Introducing Our Chapter Competition Winner
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| Joey Fala at Central Union Church, Honolulu |
Winners of the NYC Chapter's Quimby / RCYO Competition
Joey Fala (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) First Place
Colin Macknight (The Juilliard School) Second Place
The other competitors were Mary Copeley (Westminster Choir College) and Gregory Zelek (The Juilliard School). Many thanks to Matthew Lewis for overseeing the Chapter's competition that took place on March 23rd at Church of the Holy Trinity (Episcopal). Thanks also to judges Daniel Beckwith, David Hurd, and Paul-Martin Maki.
Joey Fala began his studies in Honolulu at the encouragement of the late John McCreary, Organist and Canon Musician of St. Andrew's Cathedral. As a student at the Iolani School he studied organ with Katherine Crosier and gradually began to assist at the school chapel and at the Lutheran Church of Honolulu where Katherine was organist. Upon graduation from Iolani he was presented the prestigious Bishop’s Award, for unselfish service to school, church and community.
In 2008 he was appointed organ scholar at Central Union Church in Honolulu where he remained until 2010 when he left Hawaii to study architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. He has continued his organ studies with Dr. Barbara Adler, who formerly taught at the University of Hawaii, and now lives in Schenectady.
Katherine Crosier's blog contains information about Joey Fala and the vibrant musical life in Honolulu of which she has been a part for many years.
Our congratulations and best wishes to Joey, Colin, and the other participants in the competition. We will follow your careers with great interest. |
Members From the Past
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Paul Callaway, F.A.G.O., Mus.D. (1909-1995) in the 1940 Washington, DC National Convention Booklet |
Richard Alexander, Donald McDonald, and John Van Sant each correctly identified Paul Callaway in last month's issue.
So associated was Callaway with music in Washington, DC that it is easy to forget that he began his career in New York. The son of a Disciples of Christ clergyman from Illinois, the young Callaway found his way to New York where from 1930-1935 he was an "articled pupil"—the term he always used—of T. Tertius Noble, and was the Organist and Choirmaster of St. Thomas Chapel, now All Saints Church on East 60th Street. It is generally acknowledged that, together with Andrew Tietjen and Grover Oberle, he was among Noble's most talented and prominent pupils.
While at St. Thomas Chapel, where the Sunday evening services were at 8:00, he regularly turned pages at Evensong for David McK. Williams at St. Bartholomew's and assimilated much of Williams' style in his own service playing, especially in anthem and oratorio accompaniment. Although Callaway was careful to point out that he never studied formally with David McK. Williams, he was also quick to acknowledge Williams' great influence upon him and his playing, and the two remained good friends until Williams died in 1978. Callaway was approached about succeeding Williams at St. Bartholomew's in 1946 and he likely would have had he not just returned to Washington Cathedral from service in World War II, where he was a bandmaster in the South Pacific.
In a conversation with me Callaway said that one day Dr. Noble came to him one day unexpectedly and said "I want you to do some missionary work in Grand Rapids" and with that Callaway was packed off to his new post at St. Mark's Church in that city in 1935. This was not entirely to young Callaway's liking, who by this time had grown to enjoy New York, but he did as he was asked, and four years later Dr. Noble was instrumental in securing his appointment at the Cathedral in Washington where he was to remain for 38 years until his retirement in 1977.
He was a major force in the fledgling musical life of Washington. He founded the Cathedral Choral Society shortly after he arrived, and in 1956 he was the founding musical director of the Washington Opera Society, now known as the Washington National Opera. He also taught organ and directed the choir at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, and conducted opera in the summer at the Lake George Opera Festival in upstate New York. He was on the faculty of the College of Church Musicians, the extraordinary graduate school founded by Leo Sowerby for the training of organists and choirmasters (one of five schools on the cathedral close), which combined the rigors of conservatory study together with the master-apprentice approach afforded by its small size. During its short life the college had a tremendous influence on Episcopal church music throughout the country as its students gained appointments in large churches and cathedrals throughout the 1960s and 70s.
In addition to his many other activities he was a virtuoso organist who maintained his technique and put his vast repertoire to use in cathedral services and the recitals which followed Evensong each Sunday. While he did not tour as a recitalist, he did frequently appear locally and within the region. In 1960 he was the soloist for the premiere of Samuel Barber's Toccata Festiva which was written to inaugurate the new Aeolian-Skinner organ in Philadelphia's Academy of Music and was performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy.
Callaway's musical tastes were broad and catholic. Long before the early music movement gained anything like the prominence it holds today, he performed large doses of Renaissance and Elizabethan music with the cathedral choir, both settings of the ordinary, and anthems and motets, together with the standard English cathedral repertoire of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and copious amounts of contemporary music. In 1964 for the dedication of the Gloria in excelsis Tower, the central tower over the cathedral crossing, which is the only tower in the world housing both a carillon and a ten-bell ring, he commissioned music for carillon and a variety of instruments from Samuel Barber, Lee Hoiby, Stanley Hollingsworth, Roy Hamlin Johnson, John La Montaine, Milford Myhre, Ned Rorem, and Leo Sowerby.
When he retired from Washington Cathedral he assumed the position of Director of Music at St. Paul's K Street in Washington, the noted Anglo-Catholic parish, one of whose previous organists, Edgar Priest, was the first organist of the Cathedral. For his service to Anglo-American relations he was awarded the O.B.E. (which he said irreverently—referring to himself, we presume—stood for Old Bastard Extraordinaire).
He lived his life as hard as he worked: a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes was seldom far from reach, and when asked what drink he preferred, he said it was "gin before dinner, bourbon after." I left Washington just before he went to St. Paul's. When I saw him on a trip home shortly thereafter I asked him how he liked his new position, and he replied in his inimitable guttural growl "Oh yeah, I always wanted to play in one of those . . uh . . smoky places."
His Requiem Mass, for which the Rt. Rev. James Winchester Montgomery was the celebrant, was held at the Church of the Ascension and St. Agnes in Washington, where he was a parishioner. Fr. Frederic Meisel was the preacher. Fr. Meisel was the long-time Rector of the church and a great friend of Callaway's whom he met when he was Noble's pupil, and young Freddie Meisel was a choirboy at St. Thomas.
Paul Smith Callaway is interred in the crypt columbarium of Washington National Cathedral, together with fellow musicians Leo Sowerby, Richard Dirksen, and Edgar Priest, cathedral architect Philip Hubert Frohman, President Woodrow Wilson, and various bishops and clergy associated with the Cathedral. N.C. |
