Scan 15
Musical Courier 1903-01-28: Vol 46 Iss 1192, 1903
34 lines. Read by computer on 23 September 2026. Printed page 16. See the scan on archive.org.
1MODERN ORGANS AND ORGAN MUSIC.
3[SPECIAL TO THE MUSICAL COURIER.]
5LONDON, JANUARY 12.
7AN American organist, Clarence Eddy, has just been in London. Recently I had the pleasure of hearing him play. I use the word advisedly—the "pleasure"—for it is a long time since organ playing has been pleasant to me.
9In my youth I used to hear William Rea, of Newcastle-on-Tyne, and later I heard Best and Stainer. These three remain in my memory as the only organists who were at the same time musicians. Best and Stainer have gone to the land of shadows, Rea still works vigorously in the northern climes. They tell me that Lemaire is an astonishing man, but somehow I have always been unlucky enough to miss him, and until I heard Eddy I can say Rea was the only organist known to me who played as a musician should. As for the rest, what can be said about them? They are simply organists, automatons who draw more or less agreeable noises from the organ. Time was—at least we have Macbeth's authority for it—that when the brains were out, the man was dead, and there an end. Nowadays, when the brains are out, the man becomes a church organist, and there a beginning—of many evil things. Of these later, but first let me deal with Mr. Eddy. Whether or not he is an organ virtuoso like Best I cannot yet say. But it was evident that he has an ample technic, and, I repeat, he played as a musician should. Here is the program:
11Overture in E flat………………………………………William Faulkes
12Le Cygne…………………………………………………….Saint-Saëns
13(Arranged by Guilmant.)
14Scherzo in G minor, op. 49, No. 2…………………Enrico Bossi
15Intermezzo…………………………………………………Alfred Hollins
16Toccata in E major………………………………………Homer N. Bartlett
17Vorspiel to Lohengrin………………………………….Wagner
18(Arranged by Clarence Eddy.)
19Theme, Variations and Finale………………………..Louis Thiele
21If we used dollars in this backward and benighted country—thinking of musicians makes me want to write be-knighted—I would bet my bottom one that this program will a little stagger all readers who are not organists, who do not go much to organ recitals, who are in the habit of attending opera and orchestral concerts and piano and fiddle and vocal recitals. Wagner we know, and Saint-Saëns we know, but who the dickens are Faulkes, Bossi, Bartlett, Thiele and Hollins? At Mr. Eddy's recital an organist approached me, slowly, as though I was a barrel of gunpowder and he a lighted match and something might go off, and he asked me if I liked the music of Hollins. Nothing exploded; I could only smile a kind of sickly smile—without curling up on the floor; I gasped, was flabbergasted, inarticulate.
23Everyone, in England at least, has heard of Alfred Hollins, the blind organist; of Alfred Hollins, the composer, the fame had never reached these ears. This intermezzo of his is quite a pretty trifle, but one could no more distinguish it from a hundred other pieces of the same sort than one could pick a particular Chinaman out of a row of a hundred. Instantaneously it was flashed into my mind that my organist acquaintance and myself lived in two very different worlds. To him Hollins was a composer, and, after all, Bach and Beethoven were composers, and he spoke of the music of Hollins as one might speak of the music of Bach and Beethoven. And as with Hollins, so with scores of other men—men known as composers only to organists; the case of my organist acquaintance is precisely the case of scores of other organists, and the case of myself is, I firmly believe, the case of the majority of my readers. To them, perhaps, the organ world appears even odder, more grotesque, than it appears to me. Until ten years ago I was an organist, dutifully grinding out each Sabbath the one tale of chants, hymns, anthems and voluntaries, and I was fairly well in touch with all the music published for the organ. Ten short years have sped, and lo! when I talk with organists I find myself a stranger among strangers in a strange land.
25What has happened? Have I gone backward or forward—and in saying "I," reader, I mean "we"; yourself as well as myself—or have the organists gone backward or forward, or do they remain exactly where they formerly stood? Nearly all of them remain exactly where they formerly stood. In my younger days I perceived how little about music organists knew outside the comparatively limited amount written for their own instrument. They hardly ever went to concerts, and had no faintest notion of the more recent developments of the orchestra and orchestral music. Mendelssohn was the last word to them; Wagner they regarded "with suspicion"—as did that nuisance, the late Sir George Macfarren—Brahms they simply didn't know. They had heard of Dvorák, for his cantatas and Stabat Maters and oratorios and requiems had been produced at our "great provincial festivals"; and, of course, they reckoned Gounod's "Redemption" a mighty masterpiece. Chunks of it were often given as anthems in their churches on field days—at Christmas, in Passion week, and at harvest festivals. What they would have said to a Tschaikowsky symphony I cannot guess; but I know how they would have dealt with a Strauss symphonic poem; they would have painfully analysed it and read papers at their musical association meetings to demonstrate tediously the "errors" in it. Whether it was ugly or not would have mattered nothing to them; to beauty in music they were totally indifferent, expressiveness was a word of which they merely did not understand the meaning; and heaven knows much of the music they admired and played was ugly enough.
27The notion that Bach was lovely and full of emotion was one they discountenanced; Bach was a wonderful master of counterpoint and double counterpoint; of canon and of fugue; that was all; he was not "pretty." By "pretty" they meant catchy; the "pretty" music they played—Wély's offertories, andantes in G, by (was it?) Batiste or Baptiste—were outrageously vulgar and fit only for the music hall, often too vulgar for the music hall. You will notice that innate vulgarity is the chief characteristic of the academic mind. (I have lying here a part song, "Good Night, Farewell," by Dr. George Garrett. It might have been written by excellent Mr. Sankey.) And all these organists were academics on a larger or smaller scale. The rules of the eighteenth century were to them immutable laws—the test of a piece of music was, Are these laws kept? If so, the music was good, no matter how dry and hideous; and no matter how beautiful, it was bad if the laws were broken.
29These were the English organists of many years ago; and they are pretty much the same today. Why, it is scarcely a dozen years since an oratorio—goodness knows its name—by the late Dr. Jacob Bradley was sung in St. James' Hall; I remember that it was abominable stuff, incoherent, full of scraps of puerile fugal writing. I remember also a chorus, "Lo! where Holofernes lieth on the ground without a head"—or words to that effect. That oratorio gained Mr. Bradley an Oxford degree and set him up for a great light among organists and an exemplar to the younger generation. And, note, these men had nothing but the elements of technic at their command; when they had written a little canon or a fugue forty bars long they thought they had achieved a masterpiece. Some years ago I called on a former teacher of mine—an organist and Mus. Doc, of course—who, forsaking dull contrapuntal anthems, had made a hit as a writer of "pretty"—that is, scandalously vulgar—drawing room ballads. He had just finished one, and, knowing any attempt to show him the wickedness of his sinful ways would be futile, I pleased the old boy by remarking that a certain passage would be effective—a passage in which the accompaniment imitated the voice part at a distance of two bars. "Ah!" said he, "I made you a musician; you appreciate that." Then he added mournfully: "But a bit of scholarship like that doesn't mean anything to the general herd. That song won't sell." The two things, "bit of scholarship" and "won't sell" have stuck in my memory ever since; there was the complete academic. This academic has also, I believe, gone to the land of shadows; and I hope that Bach or Beethoven or Handel has taught him better.
31It may seem that I am spending my space and energy in mere denunciations of the great bulk of the musicians of this country. I am not; I am only describing them as they are. That my description does not in the smallest degree exaggerate can be seen by anyone who takes the trouble to read the proceedings of the musical associations of this realm, or reports of the lectures delivered at the College of Organists, or the text books written by organists and used in our great music schools.
33The essential cause of the whole mischief is the organ itself and the things the church organist is required to do with it. We have hardly any good organists because we have hardly any good organs; our organists, besides being inexpert at their own trade—this, I say, due to the organ—are bad musicians because their brains and souls are killed, or at least hardened, stunted in their growth at first and later ossified by the heart breaking, soul destroying work of accompanying church services. The organ I pointed out long ago—in the "Chord," No. 3, December, 1899—"is an old world instrument, a contemporary of the harpsichord and clavichord, which reached its full mechanical perfection only in the present century for purely mechanical reasons." It has reached that perfection very, very slowly, and the land is full of bad organs. Since improvements were discovered, fresh appliances invented, many bad or at least inadequate new ones have been built owing to the solid, stolid inertia of the builders. That inertia we may hope to see overcome; the main difficulty is to get rid of the old instruments. An organ is an expensive toy and there is a potent reason why, once set up, it is not easily discarded and replaced by a fresh one. If a violinist has a poor fiddle, he buys a fine one as soon as he can afford it; a pianist gets a fresh piano as soon as his old one shows signs of wear. (Would to goodness singers could do the same with voices!) But there are few organists who can get a new organ if the thing they have to play on is not satisfactory. Not only is it expensive; the place in which it stands is also expensive; for an organ is essentially an instrument for a large hall and only millionaires with houses as big as castles can provide space for one. As a matter of fact not one organ in a thousand belongs to the player; 999 and an odd fraction belong to churches or public halls of some sort. It is scarcely likely that a man will pay a large sum for an instrument which he may only use a few years. If he is a professional man and gains his bread by giving recitals—not that there is much to be done in that way—it is not a good investment of capital as is the fiddler's fiddle, for he cannot carry it around with him. So the choice of new organs, and the question of replacing an old fashioned one by an adequate
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