August 2014
Donald Trowbridge Bryant, age 95, died on April 11. Born in Chesterville, Ohio, he began piano study at age 8, and received bachelor’s degrees in music education and composition at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio. After four years of…
For a century and a half, the name Kotzschmar has personified the outsized musical ambitions of the small city of Portland, Maine. Johann Carl Hermann Kotzschmar, who arrived in Portland in 1849 from his native Germany, became a leading…
August 20, 1914, was the birth date of organist/composer Wilbur C. Held. The place was the Chicago suburb of Des Plaines, an address familiar, no doubt, to some readers of The Diapason! Earlier this year, as I began to think of possible…
Despite the best efforts of Winter Storm Hercules, all but one of our group of seventeen made it to Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport as scheduled on Friday, January 3. Once we had gathered our luggage, we headed off to our first point of…
Hand Distribution II
I have suggested that beginning in the middle of measure 19 and going on for a while, it is best to take the upper voice—a somewhat wide-ranging eighth-note pattern—by itself in the right hand, and to group the other…
Creative freedom
Last Wednesday I was doing a service call at a church in New Jersey, where the Organ Clearing House installed a relocated organ a couple years ago. The pastor was holding keys as I tuned the reeds—a little unusual perhaps…
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