Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, July 27) my husband Charles and I went to the third concert in the Spreckels Organ Society’s 38th annual Summer Organ Festival. The organist was Thomas Gaynor, who was born in Wellington, New Zealand (neither his bio in the program nor the available online sources say exactly when) but relocated to the U.S. as a young adult and settled in Philadelphia. He is currently assistant organist and choir master at St. Mark’s Church on Locust Street and was assistant organist at the Wanamaker Grand Court Organ in the Macy’s (formerly Wanamaker’s) department store until its recent closure for renovations. (The Web site for the Wanamaker organ insists that it will be played again when the store is reopened, and there are currently concerts being live-streamed even though the venue is not open to the public.) Gaynor is also an adjunct instructor of organ at Westminster Choir College of Ride...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Monday, July 20) my husband Charles and I went to the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park for the second in the nine concerts (down from the previous years’ 12 to 13) of this year’s 38th annual International Summer Organ Festival. The organist was Isabelle Demers, who was born in Lachine, Québec, Canada. She’s gone back and forth between her native country and the U.S. and she’s played at the Spreckels at least twice before, during one of which concerts I bought her CD The New and the Old . Demers began her concert with Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in C, BWV 547, and then performed an interesting curio: four of the 15 Two-Part Inventions as composed by Bach and re-composed by Max Reger (1873-1916). Oddly, she didn’t seem to be that enamored of these pieces; she joked about how Reger had transferred the left-hand parts of Bach’s originals for harpsichord to the foot pedals of the organ ...

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night (Saturday, July 18) KPBS aired a tribute show to singer Woody Guthrie called Woody Guthrie at 100! , filmed at a concert at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts on October 14, 2012 (though Guthrie’s actual birthdate was July 14, 1912). This was before the Kennedy Center was traduced and forced, at least for a while, to bear the name of another President, a man Woody Guthrie would have hated – especially since Guthrie’s path actually crossed that of Donald Trump’s notoriously racist father, Fred Trump. In the early 1950’s Guthrie moved into a building owned by Fred Trump, only to learn that Trump’s company had a systematic and out-front policy of not renting to Black people. As a matter of principle, Guthrie not only moved out of Trump’s building but wrote an extra verse to his song “I Ain’t Got No Home” explicitly denouncing Fred Trump’s racism. The concert provide...