Robert Glasgow, Professor of Music at The University of Michigan, will celebrate his 80th birthday on May 30, 2005. In honor of this occasion, I was delighted to be invited by Jerome Butera, editor of The Diapason, to interview Professor Glasgow, and did so on February 12, 2005. We had a wonderful afternoon at his organ studio in the School of Music, and he answered many questions about his life and career. Thanks to Prof. Glasgow for the interview, and we wish him Godspeed upon the occasion of his birthday and best wishes upon his forthcoming retirement.
Robert Glasgow has taught at The University of Michigan since 1962, after teaching at MacMurray College in Illinois and having graduated with distinction from the Eastman School, where he was also awarded the Performer’s Certificate. MacMurray College named him an honorary doctor of music, and his Michigan colleagues honored him with the Harold Haugh Award for excellence in the teaching of performance. He has concertized abroad several times, has toured the United States and Canada every season, and has appeared as a featured performer, lecturer and clinician at numerous national and regional conventions of the American Guild of Organists. Mr. Glasgow was named International Performer of the Year in 1997 by the New York AGO Chapter.
Personnel coded as follows:
SE--Steven Egler
RG--Robert Glasgow
RB--Robert Barker, who also took the photos that accompany this article.
SE: Bob, please tell us about your childhood in Oklahoma City and your early music training. Did you come from a musical family?
RG: I would say so. Both my parents played musical instruments. My mother was a pianist and somewhat of an organist. My father played violin rather well and also clarinet. In fact they played piano and violin in the church orchestra, and that is where they first met.
My mother heard about a new Presbyterian church being built in Ada, a little town in southeast Oklahoma. They were going to have a new organ; it was going to be a Hillgreen-Lane. When my mother learned about it she called to ask if they needed an organist. Of course, being a little town out there in the middle of nowhere, they said, yes, they needed an organist. My mother decided to take some organ lessons and be down there in about six weeks. So she did; took six lessons from a lady in Oklahoma City and learned how to play the pedals and the manuals--enough to play a service. So she became organist of that church.
SE: So your mother was an organist?
RG: She was a natural musician and she had a lot of piano study. When she was in high school, her piano teacher told my grandmother that she didn’t think that she was making the progress that she should. She said, “Your daughter has too much talent for her own good . . . that it was too easy for her.” By the way, when I started to play the accordion, she learned the accordion herself; then she’d listen to things on the radio and then she’d play them to me, and I’d learn them by ear. She’d learn them by ear and then transfer them to my ear when I’d come home from school. It was great fun!
Well, it’s easy! It’s the easiest way to learn music rather than read through all of those notes--the printed page! I still think that there’s something to be said for learning by ear at a young age. In the first place, making music is perfectly natural. It’s not going to become any more natural than it is right then.
You want students who can play with great persuasion and do not sound affected and contrived. Those who do play this way started off as youngsters playing by ear, singing tunes they’ve heard, listening to the radio.
SE: Who were some of the organists who inspired you as a young man?
RG: The organist at First Presbyterian Church, Oklahoma City, Mrs. J. S. Frank. Mr. Ken Wright of radio station WKY, who played a 4-manual Kilgen organ in the radio station studio--this organ produced some very beautiful sounds. His playing was very tasteful, he had good organ technique, and presented a good variety of popular style repertoire. For every broadcast he played his own theme song that was not published, but I learned to play it by ear. Jesse Crawford, a very famous theatre organist of the time. I had many of his recordings. Marcel Dupré came to Oklahoma City in 1939 to play a recital at First Christian Church. He had just played the wedding of the Duke of Windsor (Edward VIII) and Mrs. Simpson. The recital was a sell-out event. He brought his daughter Marguerite on the tour, and they played Franck, Dupré, etc.
SE: Did your parents encourage music study as a boy?
RG: Well, I guess so. They didn’t discourage it. It was a perfectly natural thing in our home when I was growing up. I was an only child.
SE: What instruments did you play?
RG: Accordion! I wanted to study and play the organ, but I could not reach the pedals, so I talked my folks into buying me an 80-bass accordion. That’s how I learned to play the pieces my mother taught me by ear--on that accordion.
SE: So that’s as close as you could get to the organ sound.
RG: Yes, it’s like an organ. It’s a wind instrument. I loved doing it, and I got pretty good at it. I was popular playing for church basement suppers and things like that.
SE: You were well known early on.
RG: Oh yes, I started playing at age nine, and by eleven I was hot stuff!
SE: Who was your first teacher?
RG: My mother. She taught me some piano. We had a little baby grand. She taught me how to read the notes. I had these little pieces that I was supposed to learn, but I’d sort of half learn them and I’d fill them in myself and fix them up. Mother would say, “You’re not playing what’s there.” I told her one time, “My way is better!” Talk about cheeky!
SE: So you learned your notes then after you played the accordion: you learned the accordion by ear.
RG: Almost everything that you played on the accordion had to be arranged for the instrument anyway. There was very little written for the accordion all by itself. My piano book had wonderful illustrations in it with the keyboard going up into the sky. It was wonderful, lovely, and all very visual. But the last piece in there was the Minuet in G of Beethoven. It has a B section--all 16th notes--and I looked at that and thought, “Oh boy, if I ever get to play that piece I’ll be really good.” That was the last piece in the book, and if you got that far you were a finished pianist.
SE: So you were done. That was it!
RG: Yes. All done.
SE: Then you were ready for the organ, the real thing.
RG: I was ready, but I still couldn’t reach the pedals, and I hadn’t enough piano according to the piano teacher. Our church organist was a wonderful musician--Oberlin-trained from way back. She took me later on, but she said then that I didn’t have enough piano.
We’re missing a very important part right in here when I took up the string bass, and that’s had much more of a lasting effect upon me than anything else. The junior high school orchestra wasn’t all that good, but by the time we got to high school, the orchestras were very good. We went to state competitions at the University of Oklahoma and won A-1 ratings. We played Mozart Symphony No. 40 and Eine Kleine Nachtmusik--music of that caliber--and also the Franck D-minor Symphony.
SE: So did you just start playing the string bass?
RG: No. Oklahoma City Public Schools offered instruction in strings: first of all, violin, some viola, and you got free lessons, class lessons. This was fourth grade and there were little-sized instruments. I didn’t care anything about that: I wanted to play the big strings. By seventh grade, I could do string bass or cello, so I took up string bass because I liked the look of the scroll at the top. I’d take that instrument home on weekends and practice it and learned to play it.
SE: There must have been something about the bass notes.
RG: Oh yes, indeed. It was a physical thing. It was wonderful to play in an ensemble like that, and we really became quite good. Then they had a junior symphony (Oklahoma State Junior Symphony), and you had to audition to get into that. I got into it, and that was more fun than anything. We did get to play the major repertoire then.
That had a lasting effect. By the time I got out of high school, I was finished. I couldn’t keep using the string bass in the school. I didn’t have one. And, anyhow, guess what came on then?
SE: World War II?
RG: It was already going. But one thing that I got out of that was the GI Bill--a godsend for everyone of that generation.
SE: And that paid for your education at Eastman?
RG: Yes, just did. The amount of time you got was the amount of time that you had been in the service, and mine worked out just right. Eastman cost more than anything; in those days it was $500 a year!
I came back and I didn’t know what I was going to do where music was concerned. I thought I’d be an architect and was very serious about it. I kept drawing all the time. I couldn’t get away from it. I’d draw house plans, church plans, and outsides of buildings. Some were not bad, as I look back on that. I was about ten or eleven years old when I started drawing pictures of houses and floor plans.
SE: What sort of time was there, Bob, between your time in the service and going to Eastman? Was there much of a gap there?
RG: Well, I didn’t go to Eastman right away because it was too late by the time I got out of the service. It was March, and I had been working on Eastman for well over a year before that; there were thousands of GI’s out of the military service, and they all wanted to do something, go somewhere with the GI Bill. By that time, I wasn’t even sure what I was going to do.
I decided I’d try for Eastman and then got the usual letter back stating, “No. We’re sorry, but you’re the low man on the totem pole. You’d be a transfer student.” That year I went to Oklahoma City University and was a piano major and had good teaching there. The faculty were all Eastman graduates. I then got busy with applications at Eastman and sent audition recordings of both my organ and piano playing.
I got this letter, “Sorry for you. You’re too late . . . way too many students . . . I don’t want to discourage you . . . but send your audition recordings to us right away.” Instead of sending it to the admissions office, I sent it to Harold Gleason. In days, I had this note back from him! The first big thrill that I had was that he wrote to me and said to check that I had all of my papers in, and that they wanted to have me there in the fall. WELL, that did it! He saw to it that I got in. So I found myself at Eastman that summer and got a church job right away. That plus the GI bill got me through without too much trouble or hardship.
SE: When did you start at Eastman?
RG: Summer of 1947. I started in with the program right then, but they classified me as a sophomore. Of course, I had the freshman year at OCU, and all that work was accepted. I took their basic exams.
SE: That must have been very exciting.
RG: Well, it was! It was scary, too. I thought, “What am I doing here with all of these talented people? Good grief, they are going to find out about me. They are going to catch up to me and send me home.” I didn’t think that I was that good.
SE: It looks like that didn’t happen.
RG: It didn’t, fortunately. I was trying to figure out how I would explain it to the folks at home. It turned out that I stacked up pretty well with the rest, but at first I didn’t think that I was going to.
I went there because I had advice from people at home who were graduates of Eastman and who told me that there was only one place to go and only one teacher for me. There weren’t nearly so many organ teachers then and nearly so much good organ teaching then as there is now.
SE: Who was your teacher in Oklahoma City?
RG: Dubert Dennis. He was an Oklahoma boy--Cherokee Indian--but he put me on the straight and narrow with the Gleason Method. I’ll tell you! Hand position. Finger action. I’d never had anyone be so fussy with me before. I thought, “I’ll get to Eastman. I’ll show them.” Turned out to be just the other way around, of course. I had to get off of my high horse. I did pretty quickly.
SE: We’ve all had someone like that in our background.
RG: You need to sit back where you belong and not where you don’t belong. It’s one of the best things a teacher can do for you sometimes. To say, “Wait just a minute. You’ll be there in a minute, but not right this minute.”
RB: Humility?
RG: I don’t think humility. It’s just honesty about where you are in terms of your development, and not imagining you are further along than you really are. That’s often the trouble some students have: they think they are so much further along that they really are, and are unwilling to do “repair work.”
SE: That might be one of those later questions . . .
RG: Another big thrill while at Eastman was when I auditioned for the Performer’s Certificate. I thought that it would be fun to play with the orchestra. In those days you did not choose the concerto before you got accepted as a candidate for the Certificate.
I got chosen, and I thought that I would do the Poulenc, but it didn’t have any pedal cadenza. I wanted something that would show off the pedals. I found the Flor Peeters Concerto in a music store, so I chose that, and Howard Hanson liked it better than the Poulenc. Hanson was not a fan of Poulenc.
He was a wonderful conductor and wonderful musician to work with on that concerto. It was the American premiere, and it did have a big pedal cadenza in it and a rousing climax. It just brought the house down. Flor Peeters knew how to write for organ and orchestra very effectively.
