laid out internally. If the musicians use and understand the terminology well, they play their instruments with a deeper understanding of what’s going on inside.

10, 25, 50, and 75 years ago in THE DIAPASON

Betty Jean Taylor Bartholomew, Margaret E. Brakel, N. Frederick Cool, Carol A. Griffin, Alfred John Neumann, Wesley T. Selby, Jr.