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Nunc Dimittis

May 5, 2005
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Edward H. Holloway, 79, died February 9 in Zionsville, Indiana. He leaves behind his wife of 56 years, Doralyn “Lynne” Holloway, a sister, two daughters, four grandchildren, and five great-grand children. Born November 9, 1925, he graduated from Howe High School in 1942, where he was named All-City in basketball. He attended Butler and Purdue universities and was a member of the Sigma Nu fraternity. He was a lifetime member of the musician’s union, and after traveling with various bands, he played locally with the Louie Lowe, Doc Thrasher, and Phil Marshall Orchestras. Following in the footsteps of his grandfather, Elmer Holloway, he started a pipe organ business. He constructed and installed 70 Holloway pipe organs in churches throughout the country, working until his short illness. His first organ, Opus No. 1, was built in his garage and installed in his own church, St. Christopher Episcopal of Carmel, Indiana.

Edward H. Holloway (1925–2005)
A Remembrance by John Goulding

When I first met Ed Holloway, he was a representative for the Reuter Organ Company. Ed had begun his relationship with Reuter as a result of need. In 1949 he was playing tenor saxophone in a big band, and his group had become stranded in a snow storm near Lawrence, Kansas. Given the dismal situation, the band literally disbanded on the spot. Based on Ed’s prior organ building experience with his grandfather, he contacted the Reuter Organ Company in Lawrence and applied for a job. By the early 1950s, he had returned to his native Indianapolis and had established Edward H. Holloway Organ Company, servicing local instruments and serving as Reuter’s regional representative. In 1959, I answered an advertisement that Ed had placed in The Diapason, and I came to Indianapolis to join E. H. Holloway Company to help install Reuter organs.
Ed had an incipient idea, based somewhat on the burgeoning influence of the neo-Baroque movement, that the time was right for a new slider chest action with remote key action. His long-term goal was to establish a shop to build organs featuring these slider chests. He and I were both attending St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church in Carmel, and the church had no organ at the time. We decided to put Ed’s concept into action, and we built a one-manual instrument in his garage in the evenings. We donated our time and Ed donated the materials and pipework. With this modest success, Ed sold a two-manual organ to Speedway Christian Church just outside of Indianapolis. With the successful installation of this organ, Ed realized that the new organ work was to be the mainstay of the company, and he broke off the relationship with the Reuter Organ Company. In the succeeding years, the company produced over seventy instruments, over half of which were in Indiana. Through all of this, Ed was an interesting mixture of visionary and opportunist. He understood the importance of the simplicity of the slider chest on the organ reform movement. He attended the first organizational meeting of what was to become the American Institute of Organbuilders. He maintained a connection between his performer’s training as a saxophonist and his occupation as an instrument builder. His business savvy and his natural charisma allowed him to sell his ideas and his organ designs to organ builders and church committees alike. With his passing, the organ world has lost a significant, if under-recognized, member of its community.

Janny van Wering, Dutch harpsichordist, died in her home in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, on March 1. She was the first person ever to receive a harpsichord degree in the Netherlands and became one of the country’s most prominent harpsichordists—second only to Gustav Leonhardt—until her retirement in 1974; in 1936, a newspaper called her “our Dutch harpsichordist.”
Janny van Wering was born on July 30, 1909 in Oude Pekela in the province of Groningen in the north of the Netherlands. She left school in 1925 in order to study piano at the Conservatory of Amsterdam. At her graduation recital in 1931, Sem Dresden, the director of the school and a well-known music theorist, was so impressed with van Wering’s Bach playing that he suggested that she study the harpsichord. Dresden had previously invited French harpsichordist Pauline Aubert to teach a two-year course for pianists in Amsterdam and had subsequently appointed Richard Boer as professor of harpsichord. Ms. van Wering became Boer’s first student, but distrusting her teacher’s harpsichord expertise, she went to Paris a few months before her graduation recital and took a handful of lessons with Aubert; afterwards, Mr. Boer generously admitted that she played “quite differently.” On Boer’s suggestion, Ms. van Wering’s recital included the Concerto by Manuel de Falla, which was practically new at the time. A scholarship allowed her to continue her studies in Paris with Aubert for a few months (unlike so many harpsichordists of her generation, Janny van Wering never studied with Wanda Landowska—neither had Aubert).
In the 1930s and ’40s, Ms. van Wering was practically the only harpsichordist in the Netherlands. She played numerous recitals and was a concerto soloist in works like Bach’s Fifth Brandenburg Concerto and Haydn’s Concerto in D Major. After World War II, she became harpsichordist for the Dutch Radio Union and the Radio Chamber Orchestra (1945–69) and was appointed Professor of Harpsichord at the Royal Conservatory in the Hague (1947–74). Later, she became a member of the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra (1955–75) and also taught at the Conservatory of Rotterdam (1957–74). With the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra, she traveled internationally and recorded Bach’s Fifth Brandenburg Concerto with violinist/conductor Szymon Goldberg and flautist Hubert Barwahser. She also recorded Bach’s concerto for four harpsichords with Gustav Leonhardt and the Leonhardt Consort (with Leonhardt’s teacher Eduard Müller and Leonhardt student Anneke Uittenbosch). Ms. van Wering played in a variety of chamber groups, including the Telemann Trio with the young Frans Brüggen. Although she was literally Miss Harpsichord in Dutch music life for forty years, she herself always considered harpsichord playing a “luxury job” (in the 1950s, she still frequently played the piano for radio broadcasts) and was concerned about the younger generation of harpsichordists, who concentrated exclusively on that instrument.
After retiring from the stage in 1974, Ms. van Wering rarely played the harpsichord. She became an avid concertgoer, but not of Baroque music. She also returned to the old love of her teenage years, classics, reading/translating Latin or Greek for an hour every day.
—Jan-Piet Knijff
Queens College/CUNY

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