Michael Hey at the Organ Pavilion October 11

Great Playing but Some Pretty Bland Music

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s Monday night concert at the Organ Pavilion featured Michael Hey (and of course we couldn’t resist the temptation to make bad jokes about his name – including what you would say when you called him, “Hey, Hey!”), organist at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. It’s a prestigious job but also a rough one, as he described it, since among other duties he has to be in the church at the console at 7 a.m. for the daily morning Mass. He was one of those players who decided to tear up his printed program and play his pieces in a different order than listed – though there was only one complete substitution: instead of French composer Eugène Gigout’s “Grand choeur dialogue” he played his own transcription of the “Lyric for Strings” by Black organist-composer George Walker (1922-2018). It’s not clear why he didn’t play a Walker piece actually composed for organ, but he mentioned that Walker was the first African-American composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for music (in 1996, for a song called “Lilacs” for voice and orchestra based on Walt Whitman’s poem “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” – ironically, the very first Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1943 was won by William Schuman for a cantata for baritone, chorus and orchestra called A Free Soul, also based on texts by Whitman; 1943 was also the year Duke Ellington premiered his symphonic masterpiece, Black, Brown and Beige, and by all rights that should have won the inaugural Pulitzer Prize, but Ellington never won – in 1965 the Pulitzer prize board wanted to give Ellington a lifetime achievement award but the overall Pulitzer board vetoed it and no prize for music was awarded at all that year).

Hey began his program with an allegro movement from Charles-Marie Widor’s Organ Symphony No. 6 and then did the Walker piece, following that with “The Dancing Pipes” by Jonathan Dove (b. 1959), which he introduced as a minimalist piece. Like a lot of other minimalist pieces, it began beautifully but the endless repetitions of simple themes wore me down after a while. After that he played Ravel’s “Pavane for a Dead Princess.” once again in his own transcription, and he closed out his first set with Edwin H. Lemare’s transcription of Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 – yes, that one, the one with the Big Tune that features in innumerable graduation ceremonies. The only graduation ceremony I ever attended was held by my eighth grade class and I so hated the experience I didn’t go either to my high-school or college graduations – though I have a slight degree of regret about that. On that occasion the Pomp and Circumstance March was represented by a badly scratched 78 rpm record – in 1966, eight years after the manufacture of 78’s in the U.S. had ceased. Charles, who did go to his high-school and college graduations recalled it being played live by the student bands about as well as you’d expect a student band to play it, and he said he was grateful for the opportunity not only to hear the whole piece instead of just the Big Tune, but to hear it by a professional musician. (I have a CD of all the Elgar Pomp and Circumstance marches, and while none of the others has a tune as infectious as the big one from No. 1, they’re all pretty much in the same style.)

For the second half of the concert Hey decided to program exclusively music by American composers, and ones either still alive or recently deceased: “Variations on an Original Theme” by Jason Roberts (b. 1980 and a personal friend of Hey’s); “Solitude” by Nahre Sol (b. 1991 and another friend of Hey’s), a piece written for piano and transcribed by Hey for organ; “Roulade,” Op. 9, no. 3 by Seth Bingham (1882-1972); and, for the last work on his program, “Pageant” by Leo Sowerby (1895-1968), another Pulitzer Prize-winning composer. My husband Charles liked the second half of the program better than the first, though I felt differently; he said we’ve heard Ravel and Widor played on the Spreckels Organ before (and he felt Hey is one of those musicians who’s adept at his own regular organ but had trouble adjusting to the Spreckels, especially the tricky acoustics of a venue in which the organ is enclosed but the audience is outdoors) while the American pieces were novel. I got a bit bored by tis part of the program, mainly because Hey was so determined to avoid the nastier sort of modern music – the kind our friend Ken Herman describes as written by “composers who run kicking and screaming from anything resembling a melody” – he went in the other direction and picked modern (or relatively recent) pieces that had nice tunes but got to be pretty bland after a while.

Things lightened up considerably with his encore, his transcription of Fats Waller’s organ recording “Messin’ Around with the Blues” – after all these years I finally got to hear an organist playing one of Waller’s actual organ pieces instead of just another theatre-organ arrangement of one of his pop songs, and what’s more Hey played it the way Waller did, with a marvelously light touch. The Waller piece also exploded the pretensions of some of the other recent composers on the program who claimed to be writing jazz – or at least being influenced by it. Roberts had claimed his “variations” used jazz and bossa nova, but it didn’t sound particularly jazzy (or Brazilian) to me, while the supposedly “original” theme he was variating sounded an awful lot like “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” to me. Nahre Sol’s “Solitude” was a very pleasant melody but by giving it that title she was setting herself up (at least for me) for invidious comparisons with Duke Ellington’s classic song of the same title – it would be as if some modern-day composer wrote a piece for piano and called it “Moonlight Sonata.” The Bingham piece was nice but not quite what I would have expected from the title “roulade” (a term I’ve usually heard associated with coloratura flourishes in bel canto operas) – it was a fast-slow-fast piece and seemed to me more like a toccata than a roulade – and the Sowerby was, like a lot of his music, initially impressive but wore out its welcome and got too repetitive for me. Fats Waller’s piece (written by a real giant of jazz, not a classically trained pretender) was a breath of fresh air for me and made me hope Hey will be the musician who transcribes all Waller’s organ originals and makes this wonderful music live again. Michael Hey’s concert was actually quite entertaining, though I suspect it would have been better if his repertoire had been more adventurous; he said he had largely picked pieces he wouldn’t be able to perform in his normal church gig, and he succeeded, but I suspect the music he plays in church has more power and “oomph” to it even though a lot of it is probably just routine processionals, recessionials and accompaniments to the church choir.