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December 2013

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Nunc Dimittis

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Mildred M. (Meyer) Brugger, age 88, of Edinboro, Pennsylvania, passed away January 28, 2014. Born November 2, 1925, in Erie, she worked for the Tellers Organ Company of Erie for many years before she and her husband, Eric, founded Brugger Releathering, where she continued for over 40 years until her retirement. She was a long-time member of Our Lady of the Lake Catholic Church in Edinboro.
 
Mildred M. Brugger is survived by her husband of 67 years, Eric J. Brugger; daughters, Mary Frances Roach and husband Jim, of Millcreek, Dr. Rose Marie Attewell and husband Ray, of Jim Thorpe, and Jean Marie Jakubaszek and husband David, of North Tonawanda, New York; son, Joseph Brugger and wife Cheryl, of West Springfield, Pennsylvania; 12 grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren.
 
Melvin Dickinson, 77, died on January 31 in his beloved Bach Haus in Louisville, Kentucky, the result of a heart attack. A native of Todd County, Kentucky, Dickinson earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music from the University of Kentucky, in Lexington. During these years, he served as assistant organist at Lexington’s Christ Church Cathedral (Episcopal).
 
Bach was the common ground that united Melvin and Margaret Leupold as they embarked on Fulbright fellowships in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, from 1958 to 1960. They studied with the Bach organ master Helmut Walcha and became his assistants as the blind Walcha concertized throughout Europe.
 
The Bach bond became so strong that these two best friends were married in 1961, and formed the Bach Cantata Series at the Episcopal Church of the Ascension in Frankfort, Kentucky, where Mr. Dickinson served as organist-choirmaster for six years.
 
In 1964, he and his wife Margaret founded the Louisville Bach Society, continuing offerings of major choral-orchestral works of all centuries until 2011, all the while specializing in their first love, the oratorios, Masses, motets, and cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach.
 
Melvin Dickinson was head of the organ and church music department at the University of Louisville for 42 years, retiring as Professor Emeritus in 2001. During that time, he taught and nurtured many students who now hold church music positions throughout the country, even extending to Singapore, Ireland, and Germany. He was a careful and meticulous teacher who never let a student get away with anything, all the while maintaining a cheerful and caring attitude and a wonderful sense of humor with a very sharp wit.
 
After his tenure at the Church of the Ascension, he assumed the same position at St. Francis in the Fields Episcopal Church, Louisville, from 1966–1979. His last choral move was to Calvary Episcopal Church, Louisville, from 1979–2012. Both Dickinsons were made Musicians Emeriti at Calvary in 2012. They continued to keep their minds active by presenting a monthly Bach Lecture-Recital series at the Bach Haus, the latest and final one being January 11, 2014.
 
Professor Dickinson received many awards in teaching, organ playing, and conducting during his decades-long devotion to excellent music. One of the more recent was the Kentucky Governor’s Award in the Arts in 2001, an individual artist award for lifetime achievement. His influence was far-reaching and prolific, and his Bach legacy will long be remembered and revered. He is survived by his wife, Margaret, with whom he made music for 52 years, two daughters, Maria (Joseph) and Michelle (John), and five granddaughters.
 
A memorial service was held February 8 at Calvary Episcopal Church, Louisville. Expressions of sympathy may take the form of contributions to the Calvary Epis- copal Church Food Closet (821 S. Fourth St., Louisville, Kentucky 40203), or the Kentucky Bach Choir (Marlon Hurst, 239 Delmar Ave., Lexington, KY 40508).
 
—Stephen Schnurr
 
William A. Goodwin passed away on December 7, 2013. Born in Elgin, Illinois, on September 9, 1930, he graduated from Knox College with a degree in physics. Goodwin entered the army in 1952, was stationed in Maryland, and on his weekend leaves studied the organ. He worked for Baird Associates in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for many years and was assigned to work with the Central Intelligence Agency on the now declassified SR71 aircraft in AREA 51. Goodwin later started his own company, Keyword Associates, which designed and installed recording systems for courtrooms. A member of the AGO for more than 50 years, he served as organist and music director at the First Congregational Church in Woburn, Massachusetts, where he played the large 1860 E.G. & G. Hook Organ (Opus 283) for over 30 years and established an organ restoration fund to maintain the instrument. He used his audio expertise to set up the First Con- gregational Church with its own audio/video room, to distribute their services to the community.
 
Goodwin was an avid sailor, longtime member of the Marblehead Yacht Club, strong supporter of the arts and animal organizations, and mentor of many musicians throughout the years. He was also a regular attendee and supporter of the Methuen Music Hall Organ Concerts presented every summer. A concert in Goodwin’s memory will take place at the First Congregational Church, Woburn, May 4, 2014, at 3 p.m.  

 

In the wind...

John Bishop
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It's alive

There’s a small category of inanimate objects that seem alive to those who appreciate and use them. A friend is an avid cyclist who rides hundreds of miles each week. He has a sophisticated bike that was custom-built for him, and he talks about it as though it is a living partner. He’s at one with the machine when he shifts gears, powers up a long hill, or throws it into a turn. The sound of the wind in the whirling spokes is like a song to him.

A parishioner at a church I served as music director owned several vintage Jaguar XKEs. Those are the sleek little two-seater roadsters with twelve-cylinder engines that date from the mid 1960s. The garage at his house was his workshop, where he had hundreds of high-quality tools hanging polished on labeled hooks. The workbench had obviously seen a lot of use, but every time I saw it, it was neat and clean—except for one time I visited, when he had one of those marvelous engines dismantled for an overhaul. Each part had been degreased and was spotless. As he talked me through his project, he handled the parts, almost caressing them with his fingers. One Sunday afternoon when he took me for a long ride, I could see how much he enjoyed his relationship with that machine. As an organbuilder, I cringe when I hear the phrase “amateur labor.” But I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to put a Jaguar engine in John’s amateur hands.

Sailboats are another great example. Our boat is made of fiberglass, but it has lots of character. Although this was only the first summer we’ve had her, I’ve noticed some fun little things she seems to like. On a port tack broad reach, she makes a little skip each time the bow rises to a wave on the port bow. I think that little skip tells me that she likes that particular motion. That skip doesn’t happen on a starboard tack, and it doesn’t happen when waves cross the starboard bow on a port tack.

And if you think a fiberglass boat can have personality, you should stand on a dock surrounded by wooden sailboats and listen to their skippers. You’d think those guys had all just been out on a first date. There’s a special term for that—boatstruck. A boat lover can go simply ga-ga at the sight of a beautiful boat. One of our friends did exactly that a few weeks ago, and it was only a few days between his catching sight of this boat and its presence on a trailer in his yard.

One of the most magical moments in any day in a sailboat is when you’ve motored away from the dock, raised the sails, gotten the boat moving under the power of the wind, and shut off the engine. The boat surges forward—in good wind, any sailboat is faster under sail than under power—and the surrounding noise changes from that of the engine’s exhaust to that of the motion of wind and water. The nature of the machine shifts from mechanical to natural power.

Harnessing the wind

That magical shift is a little like starting the blower of a pipe organ. When you touch the switch, you might hear the click of a relay, and depending on where it’s located, you might hear the blower motor coming up to speed—but you certainly hear or sense the organ fill with air. It’s as though the organ inhaled and is now ready to make music. You might hear a few little creaks and groans as reservoir springs take on tension, and while most organists ask that step to be as quiet as possible, I like hearing those mechanical noises because they remind me of all that is happening inside the instrument.

Many organists are unaware of what goes on inside their instrument when they start the blower. We’re all used to switching on appliances, noticing only the simple difference between on and off. But when you switch on that organ blower, air starts to move through the organ as a gentle breath that soon builds to a little hurricane. As each reservoir fills, it automatically closes its own regulating valve. When all the reservoirs are full, the organ is alive and ready to play. There’s a big difference between the sense you get inside an organ when the blower is running and all the reservoirs are full of pressure, compared with the lifeless state when the blower is not running.

When I’m inside an organ with the blower running, it feels alive to me. It’s almost as though it’s quivering with excitement, waiting for someone to play. I compare it to the collective inhalation of all the wind players in a symphony orchestra. The conductor mounts the podium and the players give him their attention. He raises his baton and the instruments are at the ready. He gives the upbeat and everyone inhales. The split second before air starts pouring through those instruments is like the organ with blower running, reservoirs up, and windchests full of air pressure, ready to blow air through those pipes when the organist opens the valves by touching keys.

Besides the notion that the organ is a living, breathing thing is the personality of a good instrument. There certainly are plenty of “ordinary” organs that don’t exhibit any particular personality. But a well-conceived and beautifully made instrument almost always shares its being with the players and listeners. Just as our boat tells us what it likes, so an organ lets the player know what it likes and what it doesn’t. How many of us have put a piece of music back on the shelf just because the organ didn’t seem to like it?  

And besides the idea that an organ might have opinions as to what music it plays best, so a good instrument lends itself to a particular form of worship. My work in the Organ Clearing House is centered on finding new homes for redundant organs, and by extension, I’m always thinking about the strengths and weaknesses of each instrument we handle, especially from the point of view of what type of church it might be suited for.

A tale of two cities

St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Glendale, California, is a peppy, active place with lots of young families. I got to know it about four years ago when they put their 1973 three-manual Schlicker organ on the market. While I am not able to visit each organ that comes across my desk, it happened that I was in California on other business, and took the opportunity to see the instrument, take measurements, and assess its quality and condition. St. Mark’s building has pseudo-gothic lines, and is built of concrete reinforced with steel (it’s earthquake country). Most of the Schlicker organ was located in a chamber on the nave wall, in the place where a transept would be. The Positiv division was in a little cubby above the choir seats in the chancel, twenty feet behind the rest of the organ, the exact opposite of traditional placement of a Positiv division.

Herman Schlicker was a third-generation organbuilder, born in Germany, who immigrated to the United States in the late 1920s. He founded the Schlicker Organ Company in 1930, and along with Walter Holtkamp, was at the forefront of the revival movement that shifted interest toward the style of classic instruments, and of course later to the powerful revolution that reintroduced mechanical key action to mainstream American organbuilding. Through the 1960s and 1970s, Schlicker built instruments with slider chests, low wind pressures, and open-toe voicing with few, if any, nicks at the pipe mouths. There are plenty of mutations and mixtures, and a higher-than-usual percentage of tapered ranks like Spitzflutes.

I felt that the Schlicker organ at St. Mark’s was not a great success because the low wind pressure and relatively light amount of deep fundamental tone meant that the organ could not project well from the deep chamber. And all that upperwork meant there was not a big variety of lush solo voices with soft accompaniments that are so important to much of the choral literature featured in Anglican and Episcopal churches. It’s a fine organ, but it was a boat in the wrong water.

St. Mark’s was offering the Schlicker for sale because they had acquired a beautiful three-manual organ by E. M. Skinner from a church in Pennsylvania. Foley-Baker, Inc., of Tolland, Connecticut, would renovate the Skinner and install it in the same chamber then occupied by the Schlicker. (See “Skinner Opus 774 Is Saved,” The Diapason, December 2012.) The Skinner organ (Opus 774), built in 1929, has higher pressures than the Schlicker, two expressive divisions, and of twenty-seven ranks, eighteen are at eight-foot pitch (including reeds), and there are three independent sixteen-footers, plus a sixteen-foot extension of the Swell Cornopean to produce a Trombone. That’s a lot of fundamental tone.

The people of St. Mark’s felt that the Skinner organ would be more useful for the particular liturgy they celebrate. And because of the higher pressures and larger pipe scales, there is more energy to the sound, allowing it to travel more effectively out of the chamber and across the sanctuary.

§

Metropolitan New Jersey is a sprawling, bustling urban/suburban area just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. Tens of thousands of people ride hundreds of trains and thousands of buses across the river to New York each day, traveling through the many tunnels. You never saw so many buses as pass through the Lincoln Tunnel during any rush hour. These are the people whose lives came to a standstill after Hurricane Sandy caused New Jersey Transit to cancel train service for two weeks. To add to the maelstrom, sixty percent of the gas stations in New Jersey were closed because fuel delivery systems and storage facilities were damaged by the storm. It took months to restore the normal massive flow of traffic.

Five years ago, I received a call from Will Moser, the pastor of the First Lutheran Church in Montclair, New Jersey, in the heart of that area. His church was home to an aging and relocated Austin organ that had, through some inexpert handling earlier in its life, passed through its period of greatest distinction. Much later in this story I learned that Will had grown up learning to play the organ, and worked as a professional organist before going to seminary. He grew up in a church in Western Pennsylvania that had a Schlicker organ, and as he matured into his ministry, he dreamed of having a Schlicker in his church. (Can you tell where this is going?)

I visited the church in Montclair and found a nice variance on the ubiquitous A-frame building. Rather than straight walls supporting the wooden pitched ceiling, the side walls are broken into roughly ten-foot sections, set in gentle parallel angles and divided by windows. The ceiling is supported by heavy beams of laminated wood. And there is a spacious balcony above the rear door—the perfect place for an organ with low wind pressure, clear voicing, and well-developed principal choruses.

It was just a few weeks after my visit to Montclair that the Glendale Schlicker came on the market, and I immediately thought of Will. With three manuals and about thirty-five stops, this organ was larger than what Will and I had discussed, but it sure seemed as though it would be a good fit. I got back on the train under the Hudson and put the specifications and photos of the Glendale organ in Will’s hands. It wasn’t long before he got to California to see the organ, and we agreed pretty quickly that the church should acquire the organ.

We dismantled the organ and placed it in storage while the people in Montclair gathered the necessary funds, and now, several years later, the organ is in place, complete, and sounding terrific. The organ’s tone moves easily and unobstructed through the sanctuary. Each stop sounds great alone and in combinations. The full organ is impressive, but not overpowering. The reeds are colorful, and the bass tones
project beautifully.

We might describe the result of the Glendale/Montclair caper as a Lutheran organ in a Lutheran church and an Episcopal organ in an Episcopal church.

When smart organbuilders design new organs, they consider all the elements that make up the physical location and acoustics of the room. They calculate the volume, and consider the lines of egress over which the organ would have to speak. They divine how much sound energy will be necessary and calculate the pipe scales and wind pressures accordingly. Each organ is designed for the space in which it is installed. I imagine that Mr. Schlicker felt that he was building an organ that would sound great at St. Mark’s. And he was building it at a time when many organists and organbuilders felt that the ideal organ had low pressure and plenty of upperwork.

Fashion conscious 

I write frequently about the revolution in American organbuilding in the second half of the twentieth century. We celebrate the renewal of interest and knowledge about building tracker-action organs while simultaneously lamenting the loss of those organs they replaced. At the same time we should acknowledge that there was another twentieth-century revolution in American organbuilding that started and progressed exactly fifty years earlier. If in 1950 we were building organs with classic stoplists and thinking about tracker action, in 1900 they were building organs with romantic stoplists and thinking about electro-pneumatic action. In 1970, dozens of new tracker organs were being built and in 1920, hundreds of electro-pneumatic organs were installed. And as those electro-pneumatic organs had American organists in their thrall, so many distinguished nineteenth-century organs were discarded to make space.

What I celebrate about early twenty-first century organbuilding is that the last fifty years of intense study and experimentation have allowed American organbuilders to become masters in all styles of organ building. We have firms that build tracker organs based on historic principles, and tracker organs inspired by the idea of eclecticism. Other firms build electro-pneumatic organs with symphonic capabilities, or electro-pneumatic organs with the “American Classic” ethic. And I love them all.

Looking back over forty years, I wonder if that Schlicker organ was the best choice for St. Mark’s. I have not read the documents from the organ committee to know what drove or inspired that choice, and I don’t know the history surrounding it. But I bet that part of the decision was driven by the style of the day. Everyone was buying organs like that, whether or not history has proven them all to be the right choice. And we all wore paisley neckties.

I’d like to think that Mr. Schlicker would be pleased with the new home we’ve given his organ.

Through my travels during thirty years in the organ business, I know of many organs that were acquired by churches at the instigation of persuasive organists. Some of them were great successes. But some were under-informed mistakes based on the personal taste of the musician without proper consideration of the architecture or liturgy of the individual church. If an organ is to be a success, it needs to be a boat in the right water. You’d never wear blue socks with a pink shirt.

 

On Teaching

Organ Method XXI

Gavin Black

Gavin Black is Director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected] and his website is www.gavinblack-baroque.com.

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The rest of the discussion about manual changes—as found in this month’s column—is the last segment of the practical part of this method. As I mentioned in the introduction to last month’s column, it seems clear that a method cannot and should not aspire to include detailed instruction about every facet of organ playing. Since I consider it important for this method to discuss in some detail each of the fundamental skills that it is trying to teach—more prose and fewer examples than some method books—I must limit the scope. I cannot address everything about organ playing that might be important, or, to put it another way, cannot move on to very many of the “advanced” topics—or else the method will be too long. So this planned ongoing discussion does not include, for example, specifics about swell pedal technique or about ornamentation, just to mention two very different but important matters. 
 
The specific exercise for learning the physical feeling of manual changing that I include below was inspired by a casual remark made to me years ago by my great teacher, Eugene Roan. He said that you change manuals not with the hands but with the elbows. This led me to think about manual changing as being concerned primarily with the planes through which the arms move rather than specifically how the fingers operate. The rest of the exercise then developed through my applying to this concept the usual notion of practicing a physical skill in as simple, direct, and undistracted a way as possible. 
 
The rest of this method, when it is compiled into a book, will constitute some of the type of “introduction to the organ” material that is important for beginners to encounter, and that forms part of most organ methods. Even in the couple of years since I started this project, however, the standards and practices have changed as to what people expect to encounter in printed and bound books, and what they expect to find by exploring the Internet. Therefore, I have been reassessing exactly how much organ history and other such material to include, and how much to focus instead on suggestions for research. 
 
Therefore I have decided to postpone writing that part of the method: not for very long, but for long enough to live with (and revise) the existing part, to think at leisure about how to configure the rest of it, and, especially, to receive and assimilate feedback from readers of The Diapason and from my own students and various colleagues. I will, with next month’s column, return for a while to “traditional” topics: writing about teaching to teachers and organists, rather than writing about learning to students. 
 
At this point, I would be most grateful for any feedback or reaction to this whole run of columns—the proposed “method” as it now stands—and also specific thoughts about the question of how much written history of the organ or detailed discussion of stops and registration a book of this sort should include. 
This month’s column picks up exactly where last month’s left off.
 
You will probably want to follow these composers’ suggestions as closely as you can. The organ on which you are working may not have keyboards or stops with the same names as those that the composer has specifically mentioned. Keyboard names and stop names may not correspond perfectly in the ways that they are used or can be used, or in exactly what they sound like, especially if the organ on which you are playing belongs to a different school of organ building from what the composer knew or expected. The Rückpositiv, Oberwerk, Grand Orgue, and Récit of the last two examples might have to be replaced by Great, Swell, Choir, Solo, perhaps Echo, and so on. And while there may be some correspondence among some of those names (“Great” = “Grand Orgue”; “Récit” = “Swell”), in fact, divisions with names that correspond or even that are exactly the same are not necessarily even similar. If you want to reproduce Buxtehude’s R and O, you must try as best you can to figure out what sorts of sounds the composer expected from these keyboards and how they related to each other. The Oberwerk appears to be functioning as the echo sound, so presumably it is at least somewhat the quieter. Then, in the case of this piece, you can observe that both the Rückpositiv and the Oberwerk are played along with the Pedal division. So, if the balance is to be plausible throughout, the two manuals cannot be drastically different in volume, though they probably need to be somewhat different. You can try to reproduce these results using whatever keyboards your instrument has. 
 
There are two important points about this:
 
1) If you are playing a piece on an instrument that really is very similar to what a composer had in mind, then you can rely on manual indications (and everything else about registration) quite closely. 
 
2) The best way to learn how to use the keyboards and stops of the organ that you are using in a way that reflects what the composer might have expected is to hear or play instruments that are as much like what the composer knew as you can find. Once you internalize a sense of what the sounds indicated were like, or what a transition from one kind of sound to another was like, then you can work on finding those sounds and making those transitions work on your instrument. This will sometimes involve departing from the most closely corresponding stop names and keyboard names.  
 
In pieces of music that do not have any indications about manual changes from the hand of the composer, a player can nonetheless decide to change manuals from time to time. The choice to do this or not to do it is in large part something that arises out of the artistic tastes (and philosophical stance) of that player. As you continue to play the organ, you can refine your sense of when and how (and also why) you might want to change manuals. If a piece clearly falls into sections, then it might seem to make sense to use manual changes to delineate those sections. (Be on the lookout, however, for the possibility that changes in the writing—texture, or compass, or use of rhythm, for example—might cause the same registration to sound different, as this might be what the composer had planned.) If a piece is quite unified from beginning to end, a manual change might seem disruptive—though it also might enhance interest by adding variety. If the transition points where you are thinking of moving the hands from one keyboard to another are awkward and disruptive, then you might well want to decide not to do that manual change, even if you would prefer to hear the two passages on different sounds from one another. (Awkward in this situation usually means breaking a musical line that you would otherwise want to hear as an ongoing phrase. This is not about articulation, since an ongoing phrase can include detached notes. It is only about the effect of the change of sound.) You can also look for another, more successful, transition point.
 
Manual changes sometimes take place in circumstances in which there is plenty of time, and the physical act of moving your hands from one keyboard to another does not seem like a challenge or like something that has to be learned and practiced. This is most clearly the case when the manual change takes place across a rest. This would be the case, for example, with a manual change from measure 9 to measure 10 in Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in D Major, or immediately before the Alla Breve section of the same piece. Later on, if you wish to change manuals to begin the section marked Adagio, you will probably find that the shape of the transition makes it seem leisurely enough to be physically easy, even though there is not a rest as such.
 
However, there are also manual changes that take place while the music is ongoing, sometimes while it is moving very quickly indeed. These might be called one-gesture manual changes: part of the choreography of the playing. For these situations, it is important to specifically practice executing manual changes quickly but smoothly. 
 
 
Practicing a manual change
 
The key to beginning this sort of practice is to think of a one-gesture manual change as the act of moving the arms to the plane of the new keyboard while the fingers just continue to play. This is in lieu of thinking of this sort of manual change as a gesture led by the fingers. The following exercise will enable you to develop a solid feeling for this.
First, choose a very simple note pattern—one note at a time for one hand—that you can repeat indefinitely. This might well be a scale fragment such as that shown in Example 1, or something similar for the right hand, and an equivalent pattern—lower on the keyboard—for the left hand.
 
Play this pattern slowly, with whatever fingering seems simplest to you, on any organ keyboard. After a while, move your arm and hand to another keyboard at a point near the middle of your passage. Then, when you arrive next at the beginning of the passage, move back to the starting keyboard. This might look like Example 2.
 
Do this back and forth several times. Try not to look at your hands. Keep everything slow: not just the playing of the notes, but also the motion between keyboards. Try to feel that that motion takes place in the arm, and that the finger that is going to be first on the new keyboard each time just plays. Be sure that when you move from a higher to a lower keyboard that you do not land heavily on that lower keyboard.
 
When you have done this some with each hand and feel comfortable with it, start moving between keyboards at closer intervals, as shown in Example 3. (You should start this off at a slower tempo than where you left the example with the manual changes farther apart.)
 
This is still regular, planned motion. The next step is again to play your pattern in a loop, but to change keyboards at random, unplanned times. The simplicity and predictability of the pattern is crucial at this step: you shouldn’t have to think about anything except the feeling of the motion of moving from one keyboard to another. 
 
Next, go through this same procedure with a note pattern that is also very simple and predictable, but that covers a wider range on the keyboard, such as a scale through a whole octave or more, an arpeggio-based pattern, or a melody that you know extremely well. Continue to keep the hands separate.
 
The next two steps can be done in any order. The first is to go through the same process with patterns that are still utterly predictable but that involve more than one note at a time in one hand, as shown in Example 4.
 
If you are already getting comfortable with the process, you can probably start with the random changes of keyboard. If this is at all uncomfortable, go back to a planned pattern for a while, such as every other chord.
 
The other step is to combine the hands. Use a parallel or mirror pattern, such as that shown in Example 5, or something else simple. Make the manual changes regular at first, and the same in each hand, as shown in Example 6. Then make them opposite but timed together, as shown in Example 7.
 
Next, you can make random manual changes, but still timed together in the hands. Finally, you can try to change each hand at random times, but not at the same time. This is extremely difficult: if it throws you off, you need not do it. You can come back to it later, or not. It is interesting to try, but in a sense beyond what you need to get used to for applying this technique to manual changes in music that will normally be planned.

On Teaching

Gavin Black

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center in Princeton, New Jersey. He has written the On Teaching column in The Diapason since September 2007. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].

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Summer break

I am writing only briefly this month just to let everyone know that I am, for the first time since starting this column, going to take a summer vacation. I won’t be writing columns for the next few months and will return in October. 

When I and the column do return, I expect to resume with a few very practical columns arising out of things that some of my students, and a fellow teacher or two, have asked me about or brought to my attention recently: for example, the matter of helping students to choose specific pedalings for passages (something that I haven’t really addressed directly in the various columns devoted to developing pedal facility and technique) or the question of how to be sure, when blocking out fingerings early in the learning process, that those fingerings will work at a faster tempo. (It is interesting to me that a lot of students have this as a specific question. I have helped students think about it, but I haven’t yet written about systematic ways of approaching the matter.) 

I am going to spend some of the time off working on pulling together the organ method that was partly serialized in columns a couple of years ago. (I have tentatively decided to extract and publish first a stand-alone pedal method, and then proceed later with the rest of the book.) I am very grateful to readers for valuable feedback on this, which I will now be able to digest at some leisure. (And if anyone reading this has any further thoughts about it, please get in touch.)

Over the summer, we are going to work on plans for certain enhancements or additions to the column, initially revolving around video. I will be creating several short videos dealing—in a way that includes an element of direct demonstration that a written column can’t quite manage—with aspects of the teaching, learning, and practicing process. This is a new venture for me, and one about which I am quite excited. I am also concerned that I take the time to get it right. 

As always, I would welcome any communications from readers—especially during this brief break. Any feedback about recent columns, or ideas for future columns, thoughts about how to approach the video project, or other ideas about how to expand or enhance the “On Teaching” project will be greatly appreciated.

Meanwhile, enjoy the summer, and I will see you in the fall!

 

 

New Organs

 

M. P. Rathke, Inc., 

Indianapolis, Indiana

The Musical Instrument Museum, Phoenix, Arizona  

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M. P. Rathke, Inc., 

Indianapolis, Indiana

The Musical Instrument Museum, Phoenix, Arizona  

During autumn 2008 we were contacted by Kimberly Marshall, director of the Arizona State University School of Music, who spoke of a museum that would be unlike any other: the Musical Instrument Museum (MIM), then being built on the northern edge of Phoenix, would showcase instruments of virtually every nation, culture, and musical style. Dr. Marshall had been retained as consultant to the museum in the planning of its pipe organ exhibit, for which she suggested a working chamber organ, with its interior parts completely visible to interested eyes, yet protected from curious hands.

This see-through instrument, dubbed “The Visible Organ” at the time of its commissioning by donors Floyd and Marie Ganassi, is the product of our intriguing and rewarding collaboration with Kimberly Marshall and William DeWalt, MIM’s president. It features mechanical key and stop action and is housed in a case of quarter-sawn white oak with walnut accents and panels of ¼-inch tempered glass. The winding is via a weighted wedge bellows, which may be fed either by a rotary fan blower or by hand pumping in the traditional manner.

The organ was designed with a total of five stops, all divided treble and bass, of which the Twelfth and Seventeenth are currently prepared. The manual naturals are grenadil with arcaded key fronts; reverse-skunktail sharps are made from ebony flanked by holly. The pedal keys are maple with walnut sharps. The iron drawknobs and bellows handle were fashioned by Louise Pezzi of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; walnut pipe shades were designed and carved by Morgan Faulds Pike of Gloucester, Massachusetts. The dedicatory recital was played by consultant Kimberly Marshall on August 8, 2010. (More information on the museum is found in the “Here & There” column of this issue; see page 4.)

—Michael P. Rathke

MANUAL

8 Stopped Diapason

4 Principal

223 Twelfth  (prepared)

2 Fifteenth

135 Seventeenth (prepared) 

PEDAL

Permanently coupled to manual

 

Photo credit: Emil Dria

 

Harpsichord News

Larry Palmer
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More Duphly

November’s column on Jacques Duphly and his accompanied harpsichord pieces motivated two readers to send me their welcome compact disc recordings of solo harpsichord works by the 18th-century French composer. 

San Francisco-based harpsichordist Katherine Roberts Perl (www.kathyrobertsperl.com) serves up 68 minutes of Duphly favorites played on John Phillips’ superb replica of a 1707 Nicholas Dumont double harpsichord. Her chosen repertoire comprises five dance movements and the titled works La de Belombre, La Damanzy, Les Grâces, La Vanlo, La de la Tour, Médée, and La Forqueray, concluding with the composer’s most extended piece, his Chaconne in F (Dorian Recordings DOR-93169, recorded in 1996, released in 1998).

Yves-G. Préfontaine’s two-disc traversal of Duphly’s Pièces de Clavecin (ATMA Classique ACD2 2716) was recorded in November 2014 and issued in 2015. The Canadian artist utilizes a very lovely Hemsch-based two-manual instrument by Montréal builder Yves Beaupré. The extensive program, organized by keys, includes 27 works culled from all four books of Duphly’s harpsichord music.

Préfontaine also performs the lengthy F major/minor Chaconne, as does harpsichordist Medea Bindewald (on her Coviello Classics disc, cited in the November article). In comparing play-lists, I was fascinated to note the wide variance in tempi for this composition: Binewald plays it in 7 and a half minutes; Perl 8 minutes, 16 seconds; and Préfontaine 9 and a half minutes—wide enough variance that it sent me to the keyboard for my own read-through (since each of the recordings had seemed faster than I would play the piece).

I do not mean this to be critical of these fleet performances: references to Chaconne tempi in several widely-quoted sources (L’Affilard, 1705, and Pajot, 1732, for instance) suggest quick beats when these 18th-century remarks are translated into modern metronome markings. I was comforted to come across a 2007 reference to the findings of Dutch musicologist Jan van Biezen, who suggests that perhaps we read these arcane writings wrongly and points out that if we were to adjust the suggested speed to include both the back and forth movements of a mechanical device we might come closer to the more stately tempi that the music itself seems to suggest: approximately one beat equaling 78 or 79 MM (www.janvanbiezen.nl/articles.html—accessed “Tempo of French Baroque Dances,” February 28, 2016).

I have noticed for several decades that I now prefer slower tempi than I did in my younger years. Indeed students became quite used to my “I’d take that a bit slower” remark, especially when dealing with baroque music. It is a normal progression (or regression, if you wish): as we age, we move somewhat more slowly. I prefer to allow the music itself an unpressured time to unfold; the Chaconne seems to require both elegance and grace. Surely life must have moved more slowly in an age that did not have mechanized travel or instant communication. (I hope it is not too suggestive of a bad pun to conclude these thoughts with a phrase that composer Duphly might have understood: “chacun à son goût” [“each to one’s own taste”]?) 

 

Two more mystery novels

The harpsichord is mentioned thirteen times (the clavichord only once) in author Imogen Robertson’s novel Anatomy of Murder, set in the London of 1781. This second book featuring unlikely forensic sleuths Mrs. Harriet Westerman and Gabriel Crowther is a well-written page-turner dealing with the British aftermath of the American Revolution, skullduggery that besets the (fictional) His Majesty’s Theatre production of a new Italian opera starring a phenomenal soprano of unexpected parentage and a favorite continental castrato singer, plus the daily joys and sorrows of both titled and lower-class inhabitants of the fast-expanding and radically changing urban metropolis. (Pamela Dorman/Viking Books, 2012. ISBN 978-0-670-02317-2). 

A visit to Half Price Books, Dallas’s mega-emporium of previously owned reading material, resulted in the acquisition of another work from the pen of Donna Leone, the American expatriate author who resides in Venice. While musical references in Willful Behavior, the eleventh of her Commissario Guido Brunetti series (2002) are less frequent than those in the works I cited in my January 2016 column, there were four that stood out in this volume: an analogy to a Haydn Symphony, a similarity to a Scarlatti oratorio, the mention of Vivaldi’s baptismal church in Venice, and a plot twist reference to Puccini’s opera Tosca. Ms. Leone continues to be both lover and patron of classical music and her books serve as welcome guides to her adopted city for any musical armchair traveler. 

 

Semibrevity

Guest blogger Mandy Macdonald writes about Nelly Chaplin who performed on her 1775 Jacobus and Abraham Kirkman two-manual harpsichord early in the 20th century (illustrated with a picture of a similar 1755 Kirkman now in the collection of historic instruments at Musical Instrument Museums, Edinburgh). Free access is available at www.semibrevity.com, where you should also scroll down to read the amazing story of T. W. Taphouse, British collector of early instruments, who purchased his first Shudi and Broadwood 1773 harpsichord at age 19, in 1857!

The Semibrevity website continues to broaden our knowledge of these largely unfamiliar early proponents of early music on early instruments in its well-researched and beautifully illustrated postings.

 

Comments are always welcome. Address them to Dr. Larry Palmer [email protected] or 10125 Cromwell Drive, Dallas, Texas 75229.

 

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