it’s not so bad because the action will be proportionately lighter.  Then you don’t have to worry.

BD:    Are there some organs that you really have to fight in order to get the sound you want?

DS:    Oh, sure!  There are some organs, either by nature of their size or their construction, that will have mechanical actions that are very, very heavy.  In the case of a very large mechanical action instrument, as Hans Steketee, who was the head of Flentrop once said, “The action can’t be like a harpsichord if the instrument is this big.”  I think, to an extent, he’s right.  There’s a gravity inherent in the sound quality of a very large organ.  You want to be careful

BD:    Coming back to the mean-tone organ, is it difficult to find the audience receptive to something that’s going to sound a little bit different than an ordinary piano or an ordinary orchestra?

DS:    Most of the time, no.  In the case of a mean-tone organ, the audience who is going to come to hear this, for the most part, will be well aware of what it’s getting.  This would be like a clientele that will go out to taste certain red burgundies.  They’ll all know what their favorite vineyards are.  On the other hand, the sound is so delicious and so intense when you hear it, that if you were unaware that you were hearing an instrument in unique tuning, you probably wouldn’t think about it.  A musician would think about it because they think about tuning all the time...

BD:    ...but the ordinary guy would say, “Boy, this is a great instrument.”

DS:    Exactly!  And he might add, “Boy, I’ve never heard this music with such power.”  For instance, think about a beautiful Just third.  The mean-tone tuning is built around a system of eight perfect major thirds with slightly narrowed fifths.  So when you sit on one chord, it has a beautiful, other-worldly sort of dead-on ring to it, close to Just Intonation because the third and the octave would be Just, but the fifth would be slightly beaty.  You could see why early composers like to sit on one harmony for a while.  You didn’t need to leave.  It was really beautiful.  The next person you hear about that from is Debussy.  Cesar Franck would scream at him in improvisation class, “Modulate!  Modulate!” and Debussy would calmly look up from the piano and say, “But, I like it where I am.”  [Both laugh]

BD:    [Sarcastically]  Remember The Lost Chord?  Well, I found it!

DS:    Right!  That’s it.  [Lots of laughter]

BD:    Seriously, can we say that some of these sixteenth century guys were the first minimalists?

DS:    I don’t think they thought of it in the same way.  They didn’t have the conventions to rely on.  Minimalism is, in effect, a kind of superimposition and a flouting of convention at the same time, whereas the older study of music involved music much as an extension of mathematics and theology.  Parodies were relatively rare, and you certainly wouldn’t have found them much in organ music.  There are some, though.  There is one parodistic piece by Hans Kotter.  It’s a dance that is written all in parallel fifths, and it’s meant to ridicule earlier fifteenth century music.  It’s a wonderful piece to hear, but he’s just thumbing his nose.  The other night, I just listened to a remarkable piece by William Byrd, the anthem Oh Lord, Make Thy Servant Elizabeth.  The interesting thing is when you hear that piece, you can tell that he is not parodying but actually employing an older style, because the piece was written for a state occasion.  You have a feeling that he was trying to equate her, at least artistically, with the Catholic Tudors, and therefore establish the legitimacy of her end of the throne.  On this particular compact disc, you have the opportunity to compare it with pieces more typically Byrd.  But then suddenly you get into this anthem, and in about the middle of it you realize that he’s employing the language of Taverner in the beautiful, undulating harmonies, and the very pungent, resonant dissonances that Tallis uses all the time — lots of lowered sevenths and so forth.  The language is more florid, too with the disconnected ‘amen’ that reflects earlier, pre-Reformation English church music.  So maybe that’s a parody or maybe that was a conscious attempt to dignify Elizabeth’s Queenship by the use of a different style.  Who knows?

BD:    Was this musical caricaturing?

DS:    To a point.  This is music used in the time-honored way of using it for politics, but probably with a more savory aspect, say, than we’d think of some twentieth century Soviet music.  This wasn’t employed in a servile way to the state, but just as a way of adorning an occasion, like the motets of Mouton and others like that.  But you get into a piece like The Iron Foundry by Mosolov, and you realize that this piece is written to reflect an industrial state.  There’s a clever and ingenious effort given to the music, but it’s definitely subservient to what’s going on!  Have you ever heard that piece?

BD:    No, I don’t know it.

DS:    Oh, it’s wild!  Gunther Schuller did it several years ago.   He did programs devoted to some very eccentric twentieth century music.  The Mosolov was one, and he did the John Alden Carpenter ballet called Skyscrapers.

BD:    That one I know.  I’m sure it all worked as a program.

DS:    Oh, yeah.  Absolutely!

BD:    I’m thinking of doing some programming in October for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Revolution.  It needs to be political, ‘vita brevis, ars longa,’ or something like that!

DS:    Sure.  Oh, of course!

BD:    I will play music written for the politics of the time to say the political life is dead, the system is dead, but we can still play the music once in a while just to know what it was.

DS:    Sure.  I think that’s right.  In some cases the music is enduringly beautiful, just in the same way that very decadent political systems can produce music and art that’s exquisite.  Personal opinions about royalism aside, the Ancien Régime in eighteenth century France produced exquisite music.  The very late Byzantine Empire, when Constantinople was just a city and really no empire anymore, still produced incredibly beautiful artwork.  It doesn’t always have anything to do with the political stability.

BD:    We’re talking all around this, so let me ask one of my favorite questions.  What is the purpose of music?

DS:    That’s a good question!  [Both laugh]  I don’t know. I can say that it seems to fulfill an artistic need that painting and sculpture and architecture and theater don’t tend to do by themselves.  What it is, is hard to explain.  A friend of mine who is a wonderful piano technician and composer says, “Do you realize that we spend our entire lives either regulating how, or doing it ourselves, the act of people wiggling the air?”  Our profession depends on how we wiggle the air.  [Both laugh]  Now what effect does that have on the listeners?  It sort of has everything.  It has excitement, tenderness, bravado, pathos, all the different things you could go through.  So what is the purpose of music?  I’m not sure.

BD:   

not just early music, but obviously you have a passion for new music, too.  So how do you select what you will play on this or that program?

DS:    The next large solo program I’m going to do is on September 13th, and in this case I was asked back to Morgan Simmons Evening Organ Recital Series at Fourth Presbyterian Church.  A couple of years ago I played a standard repertoire program of Bach, Messiaen, Alain, César Franck, and Maurice Duruflé.  Morgan asked me back with the proviso that I play works of Chicago composers, and he has also composed a suite in three movements for me.  Ralph Shapey’s Variations will be on the program and also Frank Ferko’s Symphonie Brève; Sowerby, of course.  We’ll end the program with Fast and Sinister from his G Major Symphony, which is a wonderful piece.  In Sowerby’s own words, he said, “Fast for the hearer, and sinister for the player.”  [Both laugh]  We will begin with the Dudley Buck E Flat Major Sonata.

BD:    I didn’t realize he was a Chicagoan!

DS:    Oh, absolutely.  He was at St. James Cathedral for a while.  We will also do his E Flat Major Sonata in Four Movements that ends with a fugue on Hail, Columbia.  It’s really a good piece.  There will also be a piece by Wilhelm Middelschulte, who used to be at Holy Name Cathedral, and Eric DeLamarter, who was one of Morgan Simmons’ predecessors at Fourth Presbyterian.

BD:    Anything by Richard Proulx?

DS:    No.  What tended to exclude pieces was there just wasn’t enough room.  This material worked out well as a program.

BD:    So, going back to my original question, how do you decide which ones to use?

DS:    In this case, the pieces were requested.  In the case of a solo recital, generally speaking I put together pretty good programs, geared to a certain amount to the kind of audience I might expect to reach.  For instance, last March I was asked to do a fortepiano recital at Mary Baldwin College.  I thought the smartest thing would be to do Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, so I chose a selection that I thought would provide a good psychological snap-shot of each composer in the way that the music was written and presented.  Then I also included a piece of Mozart that I like very, very much, K553/494 in F major.  It’s a very large sonata, almost a half hour long with all the repeats.  I think it’s a wonderful piece and it doesn’t tend to be heard quite as much as some of the others.  So that was really a matter of personal choice, a piece that I find interesting and I think audiences like very much, too.

BD:    This worked well on fortepiano?

DS:    Oh, of course.  Needless to say, what Mozart doesn’t?

BD:    Do you think Mozart would be happy hearing his music on a Steinway?

DS:    I don’t know, though I will say that what the Steinway gives you in great dynamic range, unfortunately loses what the older instrument gives you with regard to changes of color, articulation and clarity.  That is almost always to be considered.  It’s not to say that you can’t do some very beautiful performances of this music on the modern piano, but there’s always something that you sacrifice, mainly because you have to do too much with dynamics.  Because of its great resonance, the modern piano only gives you an illusion of articulation.

BD:    Since you work with the different instruments, would there be something to be said for changing instruments in the middle of a concert?

DS:    I think it’s misleading to do a Mozart sonata on fortepiano, and then switch to Schumann on a Steinway because the piano for which Schumann wrote is equally distinct from the modern Steinway as the piano for which Mozart wrote.  To believe anything else is to take a Darwinian view of instrumental development.  Composers wrote for the instruments they had at hand, exploiting what were sometimes both strengths and weaknesses.  The organs of the early 19th century and back had purposefully unsteady wind, so you would have to know how to breathe.  You could literally ride the wind of the instrument, and it gave you much more the idea that the organ was a wind instrument that’s controlled by a keyboard.

BD:    It was a living, breathing apparatus.

DS:    Absolutely!  You bet.  You not only can control the way that the palate opens with mechanical action, but in this case you really can control the way the wind enters, and that gives you a great deal of tactile power.  This is just the same as a beautiful touch on a very well-voiced harpsichord allows you a good deal of sonic nuance vis-à-vis the way you brush the plector and pass the string.

BD:    When you’re playing a concert on one instrument, do you take into account all of these other factors to color your performance of each piece, and do you alter your approach for each piece to accentuate the virtues and defects that you may or may not have on that instrument?

DS:    To the best of one’s ability.  If you were on a modern organ that has steady wind and equal temperament and electric action, the decisions you make in playing Bach and Lübeck certainly are brought to bear.  Some characteristics, such as ornamentation or rhythmic treatment, would be doable.  It’ll never happen quite in the same way.  For instance, on an instrument with steady wind, when you play a large chord you can’t imitate the wonderful inbreathing of the instrument.  Suddenly the instrument draws wind and the tone develops in a split second, and that’s inimitable.  It gives it a very cushioned edge.  It’s nothing like the attack of a wind band, but it fulfills the same purpose.  If you think about it, organ music was certainly wind related.  It was related to the harpsichord and the clavichord, but not predicated on them.  But by the time you get into the 19th century, organ music tended to be less fashionable, and gradually became piano-dominated with the idea of continuous legato, and many chords attacked sharply and staccato.  Finally it was necessary to affect a steadier winding system.  For instance, if you play Marcel Dupré, it’s very, very hard to render a lot of his pieces on an instrument without steady wind because you can’t get all the very sharp, loud, almost orchestral attacks he wants.  His style is pianistic, and therefore you have to be able to depend on some of the same characteristics.  But certainly, on any given instrument you can make a certain amount of compensation.  A good musician will do that.

BD:    I never thought about non-steady wind.  Ever since we got rid of the little boy pumping the organ, I assumed that the wind would be on an even pressure.

DS:    Oh, not at all!  In fact at this point, we now go to great lengths to have organs built so that wind can be raised by hand or by foot, and that also motors for such instruments are built painstakingly, with the idea that you’d be able to engineer the same effect with electricity in case you don’t have a calcant — you know, a bellows man.  When I played at Wellesley, I had human winding.  It’s not unsteady at all.  It’s no more unsteady than the supplying of the wind by electricity, if the bellows person knows what he or she is doing.  I had a very lithe German girl, and with one bellows being worked from above and the other from the feet, it made a constant, very slow-motion aerobic exercise on the part of the bellows person.  Of course, you invited your bellows person out at the end to take a bow with you, because the soul of your performance really came from that person.  If she decided to stop, that’s the end of the program.  [Both laugh]  It’s all by way of saying that the older music

BD:    We have been talking about organ, fortepiano and harpsichord.  How do you divide your time among these instruments?  Are you primarily an organist, primarily a harpsichordist, primarily a pianist?

DS:    This is sometimes confusing.  I would like to be able to answer the question better myself from time to time!  Suffice it to say, right now I’m an organist and modern pianist because of some projects coming up.  Then shortly after that I’ll turn into a harpsichordist/fortepianist again for a while.  Then I’m due to turn into a pianist again, a modern pianist, and it sort of goes like that.

BD:    So you’re really a keyboardist?

DS:    I guess so.  I remember the organ builder John Boody once called me a musical omnivore, and I guess that maybe is the most accurate description.

BD:    [Laughs] Is that good or bad?

DS:    It’s good in the respect that you have a very diversified experience of different styles and different aesthetics, and if you can absorb those well, they do nothing but enrich your musical language.  On the minus side, you’ll never be able to learn one large corpus of repertoire on one instrument that some other people could do.

BD:    Generally it seems that performers are either mostly organists who dabble in harpsichord, or mostly harpsichordists who dabble on the organ a little bit, or mostly fortepianists who occasionally use a Steinway.

DS:    There are exceptions.  Gustav Leonhardt’s a good example of someone who’s a magnificent organist and harpsichordist.  In his case, what he’s done is steeped himself in the 17th and 18th centuries.  He really lives in the era, but he plays both instruments interchangeably.  After the last organ recording of his I heard, I take back everything I ever might have said about his maybe being a little uncomfortable with the organ, because that sounded magnificent.  With the harpsichord, I always though he was Jovian; a wonderful figure!  On the other hand, you still can learn a pretty large corpus of repertoire on each instrument, and read a lot.  For instance, as an organist I find that my rhythm and sense of nuance is complemented by the fact that I play chamber music.  A lot of organists don’t get to do that, so I feel fortunate in the perspective it gives me.  It improves your rhythm and also your reaction to things that happen within other people.  Therefore your listening is honed more carefully.

BD:    In chamber music, you have to listen more than feel.  When you’re playing alone you can feel and listen.

DS:    Absolutely.

BD:    Is there new music being written for harpsichord that is of value?

DS:    I think so, though I’m never certain about the harpsichord’s viability in 20th century music.  I know this will raise a great hue and cry.  I’ve certainly played my share of it, in fact I have a CD of chamber music of Elliott Carter, Ilja Hurník, Dominick Argento, and the de Falla Concerto.  It’s with Rembrandt Camber Players, and Patrice Michaels Bedi singing in the Argento songs.  I think composers have used it very creatively, but I question the wisdom of subjecting the instrument to equal temperament because automatically that makes it lose its focus.  A composer once said to me that in her opinion the harpsichord tended to lose pitch as you came down from the stage, and I tend to agree.  Equal temperament, and an overly loud body of collaborative instruments, i.e. modern instruments, tend to make it a different animal than it really is.  Very cleverly the Poulenc Concert Champêtre is written so the harpsichord plays against the orchestra most of the time.  The orchestra stops and the harpsichord does something.  Only occasionally do you have to do one of these passages where you really feel you could be playing anything you want and no one would notice!  On the other hand, the music itself, in the hands of a good composer, is of excellent value.

BD:    Hence my earlier remark that we should go to Ben Johnston or Lou Harrison who work in micro tone and mean-tone to write something for the harpsichord.

DS:    Mayhap.  I’d be curious to see how it worked.  I know a certain corpus of new music for the harpsichord, but I can’t say I know what might be considered to be on the cutting edge.  The Southeastern Historical Keyboard Society sponsors what’s called the Aliénor Competition, which is for new harpsichord works.  That’s been going on for several years, and it promotes the cause of new music composed for the instrument; a variety of approaches and also the incentive for people to play the works.

BD:    What advice do you have for a composer who wants to write something for the harpsichord?

DS:    On the pure technical level, confine yourself to a range of contra-F to F-3.  Count on two eight-foot choirs of strings and one of four-foot, maybe a buff stop and the use of hand stops.  Then grab your score paper and go!

BD:    Beyond that, it’s open to the imagination?

DS:    As much as you can reach with your hands.  I did have a composer write me a nose-note once.  [Both laugh]  The only way I could get the note was with my nose, and she said it was okay if I played it that way.  It was a low sonority, and unfortunately I had both hands otherwise occupied up higher on the keyboard.  She still wanted this note, so I said, “Is it okay if I play it with my nose?”  I had enough time to get to it, so it was fine.  There was a certain comic effect on the audience.  I remember once playing an organ recital where I had to take a stop off with my foot.  Unfortunately it was the end of a very, very beautiful exotic-sounding kind of piece.  The ending should be magic, and I brought my left foot up, turned the stop off and there was instant hilarity in the audience.  We sort of lost the mood there.

BD:    Couldn’t that have been taken care of with a foot pre-set?

DS:    No, the organ was mechanical.  I was playing from memory, so there was no possibility of a page-turner or register who knows what you’re doing.  It’s a good way to do it; you just have to make sure that you’re shielded from view.  [Both laugh]  Traditionally the older instruments were not always built so that you could see the organist.  They’re remote and you have a repositive behind you.  In a way, actually that’s a nice place to make your nest and do all your mechanical changes when necessary...  or in the case of one noted artist, always take a very big beer to the master class you are teaching. [More laughter]

BD:    Where should the audience look?  Should they look ahead at the front of the church, or should they look back at the organ, or should they look up or down, or what?

DS:    Do whatever you want!  In a church that had chairs, I knew a priest who would always have the folks turn their chairs around so they could look up and back at the west end, which was where the organ was.

BD:    But you can’t turn pews around.

DS:    That’s true, but you can turn your neck if you want, or look at the stained glass windows if it’s an afternoon recital, or read your program if they’ve left the lights high enough.

BD:    When you’re playing harpsichord in the middle of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, is that a completely different feeling for you?

DS:    Certainly.  There’s a radical difference between playing the harpsichord in a period instrument ensemble and being in a work like Haydn

BD:    Do you play differently in concert than you do in the recording studio?

DS:    Sometimes, yes, I think you’re shooting for something different.  You’re certainly shooting for a personal interpretation, but in some ways what you do in a recording studio, while spontaneous to an extent, is more calculated.  You want to make sure that you play cleanly, in a way that you know is going to last innumerable playings

This interview was recorded at the studios of WNIB, Chicago, on August 9, 1992.  Portions (along with recordings) were used on WNIB a few weeks later, and again in 1997.  This transcription was made and posted on this website in 2012.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here.

Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001.  His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.