Pipe Organs: Information, Acquisition and Care

Presented by the Associated Pipe Organ Builders of America

Members of Associate Pipe Organ Builders of America (APOBA) firms present an overview of their industry’s current and recent activity; discuss issues relating to the acquisition, restoration, and maintenance of pipe organs; and explain the resources APOBA provides and relevant programs the AGO and APOBA underwrite. Participants are encouraged to come with questions.

Ed Odell

Edward Odell, CAIO, is the great-great-grandson of Caleb Sherwood Odell, a co-founders of J.H. & C.S. Odell. He has worked in the pipe organ industry for more than twenty-five years, including seven at Austin Organs. He has significant experience in nearly every aspect of organ building; in addition to management, his current responsibilities at J.H. & C.S. Odell include mechanical and visual design, cabinet making, voicing, pipe making, and tonal finishing. Since 2002, he has exclusively devoted his time to the rebuilding and expansion of his family’s historic firm, to the point that J.H. & C.S. Odell is now fully outfitted and building new instruments, as well as carrying out detailed restoration work.

Matthew Bellocchio

Matthew Bellocchio is a project team leader and designer at Andover Organ Company in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He has held similar positions at Roche Organ Company in Taunton, Massachusetts; Marceau & Associates and Bond Organbuilders in Portland, Oregon; and Parsons Pipe Organs in Canandaigua, New York. He also leads Andover’s “Berkshires to Buffalo” maintenance team. He grew up in Brooklyn and began his career in 1969 as a tuner/technician with the Louis F. Mohr Company in the Bronx. He holds a Bachelor of Arts from St. Francis College in Brooklyn, and studied architecture at Pratt Institute. He studied organ privately, serving churches in New York and Massachusetts. He holds the American Institute of Organbuilders’ (AIO) Fellow Certificate, has chaired the AIO Education Committee, served on the AIO Board of Directors, and currently serves as AIO president. He has given presentations at national conventions of the AGO, AIO, and OHS.

Inspired Service Playing: How to Move From Here to There

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We might call this process “traveling music.” It includes such things as processional interludes, music before the children’s sermon, clergy movement in the chancel and preparation for communion. Transitions are often strictly musical, such as bridging between communion hymns or getting to the doxology. This workshop offers beginning to intermediate techniques for bridging gaps in the service, including a basic approach to modulation as well as tips on how to work with hymn motifs. Joyce Kull has done research on service transitions useful in a broad range of worship settings.

Joyce Shupe Kull

Joyce Shupe Kull, FAGO, Ch.M., DMA (organ performance, University of Colorado), teaches organ at the Metropolitan State University of Denver, as well as privately, and presents lectures and workshops. Her study of J.S. Bach’s Clavierübung, Part III, was awarded the Chancellor’s Dissertation Award in the Arts and Humanities in 1984. She has served as Organist-Choirmaster in churches throughout the United States, notably as Interim Director of Music and Organist at Saint John’s Cathedral, Denver. An active performer, she has been active in the Denver and Boulder Bach Festivals, and has published articles in The American Organist on Bach performance, American Guild of Organists certification, and pedagogical topics. She is a member of the Anglican Association of Musicians. In 2008, she was elected American Guild of Organists National Councillor for Education. She also serves on the Guild’s Executive Committee.

Shape-Note Singing: America’s Early Music

Shape-note singing is a participatory tradition of sacred choral music rooted in the work of America’s first composer—Boston’s own Willing Billings. This historical, hands-on workshop demonstrates links between the vibrant living traditions of the rural south, the Yankee tunesmiths’ of Colonial America, and their common pedagogical forbears in Elizabethan England, such as Thomas Morley and Henry Playford. The workshop focuses in particular on eighteenth-century composers from the Boston area—an opportunity to engage with this vital and historical aspect of American sacred music.

Tom Malone

Thomas B. Malone, DMA, is the senior lecturer in choral and community music at UMASS Lowell. His work builds on pedagogies from outside the mainstream to enliven and inform vocal music in the classroom and concert hall. His 2009 dissertation examined the cultural praxis of traditional teachers in the shape-note tradition, and his personal collection of original music in the shape-note idiom. The Champlain Harmony was published in 2010. As director of UMASS Lowell’s Choral Union, his recent performances include Dido and Aeneas, Olias of Sunhillow by Jon Anderson of Yes, and a complete choral performance of the seminal album What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye.

Rehearsal Techniques and Repertoire for Choirs of Boys and Girls

Children’s choir directors must take their singers seriously, honor their intelligence, offer a bold challenge, and expect the children’s best. Avoid “children’s music.” Simplistic music with banal lyrics insults kids’ intelligence and emerging spirituality. Children crave quality and love a challenge. They relish singing music of profundity and complexity.

Begin and end rehearsals on time. Fast-paced is good. Talk less. Sing more. Engage the imagination. Use imagery: “Is your breath a fire hose or a leaky garden hose?” Organize choir festivals. Observe other directors. Send your kids to RSCM training courses. “Nothing you do for children is ever wasted.”

Richard Webster

Richard Webster, FRSCM, is director of music and organist at Trinity Church, Boston, and music director of Chicago’s Bach Week Festival. In 2003, he was named organist and choirmaster emeritus of St. Luke’s Church in Evanston, Illinois, where, for thirty-one years, he led a distinguished music program. The acclaimed restoration of the church’s 1922 E. M. Skinner organ was completed under his leadership. As a composer, he is published by six publishing houses, including Advent Press, which features his music exclusively. Active as a choral clinician, recitalist, and hymn festival director, he has performed and recorded with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. His teachers include Peter Fyfe, Karel Paukert, and Wolfgang Rübsam. As a Fulbright scholar, he was organ scholar at Chichester Cathedral. He loves running and has completed twenty-five marathons, dressed variously as J.S. Bach, Abraham Lincoln, Paul Revere, Robin, the Easter Bunny, the Cat in the Hat, and Prince William.

The Organ as Teacher: The Legacy of Performance Pedagogy at Old West Church

Margaret Angelini Moderator with Barbara Bruns, Susan Ferre, and Anne Labounsky

Panelists discuss their personal histories of teaching organ performance. They focus on discoveries they have made at the Old West Church organ (C.B. Fisk, Op. 55) and at other remarkable teaching instruments, how these discoveries have informed their teaching styles, and what insights teachers can gain from these discoveries today.

Margaret Angelini

Margaret Angelini began her organ studies as a freshman at Wellesley College with Frank Taylor, and completed a master’s degree in organ performance at New England Conservatory with William Porter. Since then, she has given numerous performances throughout New England on organ, harpsichord, and carillon. She teaches piano and music theory at Stonehill College and also teaches carillon at Wellesley College, where is advisor to the twenty-five-member student Guild of Carillonneurs. She also serves as organist at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Sharon. She is an active member of the Boston chapter of the American Guild of Organists, where she has served on numerous committees, and has served as both sub-dean and dean. She has also served on the board of the Old West Organ Society, where, after holding many roles, she is now executive director.

Improvisation Pedagogy: Sustainable Musicianship

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At last, a sustainable improvisation pedagogy methodology! For a lifetime of improvisation endeavors, learn how to recycle classic vocal and organ works from Gregorian chant to Lemmens’ Fanfare; Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier Preludes to Franck’s Prelude, Fugue, and Variations; and Argentinian tango to Ella Fitzgerald. This improvisation pedagogy method (detailed in a web-handout) provides tools for musicians to integrate improvisation into daily practice. As improvisation enhances listening, repertoire studies, harmonic and melodic understanding, and communicative playing, it’s great for your musical health. Make the green choice and care for this mother earth of musical arts!

Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra

Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra resuscitates historic improvisation pedagogy in her acclaimed Bach and the Art of Improvisation (professional-level), Improvisation Endeavors (entry-level), and Muse (a cappella works for children). She performs solo recitals throughout North American and Europe, early music concerts with Voci dell’Anima, composes organ and choral works, and presents and teaches improvisation courses on historical instruments nationally and internationally. Her mentors include Delbert Disselhorst, Delores Bruch, Harald Vogel, William Porter, Edoardo Bellotti, historic instruments and builders, and decades of colleagues, collaborators, and students. From 1989–2008, she served as professor of music at Bethany College and Eastern Michigan University, and from 1996–2002 as senior researcher at the Göteborg Organ Art Center (Sweden). She is a Fleur De Son Classics recording artist; her recordings include Organ Works of Franz Tunder; Bach, Improvisations, and the Liturgical Year; Froberger on the 1658 De Zentis; and Bach’s Teacher Böhm and Improvisation.

Stars and Pipes Forever: Organ Works for National Days

This workshop generously sponsored by the Central Maryland Chapter of the AGO

Over the last decade, organists in many denominations have felt a greater need for music with a patriotic theme. Whether searching for repertoire for recitals or for voluntaries for worship on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Independence Day, Memorial Day, and other national occasions, or when responding to national tragedies, thoughtful organists hope to find music that is appropriate to the occasion while maintaining musical and theological integrity. Many contemporary composers have responded to this need, and publishers have made resources available. Compositions from the past have also been discovered and newly published.

Wayne Wold

Wayne L. Wold, DMA, AAGO, is associate professor, college organist, and chair of the Music Department at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland, and music director/organist at First Lutheran Church of Ellicott City, Maryland. From 1996 through 2013, he was director of chapel music at Camp David. Active as an improviser and recitalist, he has presented numerous hymn festivals and concerts, and as a harpsichordist he has performed with numerous chamber music ensembles and with the Maryland Symphony Orchestra. A prolific composer and author, he has more than three hundred published compositions to his credit, including organ works, anthems, hymns, journal articles, reviews, and three books. A long-time member of the American Guild of Organists, he has held offices in the Cumberland Valley, Baltimore, and Central Maryland chapters; has composed commissioned works for two regional conventions; and currently serves on the Guild’s Committee for Musicians in Part-Time Employment.

The Young Organist Collaborative: Attracting Youth to the Organ

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The Young Organist Collaborative is a successful initiative, launched in 2002, designed to “Invest in the Next Generation of Organists”. This presentation provides a detailed description of the Collaborative model, with information for replication. The Collaborative offers organ lessons to students ages 10–16 who demonstrate keyboard facility through a piano audition. The Collaborative provides first-year students with sixteen organ lessons, and second-year students with eight lessons. Students play in an annual May recital in May. To date, more than one hundred young people have participated.

Bruce Adami

Bruce Adami is organist at Christ Episcopal Church, Exeter, New Hampshire. He has given solo organ recitals throughout New England. For more than thirty years, he has taught organists of all ages. From 1984 through 2004, he was director of music and organist at Brookside Congregational Church, UCC, in Manchester. He holds a Bachelor of Music in organ performance from the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, where he studied with Haskell Thomson. He is active in the New Hampshire chapter of the American Guild of Organists (AGO), for which he has served as treasurer and dean. In 2009, he was the faculty coordinator for the AGO Pipe Organ Encounter in Manchester. Since 2008, he has taught students through the Young Organist Collaborative, and currently serves on the Young Organist Collaborative Committee.