Ann Howard Jones

Professor Ann Howard Jones is known throughout the country for her skill as a choral conductor and pedagogue; her ability to elicit technical and musical mastery from singers and conductors is unparalleled. She will lead conducting master classes focused on repertoire and appropriate conducting technique. Participants will be selected in two categories, advanced and intermediate, with one participant conducting during each of three fifteen-minute slots in each workshop.

The choir will comprise convention-goers. Scores for singer-participants will be provided.

Ross Wood

Ross Wood became associate organist and choirmaster of The Church of the Advent, Boston, in 2001. He studied with Russell Saunders at Eastman and Robert Anderson at Southern Methodist University. From 1985 through 2001, he was associate organist at Trinity Church, Copley Square.

Among Mr. Wood’s recital appearances are New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral, St. Thomas Church, Church of St. Mary the Virgin, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and Trinity Church, Wall Street. In France, he has appeared at Notre-Dame de Paris on two occasions and at festivals in Bourges and Carcassonne. Equally appreciated as an accompanist, he has four critically acclaimed recordings with the Trinity Choir. He accompanied that choir on tour at Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s Cathedral, as well as Ely and Chichester cathedrals. As a freelancer, has performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under James Levine and with the Boston Pops under Keith Lockhart.

Mark Dwyer

Well-known as both a skilled church musician and concert artist, Mark Dwyer is the organist and choirmaster of The Church of the Advent, Boston. He has held similar positions at St. Paul’s Church, K Street in Washington, D.C., and The Cathedral of All Saints, Albany. He has presented recitals throughout the eastern United States and in England. His work as conductor, accompanist, and recitalist may be heard on the JAV, Arsis, and AFKA recording labels.

Dr. Dwyer is organist and choirmaster and on the teaching faculty of Saint Michael’s Conference for Young People, an Episcopal Church summer conference for one hundred young adults. He also served on the faculty of the Dexter School in Brookline, Massachusetts. He is a graduate of New England Conservatory. In 2012, Nashotah House Seminary awarded him a Doctor of Music, honoris causa, in recognition of his contributions to the field of sacred music.

St. Paul’s Cambridge

The steady influx of Catholics into Protestant Cambridge led to the retrofitting of a disused Congregational church by 1873, followed by the present building of 1915–1923 to plans of Edward Graham, heavily indebted to Verona’s Romanesque masterpiece, San Zeno Maggiore. A bell in the elegantly slender campanile bears a wistful inscription from Isaiah: “Vox clamantis in deserto”—a Catholic voice crying out in the hard Protestant wilderness that is Harvard Square. Since 1963, Saint Paul’s has been home to a boy-choir school whose ensembles sing daily offices in a sumptuous acoustic—one which, alas, has never been graced with a purpose-built, entirely new organ. Jesse Woodbury’s Opus 251 of 1904 was enlarged, electrified, and installed in the gallery in 1924 by local organ builder Paul Mias. Casavant supplied a new console in 1947, then, in 1959, a two-manual unenclosed section in the south transept. Among the area’s first Casavants from tonal director Lawrence Phelps, it mirrored the aspirations of the day right down to a bee-in-a-bedpan sixteen-foot Krummhorn (since removed). More recent work falls under the banner of renovation: tonal changes in the 1970s by Arthur Birchall; a new, Aeolian-Skinner-style console in 1999 by Robert Turner; and a constipation of digital voices, including the entire Chancel Swell.

St Paul Cambridge

 Jesse Woodbury & Co., Opus 251, 1904

St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church

The first Saint Andrew’s was a small chapel built and dedicated in 1894, expanded in 1921 and again in 1931. A parish house arrived in the late 1940s, and in the 1950s the sanctuary was enlarged together with a new education wing. The first organ was a ten-rank Wicks of injudicious unification. When Donald Teeters arrived in 1957, he began a slow campaign for a new organ. Eventually, Donald Willing, one of the era’s prominent writers and thinkers on organ design, was brought in as adviser (at the time, he was organist at Wellesley Congregational Church down the road), and the commission was entrusted to Casavant Frères, under the tonal direction of Lawrence Phelps and supervised by Karl Wilhelm. The new instrument was dedicated in February 1965.

The church’s previous organist, J. Harrison Kelton, is responsible for the new organ, which, when completed in 2006, was Juget-Sinclair’s largest work to date. While some acoustical improvements have been made in the chancel and crossing (really more of a sharp left turn from nave to chapel), the room remains a stubbornly dry ring into which the builders decided to throw a thirty-four-stop raging bull. With its crisp, balanced mechanical key action, the centrally located detached console reaches leftward to the Great and right to the Swell, with Pedal on both sides. While not copying any particular organ, the tonal language here is decidedly French, particularly the bracing reeds, ringing tierce combinations, and roaring Pedal.

St. Andrew’s Wellesley

Juget-Sinclair, Opus 24, 2005

The First Church of Christ, Scientist

The Mother Church and headquarters for Christian Science worldwide, The First Church of Christ, Scientist’s original Romanesque Revival building opened in 1894 on an unusual trapezoidal lot and was quickly outgrown; the adjacent Extension of 1904–1906 seats some 3,000. Architect Charles Brigham’s original Ottoman-inspired design was substantially altered by Solon Spencer Beman along classical Renaissance lines, dispensing with plans for corner towers and a minaret-cum-campanile. The result owes much to Venice’s Santa Maria della Salute. A belt of New Hampshire granite around the Extension’s base cleverly ties the two disparate buildings together. The 1934 publishing house building is home to the Mary Baker Eddy Library and its famous Mapparium. I.M. Pei & Partners, with Araldo Cossutta, fashioned the surrounding administrative buildings and reflecting pool in the early 1970s.

The three-manual Farrand & Votey organ for the original edifice comes from that builder’s five short years of existence, between 1893 and 1898. Some of its pipes were retained in Aeolian-Skinner’s otherwise new and fairly typical three-manual of 1951, Opus 1202. While the 1894 façade was retained, the organ itself was placed in the ceiling so as to increase space for the 235-rank organ next door in the Extension.

Aeolian-Skinner’s Opus 1203 is the largest single organ the firm ever built (to begin with, there are five Pedal mixtures). G. Donald Harrison and consultant Lawrence Phelps collaborated on the tonal design. Having worked for Aeolian-Skinner from 1944 to 1948, Phelps had spent a brief period with Walter Holtkamp before returning to Boston for this project. (Phelps’ wife, Ruth Barrett Arno Phelps, was the Mother Church organist.) The complex scheme includes four unenclosed departments, each with multiple-mixtured choruses and cornet voices, against three enclosed departments. The Solo lives apart from the rest, in a separate, elevated chamber speaking out of the circular grille at the upper left, where the original 1906 Hook-Hastings Echo had been located. Altered by Jason McKown and Jack Steinkampf in 1980 and 1981, the organ underwent a complete mechanical refurbishment by Foley-Baker, Inc. between 1997 and 2000. A now-aged Phelps returned to coordinate all work, including a few changes and additions. Tonal work was handled by Austin Organs, Inc. under the direction of David Broome and Daniel Kingman, the latter doing much of the on-site finishing.

Aeolian-Skinner Organ Co., Opus 1203, 1952

Aeolian-Skinner Organ Co., Opus 1203, 1952

Methuen Memorial Music Hall

Few organs thrown out of their original locations have landed as gracefully as Methuen’s. Installed in 1863 on the stage of the original Boston Music Hall, Walcker’s four-manual instrument was a showcase of novelty: pneumatic action, sliderless cone-valve windchests, two swell enclosures (including part of the Pedal), a plethora of curiously made flutes and free reeds, a crescendo device, and what would prove the first thirty-two-foot reed (free, not beating) heard on these shores. But as soon as 1881, the newly founded Boston Symphony Orchestra began jostling for space around the organ’s muscled herms, winning the turf battle in 1884. The instrument, which had cost $60,000, was sold for $5,000, removed to storage, and sold again for $1,500 to its savior, Edward Francis Searles.

To house the organ, Searles commissioned an Anglo-Dutch-style hall from Henry Vaughan, English-born architect of the National Cathedral. This great room served as Searles’ music salon from 1909 until his death, in 1920. From thence the property passed through the hands of Ernest M. Skinner, whose workshop it was until his bankruptcy, to a civic organization that has operated it as a cultural center since 1946.

At Methuen, the Treat Organ Company put the pipes on new slider chests and provided a terrace-jamb console, preserving Walcker’s original in-built keydesk with its colored porcelain indicators. During Skinner’s ownership of the hall and organ, a few tonal changes were made, but nothing so drastic as the renovation undertaken by Aeolian-Skinner in 1947. The mechanism was sped up, the console modernized, and almost half the pipes replaced to conform to the firm’s house style. In its first decade, the Andover Organ Institute, guided by Arthur Howes, brought the instrument to public notice and played an important role in shaping post-war organ reform thinking. Andover Organ Company, the organ’s curators for decades, installed a Great reed chorus in 1971; more recently they have again updated the console, moved Aeolian-Skinner’s spiky Krummhorn from Choir to Positiv, and installed a smoother clarinet in its place. Regular summer Wednesday recitals are supplemented by special events throughout the year.

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E.F. Walker and Company, Opus 200, 1863
Aeolian-Skinner Organ Company, Inc., Opus 1103, 1947

E.F. Walker and Company, Opus 200, 1863