Celebrating the Pipe Organ

The King of Instruments is about to receive unusually royal treatment.

About 250 "Organ Spectacular" recitals -- including one at Augsburg Lutheran Church on Fifth Street -- will be presented nationwide next Sunday.

The performances are designed to publicize pipe organs and those who play them. They are being billed as the world's largest combined concert of organ music. They will highlight "The Year of the Organ," an initiative sponsored by the American Guild of Organists, a professional association in New York that serves the organ and choral-music fields.

"I think it should be a glorious day," said Margaret Evans, an Oregon organist who serves as the guild's director of professional networking and public relations. "Our goal was (the participation of) something like 250 chapters. I think we're pretty close."

The guild has 330 chapters, including one in Winston-Salem, which along with Arts at Augsburg is co-sponsoring the performance at Augsburg Lutheran.

Evans said that all 50 United States will be host to at least one "Organ Spectacular" recital. Though the general goal of each performance will be to raise awareness about the pipe organ, an instrument that has been experiencing mixed fortunes of late, each performance will serve a slightly different purpose.

There will be organ concerts with other instruments; "Pedals, Pipes and Pizza" programs, in which the organ is introduced to youth in a hands-on fashion; and "Moveable Feast" formats, in which audiences take in organ performances at multiple locations.

The Winston-Salem recital, organized by organists Don Armitage and William Osborne, is giving the traditional recital format an unusual twist. Not one but six musicians will play during a performance that's expected to last about an hour.

The program at Augsburg looks rather eclectic. It will include everything from Bach's Prelude and Fugue in A Major to two pieces by Margaret Vardell Sandresky, a noted Winston-Salem composer: Variations on Morning Star and Enter into his gates with Thanksgiving.

In addition, during Armitage's performance of Jean Titelouze's Magnificat on the Fourth Tone, the men of the Piedmont Chamber Singers, of which Osborne is the music director, will sing phrases of Gregorian chant. Osborne the organist will perform Mendelssohn's Prelude and Fugue in C Minor.

"There's nothing off the wall," Osborne said. "We're not going to have a silent movie with accompaniment."

The program's other organists will include Ray Ebert, Erica Johnson, Susan Foster and John Cummins. Of these, all but Ebert are at least fairly new to Winston-Salem. Osborne said he hopes the recital will "introduce some new faces" to a city that enjoys a "rich tradition" of pipe organs, organists and first-rate organ instruction.

Ebert, who will play the Sandresky pieces, serves as the organist of both Centenary United Methodist Church and Temple Emanuel. Johnson will play a prelude and toccata from Fantasy Pieces of Louis Vierne, the organist of Notre Dame in Paris during the early decades of the last century; Johnson recently returned to her native Winston-Salem to become the interim Kenan Professor of Organ at UNC School of the Arts and teach at Salem College.

Foster, who is the organist at Home Moravian Church, will perform Alan Spedding's Variations on Urbs Beata. And Cummins, the recently appointed organist and choirmaster at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, will play Bach's Prelude and Fugue in A Major.

Armitage is the cantor at Augsburg and the organist at Wake Forest University. He said he hopes that the performance will "remind folks that it (the organ) is not just an instrument for worship."

"We want to celebrate the instrument," he said. "We want to celebrate the music written for the instrument. That's a worthy thing to do."

That kind of thing used to be the norm, as Osborne pointed out. He wrote a biography of Clarence Eddy (1851-1937), an American organ virtuoso who astonished mass audiences in Chicago during the 1870s by performing a series of 100 different recitals without repeating a single piece. Eddy was not alone.

"So many cities had civic organists that played recitals for thousands," Osborne said. "The world of the organ was much different a century ago than it is now."

That world seems to be experiencing ups and downs.

On the plus side is that several recently built concert halls for symphony orchestras have included mighty organs. And in America, many churches -- including quite a few in Winston-Salem -- still use pipe organs and employ capable musicians to perform them. And churches are still buying new pipe organs.

Robert R. Ebert, an economist at Baldwin-Wallace College in Ohio, compiles statistics for the Associated Pipe Organ Builders of America and the American Institute of Organbuilders. He says that 100 new pipe organs are built each year in North America, with more than 80 percent of these in churches. One likely result: "More people hear live organ music than any other kind of live music," Evans said.

Several developments are causing concern among players of the pipe organ. Both Osborne and Evans suggested that too many highly trained organists are chasing after too few full-time jobs, when the vast majority of openings at churches are part-time positions.

Evans suggested that schools should look for ways to accommodate people for whom organ playing will not provide their principal means of employment.

"We need to be open to that so that people who don't want to major in organ aren't looked down upon," she said.

Another concern among pipe organists is a changing taste in musical styles, which might well result in rock-flavored praise bands coming to dominate a service's musical offerings.

"Many parishes don't have organs anymore because the music they use doesn't require the organ," Armitage said.

Pipe organs cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to build -- a fact that might prompt a church to purchase a less-expensive electronic organ instead or to decide that its funds would be better spent on combating social ills.

"What I don't want a church to do is to decide that a pipe organ is a waste of money," Armitage said, adding that there's "room for both" music and programs that address poverty and other problems.

"Every parish has to decide what's appropriate for it and what it can afford," he said. "It should not be afraid to engage in the creation of beauty."

■ An "Organ Spectacular" will be presented at 3 p.m. next Sunday in the sanctuary of Augsburg Lutheran Church, 845 W. Fifth St. William Osborne, Donald Armitage, Ray Ebert, Susan Foster, Erica Johnson and John Cummins will perform. The program is free and open to the public; for more information, call 336-722-8144.

■ Ken Keuffel can be reached at 727-7337 or at kkeuffel@wsjournal.com.