Organ Music Treasures from the Gilmore Music Library

Organ Music in the United States

Lowell Mason Library

William Billings
New-England Psalm-Singer
(Boston: Edes & Gill, 1770)
Illustration by Paul Revere

William Billings (1746–1800) was the most important American composer in colonial era. A lifelong Bostonian, Billings was actively involved in the American Revolution, and was friends with important figures such as Samuel Adams and Paul Revere. (Revere was responsible for the illustration inside the front cover of the New-England Psalm-Singer, displayed here.) Despite his connections, Billings struggled to earn a living, as a singing teacher and in a variety of non-musical jobs, such as the leather business.
Billings specialized in unaccompanied four-part sacred music, composed in a distinctive style that arose from his lack of formal musical training and his exceptional ingenuity. He frequently violated the precepts of conventional European harmony, but made up for it with his creative and energetic counterpoint.

Lowell Mason Papers

Lowell Mason
Photograph, 1864

Lowell Mason (1792–1872) was one of the most influential American musicians of his era. A major figure in the history of music education, Mason established singing schools, trained music teachers, and helped bring music into the curriculum of the public schools. He held several church music jobs, and he published a series of bestselling collections of hymn tunes. (A few of the hymns, such as “Nearer My God to Thee,” are his own compositions.) He was the patriarch of a musical dynasty that also included (among others) his son William Mason (a distinguished pianist), his son Henry Mason (founder of the Mason & Hamlin piano company), and his grandson Daniel Gregory Mason (a composer, author, and professor of music at Columbia University).
Mason amassed a vast music library, containing more than ten thousand items. It includes many American publications, as well as materials he acquired during his two trips to Europe. On one trip, Mason purchased the library of the German organist Christian Heinrich Rinck (1770–1846). Rinck was a student of Johann Christian Kittel (1732–1809), a student of J.S. Bach, so his collection includes manuscripts that are closely connected to Bach.
After Mason’s death in 1872, his family gave his library to Yale. Joel Sumner Smith produced a 681-page handwritten catalogue of the collection. Although most of the information contained therein now appears in Orbis, Smith’s catalogue still holds some unique details, and it is available for consultation in the Gilmore Music Library’s Rare Book Reading Room.

Lowell Mason
The New Carmina Sacra
or
Boston Collection of Church Music
(New York: Mason Brothers, 1858 [c1850])

Lowell Mason exercised a profound influence on American church music: as a performer himself, as an educator and organizer, and as a composer, as author, and collector. But his greatest influence may well have come from his work as an editor. His anthologies did much to broaden and standardize the repertoire of church music around the country. They were best-sellers, and went through many editions; their financial success helped enable Mason to become a great collector.

Horatio Parker Papers

Horatio Parker
Introduction & Fugue
Manuscript, 1916

Horatio Parker (1863–1919) was a composer, organist, conductor, and teacher. Much of his early career was devoted to the organ; he held a series of appointments at churches in Massachusetts and New York. But the increasing success of his compositions eventually brought him to the Yale School of Music, first as a professor (1894) and then as dean (1904). While at Yale, Parker also conducted the newly-founded New Haven Symphony Orchestra.
During his lifetime, Parker was one of the most highly esteemed American composers. His oratorio Hora Novissima was popular on both sides of the Atlantic, and his opera Mona was performed at the Metropolitan Opera after winning a competition. But as styles changed, Parker’s music went out of fashion, and his reputation has suffered from the image—not altogether fair—of him as the old-fashioned pedagogue who failed to understand the revolutionary genius of his most famous student, Charles Ives. 
Naturally, most of Parker’s organ music dates from his years as a church organist, but for this exhibit, we have selected a late work, the Introduction & Fugue in E Minor, composed in 1916 at his summer home in Blue Hill, Maine. It remained unpublished until William Osborne’s edition appeared in 1974. In the preface, Osborne suggests that his performance in Yale’s Woolsey Hall in 1970 may have been the formal premiere.

Charles Ives Papers

Charles Ives
Photograph, ca. 1892

Charles Ives was born in Danbury, Connecticut in 1874. The son of a bandmaster, Ives showed exceptional talent as a young pianist, organist, and composer. In 1893 he moved to New Haven to attend the Hopkins School, and in 1894 he entered Yale, where he graduated in 1898. (Horatio Parker was his most important teacher.) After completing his education, Ives moved to New York and enter the insurance business, in which he proved to be extremely successful. In his spare time, he composed a string of masterpieces. When Ives was in his mid-forties, his health declined dramatically and permanently; diabetes is now believed to be the cause of his troubles. In his remaining decades he composed little, and was unable to continue his insurance work. He died in Danbury in 1954.
After his death, Ives’s papers came to Yale; they were meticulously cataloged by his friend John Kirkpatrick, who was also a notable performer of Ives’s piano music. The collection includes music manuscripts, correspondence, writings, and a wide variety of other materials, including about 250 photographs. The most famous photos were taken when Ives was elderly, but for this exhibit, we have selected one from his late teens, because that was when he composed Variations on “America.”

Charles Ives Papers

Charles Ives
Variations on “America”
Manuscript, ca. 1891–92

Ives took his first post as a church organist, in his hometown of Danbury, at the tender age of fourteen. A local newspaper described him as the youngest organist in the state. He went on to hold church jobs in New Haven; Bloomfield, New Jersey; and New York. He gave up his last appointment, at Central Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, in 1902.
Ives composed a great deal of organ music during this phase of his career, though not all of it has survived. His most famous organ work is Variations on “America,” the familiar tune also known as “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” or “God Save the Queen.” Ives’s father, George, directed town bands, and young Charles Ives developed what would become a lifelong fondness for patriotic melodies (as well as hymns and popular songs). He loved to incorporate them into his concert works, sometimes in ways that raised the hackles of unsophisticated listeners. Ives composed this piece around 1891, and he performed it at churches in Danbury and in Brewster, New York. Nearly twenty years later, he added the adventurous interludes between the variations, although these may be based on his earlier improvisations. Ives unsuccessfully sought to publish the Variations in 1892; it finally appeared in print in 1949, edited by E. Power Biggs. After languishing in obscurity for more than half a century, it became Ives’s most famous organ piece. But in a letter to his publisher in 1949, the elderly Ives emphasized that it was a “boyish” work, “partly serious and partly in fun.”

Paul Hindemith Collection

Paul Hindemith
Photograph by Ben Quashen, 1948 or later

Paul Hindemith (1895–1963) is recognized as one of the leading composers of the 20th century, and he is also a central figure in the history of music at Yale. Hindemith was an exceptionally versatile musician: in addition to his work as a composer, he conducted everything from medieval to modern music, he played the violin in the Rebner Quartet and viola in the Amar Quartet, and he was known for having a basic competence on almost any instrument. Hindemith was an influential teacher, both in the classroom and in his theoretical writings.
Although he was not Jewish, his relations with the Nazi authorities became increasingly difficult over the course of the 1930s, and in 1939 he left Germany for Switzerland. In 1940 he moved to the United States, where he taught briefly in Buffalo before coming to Yale, where he remained until 1953. He then moved back to Europe, settling in Switzerland until his death.
Although the Yale School of Music numbered many outstanding musicians among its faculty and students in its early decades, it was in some ways still a regional school. Many of the students came from Connecticut or other parts of the Northeast, and a high percentage of the faculty were alumni of the School. Hindemith changed that; he helped give the School a global reputation for excellence, and he attracted and trained a host of remarkable young musicians who went on to impressive careers.

Bequest of Frank Bozyan
Paul Hindemith Collection

Paul Hindemith
Sonate für Orgel nach alten Volkslieder
[Organ Sonata No. 3]
Manuscript, 1940

Shortly after arriving in the United States in February 1940, Hindemith served as a visiting professor at the University of Buffalo. While in Buffalo he composed the Organ Sonata No. 3. The manuscript bears the dates June 5 (on the first and third movements) and May 25 (on the second movements), and is inscribed “For Frank Bozyan in Friendship!” Bozyan (1899–1965) was an organ professor at the Yale School of Music. When Hindemith moved from Buffalo to Yale a few months later, he and Bozyan became faculty colleagues. But it was E. Power Biggs who gave the first performance of this sonata, at Tanglewood on July 31, 1940. Each of the movements draws upon a traditional German melody: “Ach Gott, wem sollt ich’s Klagen,” “Wach auf, mein Herz,” and “So wünsch ich ihr [ein gute Nacht].”
Most of Hindemith’s papers are held at the Hindemith Institute in Frankfurt, Germany, but Yale has the world’s second most important Hindemith collection. It was assembled by Luther Noss (1907–1995), who was an organ professor and dean at the Yale School of Music, a close friend of Hindemith, and the author of the book Paul Hindemith in the United States. Noss persuaded many of Hindemith’s American associates to donate their Hindemith-related materials to the collection at Yale. Frank Bozyan, who owned the manuscript of the sonata Hindemith had dedicated to him, was one of these donors.