V o l .   6 3 ,   N o .  8
 
M a y / J u n e   2 0 1 3

 
In This Issue
From the Dean
Next Chapter Event
Introducing Our Chapter Competition Winner
News of Members
Members From the Past
Can You Identify This Member From the Past?
Renew Your NYC AGO Membership Now for 2013-2014
 
Links
Poulenc Stabat Mater St Paul's Episcopal Church Westfield NJ
  Keith S. Tóth, Dean, NYC Chapter, American Guild of Organists
  Keith S. Tóth, Dean

From the Dean


On Saturday, April 20 the chapter collaborated with St. Malachy’s Church and the Northern New Jersey AGO chapter in presenting our own David Higgs, Professor of Organ at the Eastman School of Music, in a recital on the spectacular Aeolian-Skinner/Peragallo organ at St Malachy’s Church (The Actors’ Chapel). Many thanks to Mark Pacoe, Director of Music at St. Malachy’s, for hosting this most successful event.

As highlighted last month, our closing event for the season will be on Monday, May 20, with a dinner cruise on the motor yacht Affinity. If you have not already done so, please purchase your ticket either online or by sending a check to Sub-Dean David Enlow. Further information may be found in this newsletter and at the chapter website. You will not want to miss this grand evening of camaraderie, food, drink and spectacular views of Manhattan from the water!

Our Registrar, Larry J. Long, brings to my attention that you may now renew your membership online for the 2013-14 season. Further information may be found later in this newsletter. Our Program Committee, chaired by Sub-Dean David Enlow, is hard at work preparing an exciting season of events. You will not want to miss out on these events by allowing your dues to lapse!

I look forward to greeting many of you onboard the motor yacht Affinity on Monday, May 20. Until then,

All best wishes,

Keith S. Tóth
Dean
Saint Thomas Choir School

Next Chapter Event

Motor Yacht Affinity

 

Monday • 20 May 2013
Dinner Cruise in New York Harbor

Pier 60, Chelsea Piers
West 23rd Street & the Hudson River
6.00 pm – Embarkation
6.30 pm sharp – Set Sail


Our final event of the 2012–2013 season will be a dinner cruise on the Motor Yacht Affinity, a 120-foot vessel accommodating up to 149 guests. Fast becoming an annual tradition, our Chapter boat cruise features the wonderful scenery of New York Harbor, very fine food and drink provided by Affinity's catering team, including an open bar, and the company of your colleagues, the organists and organ-music lovers from the City and surrounding areas.

We regret that no accomodation can be made for late arrival. For our suburban friends, we recommend the public transit, and leaving plenty of time, as road traffic approaching the City is notoriously unpredictable.

Tickets: NYC Chapter Members $75; all others $100

To pay by credit/debit card, click here.

Pay by check: You may also send a check – made out to NYC AGO – to David Enlow, 119 East 74th Street, New York, NY 10021 postmarked on or before May 1st to guarantee your place.

Best Wishes to All from Yvonne L. Sonnenwalk-Melin   David Lloyd ben Yaacov Klepper

Introducing Our Chapter Competition Winner

Joey Fala, Organist
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.

Arthur Lawrence   British and French Organ Music Seminars   David Enlow FAGO

News of Members

Victoria and Robert Sirota
Victoria and Robert Sirota

The Metropolitan Museum's Appleton organ will be featured in this week's PIPEDREAMS program. Featured will be new music written for it by Robert Sirota and played by Victoria Sirota, plus other period pieces.

http://pipedreams.publicradio.org/listings/2013/1316/

Audio is live online now, and will remain accessible 24/7 for a continuing, indefinite period.

John Conner, M.Mus, ChM, CAGO

Members From the Past

  Paul Callaway, Organist
  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.

Can You Identify This Member From the Past?

. . . now deceased?

Renew Your NYC AGO Membership Now for 2013–2014

AGO chapter membership runs July 1 through June 30 each year. As of May 1, we are ready to accept your membership renewal for 2013–2014 on the Membership page of our chapter web site, either by mail or by using PayPal.

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The next chapter newsletter is the July/August 2013 issue. The deadline for submissions is June 15, 2013. Material may be submitted to Neal Campbell, Editor. Nine issues are published through the year on a monthly basis with combined issues for December/January, May/June, and July/August. To make changes in your email address or to subscribe to the e-newsletter, please contact Larry Long, Registrar.