February 2017
Nunc Dimittis
Robert V. (Bob) Clement, 67, of Avondale, Pennsylvania, died November 18 after a brief illness. An electrical engineer by profession, his greatest passion was music. He started piano lessons at age five. and on a visit to…
The A Team:
Antoinette Vischer’s
Commissions for Harpsichord
Marguerite Bertha Antoinette Vischer (born February 13, 1909, in Basel, Switzerland) was the only child of a wealthy banker and his wife. She began her musical career as a…
Why it matters.
An hour ago, I finished my last “Christmas” tuning. It’s been a fun season involving lots of organs—some wonderful, and some a little less wonderful. I started tuning organs in Boston in 1984 when I joined Angerstein &…
Disjunct Motion III
For reasons that were random and fleeting, I did not write columns for November 2016 or January 2017. Thus these three columns on disjunct motion have themselves been presented in a disjunct manner . . . .
As I have…
We first saw the much-altered 1875 Steer & Turner organ at First Baptist Church in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota, in 2003. There were dead notes, some pipes were leaning and about to fall over, the pedal wiring included a number of…
Turning nineteen is a pretty awesome event—exploding horizons, new responsibilities, new friends, leaving home for an exciting new place to live, long-held goals coming within range, and dreaming ever bigger for the future.
The nineteen-…
This is the third installment in a series of articles that will offer ideas for enriching service playing. (The first installment, on hymn playing, appeared in the September 2016 issue of The Diapason; the second installment, on…
Buzard Pipe Organ Builders, Champaign, Illinois, Opus 44
Grace Episcopal Church,
Sandusky, Ohio
Buzard Pipe Organ Builders Opus 44, a three-manual and pedal instrument, contains 47 independent registers and 61 ranks of pipes, retaining…
M. P. Rathke, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana, Opus 8
Newtown United Methodist Church, Cincinnati, Ohio
From the director of music
II Corinthians 5:17 reminds us that “[t]he old becomes new again.” Organbuilder Michael Rathke’s Opus 8 at…