Peter Hallock, composer, performer, mystic, philosopher, and church musician, died yesterday afternoon at the age of 89. He died peacefully within moments of returning to his beloved home in Fall City, Washington. He was my closest friend and mentor of 25 years. What follows is a letter to him as he rests beyond the grave.
I am part-way through my summer tour of ten concerts in Europe, having already played in the cathedral in Mainz and the Abbey Church in Steinfeld and am now aboard the train to Braunschweig where I’ll play a concert tomorrow in the late afternoon (le quatorze juillet). George and I spent five days of honest-to-goodness
It is the common denominator among nearly all church organists that we go about our weekly routine hearing one thing in our head and another in our ears. Nowhere is this more true than congregational singing – be it hymns, parts of the Ordinary of the Mass, or Acclamations. I’ve just finished a week with
The Trinity gets a bum rap these days. Most people equate it with Christian dogma about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – a theology that seems strictly theoretical at best – and irrelevant at worst. But I think it’s useful to ponder how three-ness makes life work. In the world of dimensions, it means
Dana Marsh Bach at Haarlem. Jonathan Dimmock, organ (Loft Recordings, LLC, 2013, www. Amazon.com), $20.89. This recording is a major achievement. The tonal brilliance and eloquence of the justly-famous Müller Organ in the Bavokerk, Haarlem, The Netherlands (1738) are brought fully to life through Loft’s superb engineering and production. The organ’s broad range of color
Virgin Gorda is one of those places that most people have never heard of – which is precisely the reason that I love going there. Nestled into the British Virgin Islands, and forming a border between the Atlantic and the Caribbean, this corner of the West Indies has been a favorite place for me for
When you think about it, it’s a very odd thing for a musician to be spatially separated from his instrument. For virtually all instrumentalists, the instrument itself has to be in hand for it to play at all. I suppose conductor’s have the dilemma of spatial separation, especially when large orchestral and choral works are
A Letter to the Editor Dear Editor: With all of the dialog about guns, rights, Constitutional Amendments, and fear-mongering (on both sides of the equation), I am hoping that the American media will use this as an opportunity to educate the public as to the facts about the Second Amendment. Then: · When Secretary of State,
I’ve always wanted to do that! But taking an organ, piano, or harpsichord outdoors has always seemed like a virtual impossibility, especially when compounded by the issues of staying in tune. Last week I took part as a continuo player in the Bay area’s Midsummer Mozart Festival. We did the Grand Mass in C minor
I realized, when I climbed inside a car yesterday, that it was the first time in six days that I had been inside a moving vehicle. At first, I thought that this shouldn’t seem odd at all, until I realized that, quite possibly, never in my adult life (since college) had I gone that length
It took me ages to figure this out. My special skill in music can be summed up in one word: Collaboration. I’m really surprised that it’s taken me this long to figure it out, even though it’s been obvious for a very long time. Whether I’m performing with other people, or performing a solo organ
It’s not very often, at my age, that I get asked to go dancing, most especially when it’s Bavarian folk dancing! Concert work took me to the town of Ottobeuren, not too far from the Alps, to play on a couple magnificent instruments in an enormous baroque basilica. The Riepp organ (1766) is justly world-famous
Every church music director has a mixture of excitement and dread in the days and weeks leading up to Easter. Culminating in the Triduum, the last three days of Holy Week, there’s never a question that the work will be anything less than physically and emotionally exhausting. And now that I’m serving the two largest
I have just finished 26 Children’s Concerts (Adventures in Music) with the San Francisco Symphony, playing excerpts from Strauß (Also sprach Zarathustra), Poulenc (Organ Concerto), and most notably Saint-Saëns (Symphony III – The “Organ Symphony”). Punctuating these performances over the course of several weeks in the Autumn and in January & February of this year,
This has been a banner winter for me and Monsieur Poulenc; I’ve had the opportunity to play all or part of his organ concerto sixteen times in performance. Once, last November, with the Bay Area Rainbow Symphony (B.A.R.S.), twice in January with the Santa Cruz County Symphony, and thirteen times with the San Francisco Symphony
This week, two titans of church music passed from this world to the next; each had an enormous influence on me. The first of these, Gustav Leonhardt, was actually only an acquaintance of mine, having met him while still a Conservatory student. But his career was one that I emulated. Here was a brilliant keyboard
Jonathan Dimmock captures the spirit of the mystic Messiaen in his thoughtful and sympathetic treatment of some of the somposer’s most famous works: Transports de Joie (Outbursts of Joy) from L’Ascension, Dieu parmi nous (God among us) from La Nativité, and Le Banquet Céleste (The Celestial Banquet). But there are more esoteric offerings as well:
Known as the “Orpheus of Amsterdam,” Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck was the greatest single influence on the succeeding generation of north European organists and composers, including H. Scheidemann, J. Praetorius II, M. Schildt, and both Samuel and Gottfried Scheidt. Jonathan Dimmock brings these influential works to life on three landmark mean-tone organs in Holland and Sweden.