Prologue

The organ recital, as we know it today, is largely an invention of the nineteenth century. It is true that organ music for essentially non-religious purposes was written and performed as early as the sixteenth century, but a large part of the vast corpus of organ literature that has come down today, whether Lutheran chorale preludes, Anglican voluntaries or Catholic plainsong-based works, had its roots in the liturgy and usages of churches. Concerted music such as the seventeenth-century domestic works for chamber organ and viols, or the eighteenth-century organ concertos of Handel and his British followers, was indeed secular. But the larger and more impressive solo works – Preludes and Fugues, Toccatas, Variations, Fantasias – required larger instruments, with more than one manual, multiple stops, plus pedal, and as these were only to be found in churches, these larger works had to be performed there, but not always as a part of (or prelude to) a religious rite.

Occasions when non-liturgical works were performed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries varied with the different European cultures. In the Netherlands and Germany church organs might be played on municipal or state holidays, to fete some royal personage, or even on market days, when people could wander in and out of a church at will, and be delighted to hear a brilliant Fantasia or some setting of a secular folksong from the organ loft. In France, churchgoers could gather well before the midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, while the organists treated them to lively variations on familiar secular carols. In England and Spain, non-liturgical music could be heard accompanying progressions of royalty and other notables in college chapels or cathedrals. But while a range of opportunities for playing non-liturgical organ music on church organs existed, none of these usages were equivalent to what we today would regard as an organ recital, which is actually a formal sit-down, programmed concert. In fact, until recent times, ‘organ concert’ was the proper term for such musical offerings, and in Germany the usual term is still Orgelkonzert.

During the first half of the eighteenth century, when Bach was crafting his contrapuntal masterpieces for large and colourful central German organs, and Couperin was using his considerable skill in displaying the stops of equally colourful French organs, musical matters were very different in the European settlements of North America. As the eighteenth century opened, we hear of the first organs to sound in these colonies – a little positive organ brought from the home country by some German settlers, recorded as having been played at a Lutheran ordination in Philadelphia in 1703, and an English chamber organ owned at least as early as 1708 by the Treasurer of Harvard College, and willed to Boston's only Anglican church a few years later. The Catholics in Quebec are said to have had a small organ in this period, and it is now known that two large organs in Spanish style were already sounding forth in Mexico City's Cathedral. However, the earliest settlers of what would become the United States of America were largely Protestants, the majority of whom, particularly in the northeast, were of the Calvinist persuasion and saw no legitimate use for musical instruments of any kind in their church services – although records show that they had no problem with flutes, fiddles, guitars or trumpets in their secular lives.

By the midpoint of the eighteenth century, however, trade was bringing prosperity to the growing coastal cities. More churches were being built, a growing number of them Anglican, and by mid-century Anglican churches in Charleston, Williamsburg, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Newport and Boston either had, or were about to acquire, imported organs from London's notable organ-builders, some of them of fairly substantial size. Lutherans and Moravians also were acquiring organs, most of them small. By mid-century too, immigrant German and English instrument-makers had begun in a small way to make keyboard instruments, including pianos and organs, and were soon followed by native-born instrument-makers.Footnote ¹ As church organs proliferated toward the end of the eighteenth century and into the early nineteenth, so too did organists, although at first they were jacks of all musical trades, for no one could yet make a living in America simply as an organist. Many of the earliest were British, a few German, plus an occasional Frenchman or Italian, and several came with respectable musical background – Philadelphia's Raynor Taylor from the Chapel Royal, New York's William Tuckey from Bristol Cathedral, Boston's William Selby from positions in London churches, and even a son of Johann Pachelbel, who served churches in Newport and the south.Footnote ² They are recorded as having introduced the choral music of Handel and other notable composers, and even occasionally performing an organ concerto. But if a musical time-traveller to the late eighteenth century had enquired in any North American city as to where one might attend an actual organ recital, he or she would have received only a baffled stare.

Beginnings

The same situation held in the earliest years of the nineteenth century, but now churches of the non-liturgical tradition were also acquiring organs, which were increasingly being built by native-born craftsmen, particularly in Boston and New York, where the foundations of what would soon become a substantial industry were being laid by William Goodrich, Thomas Appleton, the Hook brothers, Henry Erben, Thomas Hall and George Jardine. Accounts of ‘organ openings’ began to be recorded in newspapers, but one looks in vain for a solo organ recital, or often even the name of an organist, since these events invariably were an olio of anthems and songs with organ accompaniment, with an occasional anonymous voluntary thrown in. Even such notable church organists of the period as George James Webb, an Englishman who arrived in Boston in 1830 and was involved in numerous musical endeavours there, neither participated in any organ concerts nor wrote any organ music. The same was true of the eccentric Dr Edward Hodges, another Englishman, who was organist of Trinity Parish in New York in the 1840s.

New organs continued to be opened, and often described in the media, but if any mention was made of the music heard on these occasions, it usually referred only to the assorted soloists or quartets that invariably participated, the organ being used simply as accompaniment. Perhaps the strangest ‘organ exhibition’ of this period was that given for the large organ Henry Erben had completed in 1846 for Trinity Church, New York, for several years the largest in the city. This consisted of a two-day marathon in which several of the city's organists (excluding Dr Hodges) successively performed an unprogrammed hash of operatic arias, ‘marches from military bands, and waltzes from the ball-room … interspersed with chromatic improvisations, complicated fantasias, and voluntary variations of popular airs’, as their audience sporadically wandered in and around the church – apparently rather noisily.Footnote ³

While programs mixing organ music with choral, vocal and instrumental selections were to continue well into the period under discussion, solo organ performances were beginning to be occasionally heard in larger churches and public halls of the growing cities as the 1850s progressed. Intimations of things to come were appearing around 1850, when accounts of ‘openings’ began to include, along with descriptions of the new instruments, passing mention of organists. One of these was young John H. Willcox (1827–1875) who, at the inaugural of an E. & G. G. Hook organ in Christ Church, Hartford, Connecticut, in 1849 is reported to have played ‘in a fine frenzy’, apparently improvising, since the only actual compositions cited were three transcriptions of choruses from Handel oratorios, played as duets with another organist, Lewis Downes.Footnote ⁴ The following year Willcox, who would eventually become one of the more renowned recitalists of the period, performed at the dedication of another Hook organ in St Paul's Church, New Haven, Connecticut, but other musicians were also involved, and no titles of organ compositions were cited – still quite typical for the period.

Interestingly, one of the earliest records of the performance of actual named organ works (and one of the first of a work by J.S. Bach) occurred in the German-speaking Zion Lutheran Church of Baltimore, where a ‘Grand Sacred Vocal and Organ Concert’ was given on 30 May 1853, in which an unnamed organist performed Johann Ludwig Krebs's Fugue on B-A-C-H, J.C. H. Rinck's Flute Concerto, and an unspecified ‘Fugue composed by Bach’, the remainder of the programme being choral works sung by the church's choirs.Footnote ⁵ The organ, by Henry Knauff of Philadelphia, had been installed two years earlier, and the church's history reveals that it was the centrepiece of an active choral music programme.

In New York, Erben's 1846 Trinity organ, with occasional upgrades, seems to have remained for over a decade the largest and most prestigious organ in the area, although eventually beginning to be challenged by others, such as George Jardine's sizable 1855 instrument in Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, where Lowell Mason had recently become music director. Indeed, this period climaxed the gradual ending of the long-held proscription of instruments in churches of the Presbyterian and Puritan traditions as new and large non-liturgical churches were being built, complete with organs of appropriate size. A quite formal ‘exhibition’ programme was played in Fifth Avenue Presbyterian on May 26, 1856 by George W. Morgan and William Mason, Lowell's son, who had recently studied piano in Germany with Liszt, and was now the church's organist. Interestingly, the legitimate organ works were all at the beginning of the programme, followed by alternating transcriptions and extemporizations:

During 1854Footnote , one of the first organs fully suitable for both church and concert use, a large instrument by E. & G. G. Hook, was installed in Boston's new Tremont Temple – a Baptist Church on Sundays, but available for secular events during the week. The organ, with 56 speaking stops on four manuals and pedal (the 27-note pedal division having the then unusual number of 10 stops), was reportedly the largest in the country at the time, but also the first in Boston upon which free-standing organ recitals could properly be given. The programme of the ‘opening’ on August 17, although it included two choral selections, was nonetheless an organ recital of sorts, played by no less than seven organists, some of them from New York, Albany, Hartford, and Philadelphia: John H. Willcox, John Zundel, George William Warren, Silas Bancroft, William A. King, Lewis Downes and William Darley. Several of the organists are listed as playing ‘extempore’ (improvising), but Willcox performed a ‘Grand Fugue in E Flat’ by Bach, Zundel an ‘Introduction and Variations’ by Rinck, and Willcox and Downes reprised one of their Handel chorus duets, described as ‘one of the most satisfactory performances of the evening’.Footnote ⁷

Unlike the Trinity Church mélange of 1846, this, like the Fifth Avenue opening, was a sit-down event with a printed programme. So too was the opening of another large organ in May of the same year, built by John Standbridge for the hall of the Harmonia Sacred Music Society in Philadelphia. This too involved seven organists – Thunder, Getze, Newland, Cross, Emerick and Darley along with the builder, Standbridge – all of them local, as well as a chorus and some vocal soloists. Operatic transcriptions from Fra Diavolo, Tannhäuser, and Zampa predominated, along with a ‘fantasia’ extemporized by Albert Emerick, ‘to the entire satisfaction of the audience’, but the only actual organ composition appears to have been ‘a fine Adagio and Allegro of Rink's, performed admirably by Mr. Thunder’.Footnote ⁸ Henry Gordon Thunder, Sr (1832–1881), a native of Ireland and organist for many years of St Anthony's Church, would soon become known as Philadelphia's leading organ recitalist, and in 1876 was chosen as one of the organists for the Centennial Exhibition, playing the two large organs erected there by Hook & Hastings of Boston and Hilborne Roosevelt of New York.

With the exception of Thunder, and John Zundel, an influential and fairly recent immigrant from Germany who at the time was organist of St George's Church in New York, nearly all of the players on these occasions were natives of North America, none of whom are known to have yet been abroad. That musical insularity was changing in the 1850s, however, and the changes would soon be felt. In 1853 George Washburne Morgan, formerly sub-organist of Gloucester Cathedral and organist in London's Exeter Hall, arrived in New York to take the position of organist in St Thomas's Church. Already a seasoned recitalist in England, he soon began giving solo recitals and taking students. While he played some legitimate organ music, his forte throughout his career seems to have been splashy operatic overture transcriptions, and in a concert given on the large organ in Boston's Tremont Temple in August of 1856 he performed a full programme which included a Bach Fugue in B minor and organ works by Steggall, Hesse and Mendelssohn, but also transcriptions from Weber, Meyerbeer and Handel and a ‘Fantasie, extempore, which not only showed Mr. Morgan's skill as a composer, but gave him an opportunity to display his wonderful facility of execution. The imitation of a thunder storm, in this piece, gave ample evidence of the great power of the magnificent instrument’.Footnote ⁹

Morgan, Thunder and Zundel were the last foreign-born organists of note to relocate to the United States for a number of years. But young American organists and pianists were beginning to travel for their education in the opposite direction. Benjamin Johnson Lang was among the first, initially going to Berlin in 1855 to study piano, apparently with Liszt, but he must have studied organ as well, for he assumed the position of organist at a prestigious Boston church upon his return in 1858, and soon made his mark as an organ recitalist. Other notable young New England organists were John Knowles Paine of Portland and Dudley Buck of Hartford. Paine went to Germany in 1858 to study organ and composition in Berlin, probably at the instigation of his teacher, Hermann Kotzschmar, the German-born organist of the First Church in Portland. Upon his return in the fall of 1861, he took the position of organist at Old West Church in Boston, and on 1 November gave a full-fledged solo recital on the only organ in the city that was fully capable of handling such a programme, that in Tremont Temple. Although it contained one ‘vocal quartette’, an Agnus Dei composed by Paine, the rest of the programme (entitled an ‘Organ Entertainment’) was purely serious organ music:

Also in 1858,Footnote Dudley Buck, who had previously studied with Henry Wilson (1828–1878), organist of Christ Church in Hartford, departed for Leipzig, and studied organ and composition there and in Dresden, followed by a year in Paris prior to returning to Hartford early in 1862, where he resumed a position he had previously held at the North Church, and soon began giving organ recitals. He too was a missionary for Bach, and, like Paine, a composer (and performer) of his own recital-quality organ works. But like Morgan (and unlike Paine) he was not above programming transcriptions of opera overtures and other orchestral music along with his ‘legitimate’ Bach, Mendelssohn and Batiste. Right after his return in January of 1862 he, with Wilson and the North Church choir, gave what was advertised as a ‘Grand Organ Concert’, but was obviously the sort of potpourri that usually went under that title. No programme has been found, but a brief newspaper account states only that ‘compositions of Berdi [Verdi?], Rossini, Meyerbeer, Liszt and others’ were performed; the Rossini and Meyerbeer presumably being overtures.Footnote ¹¹ In another Hartford recital, on 25 November 1865, he opened with Bach's Fugue in E-flat Major, the so-called ‘St Anne’ fugue, and on 9 December he played Bach's Fugue in E minor, along with Mendelssohn's Sonata No. 4 and a Grand Offertoire by Batiste, interspersed with transcriptions from Beethoven and Mozart. In this same period he premiered his own ‘Star Spangled Banner’ Variations and Grand Sonata in E-flat – works clearly intended for concert performance.Footnote ¹²

Another notable recitalist and composer of this generation was George Elbridge Whiting (1842–1923), a native of Holliston, a town near Worcester, Massachusetts. A precocious musician, he began playing the organ in churches at the age of 13, and took over the organist's duties in Hartford's North Church during Buck's absence, while studying with Morgan in New York. He was only 16 when he gave a full-fledged solo organ recital in the First Unitarian Church of Worcester on 6 July 1858. Morgan's influence is evident in the presence of five transcriptions, overtures to Auber's Masaniello, Rossini's William Tell, and Weber's Oberon, along with Beethoven's Turkish March and Mendelssohn's Wedding March. But he also performed Mendelssohn's Second Sonata and two ‘Organ Fugues’ (G minor and F minor) by Bach. And, as did Morgan, Paine, Buck and others, he included an improvised ‘Fantasia (Free Style)’.Footnote ¹³ In 1863 Whiting, too, went abroad to study, not in Germany but in Liverpool with W.T. Best, probably on Morgan's recommendation, returning two years later to accept a position in Boston's King's Chapel. Morgan, Paine, Buck and Whiting were active lifelong as teachers, and many of their pupils made up the next generation of organists and composers.

The Music Hall Era

The demand for large secular performance spaces began to increase everywhere in midcentury, and music halls of significant capacity began to appear in the larger American cities in the 1850s. By 1850 England already had substantial halls with impressive organs in London, Birmingham, Liverpool and elsewhere, although at the outset they were used primarily for choral concerts and music festivals, and only somewhat later for organ recitals. From 1855 to 1894, W.T. Best gave weekly recitals on the large Willis organ in St George's Hall, Liverpool, and no less a personage than Felix Mendelssohn is known to have given one in 1846 on the Hill organ in Birmingham City Hall. Alexandre Guilmant and other Parisian organists would later give many recitals on the Cavaillé-Coll organ in the Trocadero hall in Paris.

Boston dedicated its new Music Hall in the fall of 1852, and, while a new organ was planned for it, had to make do for several years with a second-hand one belonging to the Handel and Haydn Society until sufficient funds could be raised for one specifically designed for the hall, which seated more than 2,000 people. Meanwhile, in 1854, Philadelphia's musical community had erected a music hall with a substantial organ, and in the same year a new Tremont Temple was completed in Boston to replace an older building destroyed by fire, and it too had an impressive organ. But it was not until 1863 that Boston's Music Hall acquired what at the time was the most impressive (and, for a time, most famous) organ in the country. Its interior parts had been fabricated not in Boston, but in Württemberg, Germany, by the Walcker Orgelbau, and its impressive architect-designed casework was made in New York by the noted Herter Brothers firm, makers of elegant furniture and architectural woodworking.

While this organ, like its British counterparts, was expected to support large choral productions, it was from the outset also intended for the performance of organ recitals. Indeed, the opening programme on 2 November 1863, following a lengthy ‘Ode’ recited by a noted actress, Charlotte Cushman, some introductions, and the dramatic dropping of a large curtain that had concealed the organ from view, was in fact a straight organ recital, with no soloists, choruses, or other distractions, and played by six leading organists:

Except for Morgan's two Handel chorus transcriptions, and Tuckerman's choral ones, the rest of the selections were all legitimate organ works, and four of the organists have already been mentioned here. Eugene Thayer, a pupil of Paine, soon joined the ranks of Boston's elite recitalists; eventually he too travelled to Germany for further study, and he also became a teacher and composer of note. S.P. Tuckerman (1819–1890), organist of St Paul's Church, had studied for a time in England, and was the group's ‘elder statesman’, but it would seem that he was not really attuned to the contemporary recital scene, and seldom heard in recitals subsequently. At the time of the concert, Paine, besides being organist of the West Church, was chapel organist and music instructor at Harvard College, and he would eventually become its first tenured Professor of Music; Morgan, the only non-Bostonian, had moved from St Thomas's Church to Grace Church in New York; Lang was the organist of the South Church and also of the Handel & Haydn Society, a position he held for several decades; and Willcox had moved permanently to Boston and had recently become organist of Immaculate Conception Church, for which a large new organ was already under construction in the Hook factory. In the weeks following, and into 1864, most of these same organists (with a very occasional visitor) gave a continuing series of weekly solo recitals in Music Hall, and while operatic overtures, Handel choruses and improvised fantasias and thunderstorms soon began to creep in, Bach and Mendelssohn were still frequently heard, along with such contemporary European organ composers as Rinck, Thiele, Hesse, Schumann, Sechter, Batiste and Lefebure-Wely, as well as compositions by some of the performers.Footnote ¹⁴

The opening recital of Boston's ‘Great Organ’ may well have been the first such to be subjected to some actual in-depth reviewing, thanks in part to the musically knowledgeable Dwight. Some excerpts: ‘Mr. Morgan rolled out the great 32-foot basses with superb effect in those “Israel in Egypt” choruses, and had to answer to an irresistible recall … . Mr. Lang's choice of stops in the Mendelssohn Sonata was most appropriate, and revealed rare beauties in the organ as well as the composition … . The Offertoire, performed so admirably by Mr. Willcox, had more of thought and serious purpose in it than most of the French music. It served well his peculiar talent for contrasting and combining various stops’. Dwight reserved his highest (and most flowery) praise for Paine's performance of the two Bach works: of the Toccata, ‘its mighty inspiration, its refreshing grandeur, its inexhaustible suggestion of the ocean rolling in upon the beach’, and of the Trio Sonata, ‘played on soft stops, with alternation and contrast of voices, as well as of tempo in the several movements’. And Thayer's ‘glorious G minor Fugue … made the proper balance and finale to the appropriate trilogy (so to speak) of great works of Bach’.Footnote ¹⁵

Dwight could be expected to wax enthusiastic; he was, after all, a lover of Bach and one of the movers and shakers behind the whole Music Hall project. A somewhat different view of the Boston event was recorded by an anonymous contributor to the New York Times. After panning the ‘Ode’, which he thought too long and ‘not very warmly received’, he addressed the concert. Paine's Bach Toccata ‘exhibited his severe classic (but not popular) style, and his great excellence with the pedal; the trio sonata was a very beautiful movement, and well followed out. But, admirable as Mr. Paine's mastery of the organ is, he received no encore’. Thayer is said to have ‘rendered well’ Bach's Fugue in G Minor, ‘in which he showed surpassing skill in pedaling’. The reviewer's fellow New Yorker, Morgan, perhaps predictably, received the highest praise, in flowery terms rivalling Dwight's praise of Paine. The Handel transcriptions convinced him that Morgan ‘was the star of the evening, and I baptize him as royal at once, verily believing that when he has an organ at his command, such an one as he had last night, he is in truth a king. Sweetness drops from his finger ends’. And he was encored, playing his improvisation on American and British national anthems, which ‘easily bore away the laurel of the evening’, and his pedalling was likewise praised – perhaps not unusual, considering that full-compass ‘German pedals’ of 27 or (as yet less common) 30 notes, although already recently adopted by American builders for their largest organs, were still a novelty, and the expert usage of them likewise so. The other players received but little mention. Lang, described as an ‘admirable organist’, was praised for his selection of a ‘beautiful and appropriate’ Mendelssohn Sonata and Tuckerman dismissed as ‘somewhat tedious’, but Wilcox's Lefebure-Wely Offertorium was regarded as ‘the gem of the festival. It was the best and completest exhibition of the capabilities of the instrument that was made’. And, somewhat predictably, his pedalling was also praised.Footnote ¹⁶ Indeed, the impression that virtuoso pedalling made on audiences still unused to it may well have been what made Bach's Toccata in F popular with several recitalists in this period.

Many of the programmes played weekly thereafter on the Music Hall organ, during its 20 years of regular use before being ousted in 1883 to make room for the newly organized Boston Symphony Orchestra, are preserved, and while at first they were largely performed by the Boston ‘regulars’, Lang, Willcox, Thayer, Whiting and Paine, these were shortly joined by a newcomer to Boston and a distinct rarity in that period, young Lillian Tillinghast Frohock (1841–1921), who had recently arrived from Chicago with her husband, an industrialist, and soon became organist of the Arlington Street Church, where a new Hook organ had been installed in 1862. She made her debut at the Music Hall organ in March of 1864 in a concert given by the Orchestral Union (billed there as the ‘Distinguished Lady Organist’) but was soon playing regular solo recitals in the weekly series, displaying an impressive repertoire that included large works by Bach (several preludes and fugues), Mendelssohn (five of the six Sonatas), Merkel, Batiste, Hesse, Rinck and Freyer, along with the inevitable Handel and operatic transcriptions, and was praised in Dwight's Journal: ‘here was not only delicacy and expression, but the most vigorous execution, when required, both upon the manuals and pedals. The ease and rapidity of the latter was truly wonderful’.Footnote ¹⁷ Although she lived to an advanced age, her impressive career as a recitalist lasted only a decade, cut short by the progress of a debilitating disease.Footnote ¹⁸

After the establishment of the conservatories, women were gradually found in lists of organ students, and occasionally appeared in student recitals, some later taking positions in urban churches, but unlike Lillian Frohock, none seemed destined to make a mark as recitalists. After the establishment of the American Guild of organists in 1896 a few women began passing the necessary membership examination, but again were mainly church organists. In 1906 Georgia B. Easton (1877–1957), a student of Everett Truette, became one of the first women to pass the Associate examination of the A.G.O., and is known to have given a number of recitals at Serlo Hall in Methuen, Massachusetts.Footnote ¹⁹ However, it is not until the early decades of the twentieth century that we find women beginning to appear in any significant numbers as organ recitalists, and that is outside of the parameters of this study.

In 1867 the New England Conservatory was founded, with its headquarters initially in Music Hall, and Lang, Tuckerman and Whiting were immediately hired as instructors. Buck had gone to Chicago in 1869 to accept a position at the large and prestigious St James's Church, and was soon giving recitals in the Midwest. Of a performance given in Omaha in July of 1869 his pedalling was praised, and ‘his execution was fully equal to the reputation accorded him by the eastern press’,Footnote ²⁰ and the following year he opened a new Marshall organ in Milwaukee. But in 1871 the great Chicago fire wholly destroyed not only Buck's church but also his house, his studio (with a Johnson organ) and his library, and by 1872 he was in Boston and teaching at the Conservatory, having also been appointed official Music Hall organist. One of his first recitals there was somewhat of a mixed bag:

Although he began with Bach, as Buck often did, and included an organ work by Lemmens, it is possible that the Beethoven and Wagner transcriptions were meant to appeal to the string and vocal students of the Conservatory – while the Rossini (which had been recently published in his own arrangement) was obviously the crowd pleaser. But, while the regular afternoon Music Hall recitals continued to be often heavily interlaced with operatic overtures and other transcribed pieces, surviving examples of some of the conservatory's student recitals consist largely of actual organ works, almost always including something by Bach, as did most conservatory-sponsored programmes by their teachers, Whiting, Buck, and F.H. Torrington. Clearly, authentic organ literature already played a large part in the curriculum.

The Postwar Surge

Large organs continued to proliferate in the period following the Civil War, both in the large new urban churches of all denominations then being built as well as in concert halls. Hard on the heels of the celebrated Boston organ came the ‘Worcester Organ’, built by Hook on a plan similar to that in Willcox's Immaculate Conception church and installed in the recently-erected Mechanics Hall of nearby Worcester, where it was inaugurated almost exactly a year after the Boston one, on 10 November 1864, with a recital performed by three organists, and containing only two transcriptions, neither of them operatic:

The Vox Humana,Footnote a quiet reed stop, was one of the few tonal innovations introduced by Boston's Music Hall organ, and, seeing its appeal as something of a curiosity, Hook and other Boston builders immediately began to provide it in their larger organs. And it was just as immediately taken advantage of by the organists who played those instruments.

In 1865 the greatest organ sensation in the New York area was not in Manhattan but across the as yet un-bridged East River, in Brooklyn. Headlined in the New York Times as ‘The Largest Organ Ever Made in the United States’, it was built by E. & G. G. Hook for Henry Ward Beecher's Plymouth Church.Footnote ²³ A later writer observed that this four-manual, 62 stop organ ‘is in reality a Concert Organ; it had been used, more, probably, for Concert purposes than any other American-built organ’.Footnote ²⁴ That statement (having clearly ruled out the German-built Boston organ), could well have still been true when written in 1875, for almost immediately the church had begun advertising weekly free organ concerts. And indeed, during the ensuing years, Plymouth Church, in addition to the services and other programmes driven by its dynamic and controversial preacher, seems to have functioned as Brooklyn's de facto concert hall, hosting not only organ recitals but also concerts by the Brooklyn Handel & Haydn Society, Harmonic Society and Apollo Club, as well as ‘Old Folks’ concerts, bell ringers, assorted singers and instrumentalists, and visiting choral groups such as the Jubilee Singers.

A grand opening concert was planned in 1866, and some controversy arose about paying Morgan a hundred dollars for his part in it, but ‘the desire that the services of Mr. George W. Morgan should be secured was so generally expressed, that Mr. Beecher yielded to the pressure and engaged him at his own expense’. Willcox (perhaps subsidized by the Hooks) also took part, along with F.F. Muller, temporarily the church's organist. Willcox began the concert, ‘not up to his usual standard’, according to a reviewer, ‘but in his subsequent improvisation, he displayed the various exquisite solo stops’, and was encored. Morgan, obviously the star of the programme, performed four (unnamed) pieces, and ‘displayed his perfect mastery of the organ’, and although it was ‘almost entirely new to him, he handled it in a perfectly familiar way, making and varying his combinations with the utmost ease and rapidity’, and he too was encored. Muller, however, ‘cut a very sorry figure between these two fine organists, and … was certainly out of place on this occasion’.Footnote ²⁵ Nonetheless, he seems to have held on to his position for a few more years before his predecessor, Zundel, returned.

By November a series of Saturday afternoon ‘Grand Organ Concerts’ was in full swing, one of the first being given by a variety of performers ‘complimentary’ to George William Warren, organist of Holy Trinity Church, during which Warren himself performed ‘an extempore fantasia and a fugue from Beethoven's Mount of Olives, in which his masterly handing of the immense instrument elicited the most enthusiastic response’.Footnote ²⁶ Later, he performed a piece exhibiting the ‘perfectly delicious’ Vox Humana stop. Indeed, it would be quite a while before organists (and audiences) anywhere finally got tired of this stop, which was now showing up rather predictably in large organs everywhere.

In the decade preceding the 99th Plymouth Organ Concert in 1876 (given by H.G. Thunder), the Brooklyn organ would seem to have closely matched the Boston organ in the number of concerts given, although perhaps of lesser quality. On 2 October 1867, F.F. Muller, who had temporarily replaced John Zundel as the church's organist, played a programme of eight pieces, only two of which were actual organ works – an unidentified Prelude and Fugue by Bach and ‘Thema, Variations and Finale, with Pedal Obligato’ by Rinck – the rest being assorted transcriptions. Zundel eventually returned, and on 30 January 1869 performed a short programme of four pieces, described thusly:

1. 1. Overture to Zampa … Herold

2. 2. Traumerei (Dreams) – for the soft stops … Schumann

3. 3. Andante Pastorale – from an unpublished Sonata – (exhibiting the various stops and compass of the organ) … Zundel

4. 4. Introduction, Variations & Finale – presenting one of the author's celebrated fugues … Rink’Footnote ²⁷

In March, Robert Elder gave a recital of seven pieces in which only one (a Beethoven transcription) was not composed by him, and in November, a programme of five pieces by Zundel was comprised solely of transcriptions. Samuel P. Warren, a notable New York organist and composer who had studied in Germany with Haupt, provided a little more balance in a programme that began with Bach's Passacaglia and included organ works by Thiele and Best, along with five transcriptions, and in December John H. Willcox came down from Boston with a somewhat predictable programme including an improvised prelude, a Lefebure-Wely Elevation, and some transcriptions, including two opera overtures.

1870 opened in January with the three Canadian Carter brothers, John, George and Henry, who had recently performed in Boston. While their programme of 12 works contained several transcriptions, they were all from choral or symphonic sources, and organ works by Bach, Krebs and Theile shared the honors with a Fugue in E Major by one of the players, John Carter. Muller played again that same month, including organ works by Hesse and Albrechtsberger with a reprise of the Rinck work played in 1867. Reviews of these programmes are rare, but one article in 1871 comments on the audience: ‘The ‘organ concerts’, as they are called, are popular, likewise cheap and always crowded. The ladies find them pleasant … listening to excellent music and whiling away an afternoon’.Footnote ²⁸ A commentary on a concert appeared in 1873, noting that S. B. Whiteley, organist of Holy Trinity Church, ‘rendered his numbers with good taste, and in the instance of the ‘Lohengrin’ selections with brilliancy’.Footnote ²⁹ George W. Morgan played a programme in October of 1876 that began with Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor before launching into his usual transcriptions, sharing the programme with a vocalist. Whitely played in the following month, and ‘the program was judiciously selected as regards the organ numbers, and included the first concerto of Handel, the ‘St. Anne's’ Fugue of J.S. Bach, a meditation of Gounod's arranged by Mr. Whiteley, Chipp's variations on the Austrian Hymn, and the overture to Spohr's ‘Jessonda’.Footnote ³⁰ While, as in Boston, interest in the Brooklyn organ programmes began to diminish in the 1880s, they continued for some time longer.

Across the river in Manhattan many new organs were being built, and attracting some younger organists. ‘Exhibitions’ by multiple players still seemed common on these occasions. Morgan, along with George W. Walter, J. M. Loretz and Samuel P. Warren, opened the Hall & Labagh organ in the city's Temple Emanu-El in June of 1869, performing nine works, only three of which (a Bach Fugue, a Bach Toccata, and Theme and Variations by Thiele) were true organ works. Samuel Prowse Warren, the son of a Montreal organbuilder, had studied with Haupt in Berlin, like some of the Bostonians, and was an accomplished Bach performer. A relative newcomer to the New York scene, Warren began his long career in New York as organist of All Souls Unitarian Church in 1866, but in 1868 was appointed to succeed Morgan at Grace Church, where he would carve out a prominent niche as a serious recitalist.Footnote ³¹

Pointing in the direction of programmes featuring more genuine organ works was the 1878 exhibition of the new organ in Grace Church, built by New York builder Hilborne Roosevelt. Some of the New York ‘regulars’ such as Morgan and Warren, were joined in 1875 by another newcomer to the area, Dudley Buck, who had left Boston to become organist of Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn. Warren, Grace Church's organist, began with Bach's Passacaglia. Following a vocal solo, Morgan, by then organist of the Brooklyn Tabernacle, performed a Prelude and Fugue in D Minor by Bach, followed by Buck performing one of his own recent compositions, a tone-poem entitled At Evening. A couple of transcriptions played by Warren and Henry Carter preceded Buck's performance of Thiele's Theme and Variations in A flat, and following another vocal solo the programme closed with Warren playing two movements from Alexandre Guilmant's Sonata, Op. 42 and Morgan performing his own ‘God Save the Queen’ variations. Out of 12 selections, three of which were vocal solos, these six organ works outnumbered the three transcriptions of choral works that rounded out the programme.Footnote ³² The appearance of a work by Guilmant signalled a new trend of interest in contemporary French composers, who would begin to supplant the older ones, chiefly Lefebure-Wely and Batiste, during the next two decades.

The Gilded Age Arrives

By the 1870s, the United States was prospering. Westward expansion was creating large cities in the midwest and west coast, and in 1869 the ‘Golden Spike’ was driven uniting the east and west coast by rail. Manufacturing, mining and other industries, spurred by new technologies, inventive genius and entrepreneurship, were making fortunes and attracting waves of new immigrants – Irish, German, Italian, French Canadian. While in the growing cities across the country wealthy Protestants were building large new churches and cathedrals, often to replace older and smaller ones, struggling immigrants, a majority of whom were Catholics, were pooling their meagre resources to build impressive churches and cathedrals to house and serve their communicants as well as to advertise their presence, and big choirs and organs were a given when they could be afforded. All told, the older established organ builders were being kept busy, and the growing market encouraged the establishment of new firms, especially in the midwest, and particularly by Germans with names like Felgemaker, Schantz, Reuter, Pomplitz, Schwab and Koehnken, some of whom would eventually provide serious competition to the east coast establishments. Even in the east, new organbuilding firms were being established, most notably by Hilborne Roosevelt in New York and George S. Hutchings in Boston. All had their work cut out for them, not infrequently receiving orders for organs larger than the largest built in the 1850s and 1860s. These larger organs drove the need to invent new registration aids and means of lightening actions as well as adopting a bolder style of voicing for large buildings, and devising means of making production faster and more factory-centred. The Hook firm had already built a large new factory in Boston in 1854, and by 1880 Roosevelt had opened branch factories in Philadelphia and Baltimore. Organists, mostly American-born, were proliferating too, many being graduates of the growing number of music conservatories that sprang up almost immediately after the end of the Civil War – four in 1867 alone (New England, Boston, Cincinnati, Chicago) as well as Oberlin (1865) and Peabody (1868). And every conservatory had one or more organ teachers.

Among the first major Roman Catholic cathedrals were St Patrick's in New York, in which Henry Erben installed a 38-stop organ in 1868, and the larger and newer Holy Cross Cathedral in Boston, said to be larger than even Music Hall. For Holy Cross, in 1875, Hook & Hastings built their largest organ yet, double the size of the New York instrument, containing some mechanical innovations, and exceeding by several of its 80 stops the size of their 1865 Brooklyn organ.Footnote ³³ As seemed customary with such events, its opening recital was played by four organists whose programme, according to Dwight, lasted over two and a half hours:

Lang and Footnote Whiting were among Boston's ‘recital regulars’, and Whitney, a Vermont native who had recently become organist of Church of the Advent, would soon be heard in other local recitals, but Chaffin was a visitor, the organist of St Paul's Episcopal Cathedral in Buffalo, where Hook & Hastings would install a large three-manual organ three years later. Aside from improvisations and the opening and closing transcriptions, the programme consisted entirely of organ works.

Large industrial exhibitions that featured substantial organs had been held in England and France in the 1850s and 1860s, and in 1876 the United States flexed its own industrial muscle and celebrated the centenary of its founding with a lavish exhibition of its own in Philadelphia, which featured two large and prize-winning concert organs by Hook & Hastings, whose entry was based closely on the Holy Cross organ, and Roosevelt, whose instrument sported an experimental electrically operated division.Footnote ³⁵ Both were reported as having been played several times a day by leading organists such as Willcox and Thunder, who had constantly to play fortissimo due to the continual background noises in the exhibition hall, and apparently without set programmes. What they played has not been recorded, although it doubtless included some rousing opera overtures and ‘thunderstorm’ improvisations. This exposure, although rather informal, was good advertising, and was followed by some prestigious contracts being subsequently awarded to both builders.Footnote ³⁶

The following year Hook & Hastings completed their largest organ yet, for the new concert hall in Cincinnati, Ohio. George E. Whiting, who dedicated it, left Boston to become the official organist there, and in a letter published in a booklet describing the organ made the following comments on concert repertoire:

This is a pretty broad statement, of course, but quite indicative of what recitalists such as Whiting had been playing in this period, and note should be taken of the emphasis on ‘living composers’ – which would include not only Whiting himself, but along with contemporaries in other countries, other Americans such as Buck, who as early as 1866 had already begun publishing major organ works designed for concert use.

New York's innovative Roosevelt firm had also attracted some noteworthy contracts, including a sizable instrument for Grace Church, where Samuel P. Warren was organist, in 1878. In the same year a smaller instrument was completed, which would appear to have been the first organ exported by an American firm, destined for St Paul's Episcopal Church (the ‘American church’) in Rome, Italy. Before its departure it was set up in Irving Hall, where concerts were given on three days by four organists, assisted by three singers, a cornetist and harpist Maud Morgan, daughter of George W. Morgan. Morgan's presence was prominent, and in the three programmes he performed his ‘signature’ William Tell overture and ‘America’ variations, along with the overtures to Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream, Mozart's Figaro, and Rossini's Semiramide, plus one lone organ work, Bach's Fugue in E-flat, which he had performed on other occasions. Although continuing to be a popular player, his repertoire seems to have become increasingly predictable. S.B. Whitely played the overture to Schubert's Rosamunde and Guilmant's Marche Religeuse in the first programme; S.P. Warren took part in the second programme, playing Guilmant's Grand Choeur in D and Hesse's Air and Variations in A, plus a Wagner transcription; and in the third programme P.A. Schnecker, organist of West Presbyterian Church, performed two organ works, an Adagio by Hesse and Guilmant's Hommage à Thalberg.Footnote ³⁸ Overtures by well-known nineteenth-century composers were still popular, but among composers of actual organ works, Guilmant was beginning to crowd out the older Lefebure-Wely and Batiste as a French favourite, while Hesse was doing likewise with former German favourites such as Rinck. These choices give validity to Whiting's dictum regarding the performance of music by living composers.

By the 1880s Willcox was dead, and Buck and Paine had largely given up playing recitals to concentrate on composition and pedagogy, but Morgan, Warren, Lang, Thayer and Whiting continued to concertize, and were being joined by a younger generation made up largely of the pupils of these older performers. One who would soon attain prominence, both nationally and internationally, was Clarence Eddy, a native of Greenfield, Massachusetts. At the age of 16 he began his organ study with Buck in Hartford, and after serving for a short time as organist of a Vermont church, went – probably on Buck's advice – to study with Haupt in Berlin. Shortly after his return Eddy took the position of organist at First Congregational Church in Chicago, and in March of 1874, he gave a recital on an 1871 Hook & Hastings organ in the Asylum Hill Congregational Church of Hartford, which, with the exception of two vocal solos by a Mrs Oliver, consisted almost entirely of German organ works:

The performance elicited a glowing review: ‘Every number … .showed an intelligent appreciation of the music, and the perfect mastery of the instrument necessary to give it its true expression. He plays with great ease and steadiness, handling the instrument with remarkable skill’. Eddy's ‘Greenville’ variations may have been an improvisation, for he encored it with what probably was one, based on ‘Home, Sweet Home’.Footnote ³⁹

Save occasionally in Dwight's Journal, reviews of organ recitals had rarely contained commentary such as this on the actual performances, but that was changing in the 1870s. Louis Falk, who after study in Germany came to Chicago 1869 to become organ instructor at Chicago Musical College, gave a recital at Immanuel Church in Milwaukee in August of 1875 that was reviewed in considerable (and not always favourable) detail by an anonymous but knowledgeable writer. His first criticism was to point out that of seven selections, Richter's Fantasie and Fugue and Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor were ‘the only representations of genuine organ music’, on the programme, although they ‘afforded Prof. Falk an excellent opportunity to exhibit the results of a training in the classical school of organ-players, and constituted the principal attractions of the entertainment’. Of the transcriptions, Costa's March from Naaman ‘made a most agreeable impression’, but Chopin's Marche Funebre ‘was not to be congratulated, a part of the composition being played somewhat too fast … .while the whole could scarcely be recognized’. Monastery Bells by Lefebure-Wely had already been played three times in Falk's recital series, and Hoffman's Trinity Chimes ‘afforded an opportunity for the exhibition of considerably dexterity in pedal playing, but was not remarkable for anything else’. Falk's own Life on the Ocean, described as ‘descriptive’, was presumably an actual organ composition (unless it was improvised), and the reviewer's only comment was that it too had already been heard at a previous concert.Footnote ⁴⁰

The same reviewer may also have reviewed the concert opening a new Johnson organ in Milwaukee's Plymouth Church a year later, in which Clarence Eddy shared the programme with some vocal soloists. Here, however, nothing but praise was given to Eddy, ‘who was the principal attraction … and performed some very difficult compositions – the Guilmant Sonata, a rather long but brilliant work … a Concert Fantasie by Lux … . Meyerbeer's Schiller March, arranged by Best, and last, but not least, Thiele's immensely difficult theme and variations. Mr Eddy is an extraordinary performer, and played the different compositions mentioned with apparent ease’.Footnote ⁴¹

A contemporary of Eddy's was Henry Morton Dunham, a native of Brockton, Massachusetts who carved out a distinguished career as organist, composer and teacher in Boston. He had studied with Whiting (organ) and Paine (theory) in New England Conservatory, graduating in 1873. In his autobiography, written shortly before his death, he commented on the changes in repertoire that had occurred since his student days in the 1870s: ‘In looking over my scrap-book, I also find that the type of programme was quite different in those days. Mine contained an undue profusion of arrangements which, after all, one had to use, or play nothing worth while but Bach, Merkel, Hesse and a few others of the same school’.Footnote ⁴² But Guilmant or Rheinberger had yet to appear in Dunham's recitals as late as 1880 when, having recently succeeded Whiting at the Conservatory, he gave three recitals in Boston's Music Hall. In these, however, organ works by Bach, Mendelssohn, Merkel, Salomé, Volckmar, and Lemmens (as well as ones by himself and Whiting) considerably outnumbered two Wagner transcriptions and one from Beethoven. One of the two Merkel works was the Grand Sonata for Four Hands and Double Pedal, performed with his contemporary, Arthur Foote. According to Dwight, it was ‘played con amore and with inspiring effect’, and of his performance of Bach's Passacaglia, it was ‘something that we would fain miss no opportunity of hearing, at least when so well interpreted’. Of Volckmar's Adagio, it ‘doubtless pleased many of the audience … but we prefer small doses of such sugary sweetness’. Regarding Dunham's performance technique, Dwight observed that ‘he plays with great clearness, so that you trace all the polyphonic parts; his time is firm and even, and he combines and contrasts the registers with judgment and facility’.Footnote ⁴³

Dunham's partner in the Merkel work, Arthur Foote, a pupil of Lang, would soon also become a member of the Conservatory faculty, and, like Whiting and Dunham, a composer, whose varied works included several for the organ. In 1878 he succeeded Eugene Thayer as organist of Boston's First Church, remaining there until 1910. Thayer, who shortly moved to New York, and died in 1889, had given numerous free weekly recitals at First Church and Old South Church during the previous decades, and was unique among his peers in never playing any transcriptions (unless Best's arrangements of Handel's organ concertos could be counted as such). Thayer's programmes usually contained two or more works by Bach, and pieces by Mendelssohn, Schumann, Calkin, Hesse, Thiele and Rheinberger, as well as some of his own compositions, but he often repeated works. Foote did not continue this tradition, as in addition to his church duties, his teaching, along with the composing of works for a wide range of media in addition to the organ, precluded much actual concertizing. In his autobiography, however, he notes that he did give ‘a few regular organ recitals’ at the church during his long incumbency, as well as short ones preceding special Thursday afternoon services, but admitted that ‘As a church organist I was more of a success than in concert; for I have not the temperament for public playing of either organ or piano’.Footnote ⁴⁴

Paine had, with some minor exceptions, largely given up composing for the organ toward the 1880s, and no longer played recitals. One of his later performances was of Bach's Prelude and Fugue in A Minor as part of a symphony concert at Music Hall in 1874; Dwight praised his ‘clear, masterly manner’, but took exception to the fact that he had played the work on full organ throughout– probably a reflection of what he had been taught during his study in Germany, where this seems to have been the norm at the time.Footnote ⁴⁵ Buck continued as a church organist after his move to New York, and, along with more choral composing, to continue to write for the organ, although the works of his later years tended toward the ‘character piece’ genre rather than the major recital pieces of his earlier years, On the Coast being one of the most popular, and after the 1880s he seldom played recitals. Frederick Archer was of this same generation, a seasoned recitalist who arrived from London in 1881, coming first to the New York and Brooklyn area and building a reputation as a somewhat virtuosic performer before settling in Pittsburgh, where in 1896 he became conductor of the Pittsburgh Orchestra. His recital repertoire tended to be similar to Eddy's, consisting largely of works by nineteenth-century organ composers such as Merkel, Batiste, Lemmens, Callaerts and Tours, plus Bach and some of his own compositions, with an occasional transcription.

Thayer and Dunham continued to both play and compose for the organ almost to the ends of their careers, as did Samuel P. Warren and Morgan, who died in 1892 while on a concert tour on the west coast, although toward the end his repertoire seems to have shrunk to the same handful of popular pieces. No so Warren, perhaps the only one in his generation with a repertoire as broad and as formidable as Eddy's, and from as a wide range of organ composers of all periods and nationalities, much of it performed in regular recitals at Grace Church between 1878 and 1894.Footnote ⁴⁶

A younger Bostonian, Everett E. Truette (1861–1933), a student of Dunham at New England Conservatory who later studied abroad with Haupt, Guilmant and Best, likewise spent his lifetime composing, arranging and performing. In addition, he was for many years a church organist, taught numerous pupils in a private studio, and between 1892 and 1894 edited a periodical for organists entitled simply The Organ, which contained articles about organs, organists and composers, as well as organ music.Footnote ⁴⁷ Like Thayer, he was something of a purist in his recital programming, eschewing all but a very occasional transcription from Wagner or Meyerbeer. With the exception of Bach, his programmes played in the 1890s reveal a preference for contemporary French, German and British composers such as Guilmant, Gounod, Chauvet, Batiste, Dubois, Merkel, Thiele, Tours, Hollins and Wolstenholme. More contemporary French works were appearing in the programmes of other organists too; in 1890 S.P. Warren, in a programme inaugurating the new Odell organ in Troy Music Hall, included (along with Bach's Prelude and Fugue in A Minor) works by Grison, Widor and Guilmant.Footnote ⁴⁸

George W. Chadwick, began his musical activity as an organist, but his main career was as an educator and composer, and although he composed several organ works, including an impressive six-movement Suite in Variation Form, was not known as a recitalist. The same is true of Horatio Parker, a student of Chadwick, who served for several years as organist of Trinity Church in Boston before joining the music faculty of Yale in 1894. But he too composed a number of organ works, most of them suitable for either church or recital use, as well as a major Concerto for Organ and Orchestra, premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1902.

During the 1890s Parker had a rather interesting if sometimes puzzling student at Yale, who had regularly served as a church organist between the ages of 14 and 24, and had even played some creditable recitals. In 1890 he gave a concert in the Baptist Church in his home town of Danbury which included Bach's ‘Dorian’ Toccata, Mendelssohn's Sonata No. 1, Lemmens's Organ March in D Major, Buck's Variations on ‘Home Sweet Home’ and his own transcription of Rossini's William Tell overture, plus a transcription of Wagner's ‘Evening Star’ melody. A reviewer praised the young player's ‘brilliance and precision’ and predicted for him ‘a brilliant future as an organist’.Footnote ⁴⁹ However, after graduating from Yale, and while continuing to play in churches for a few more years, Charles E. Ives eventually realized that his professional and musical lives lay elsewhere and is said never to have played an organ thereafter. Yet one of his early organ compositions, an 1893 set of variations on ‘America’ that somewhat parodies the earlier variation sets of Buck and Thayer, has remained something of a recital staple to the present day. In a way, though, it marked the end of an era.

Of a different stripe from these individuals was Clarence Eddy, who, like Warren, composed but few original organ works, although, like Buck, he did edit some anthologies of organ music, largely of works by his contemporaries. Eddy's major career was as a concert organist – perhaps the very first American actually to deserve that title in the modern sense. Based in Chicago 1874–95, this highly gifted performer was frequently on concert tours ranging from the midwestern states to the east and west coasts. He also had a formidable repertoire in his head and under his fingers, and was constantly learning new music, from the then little-known works of Buxtehude to Charles-Marie Widor's Sixth Symphony, which he mastered only a year after it was first published. In 1881–82 alone he performed eight full-length programmes between April and June, each devoted to the music of a different nationality. No works were repeated, and none of the selections were transcriptions. His ‘American’ programme included works by older composers Thayer, Paine, Buck, Whiting, and Whitney as well as younger ones, notably Frederick Grant Gleason, who dedicated his Triumphal Overture to Eddy, plus his own Festival Prelude and Fugue on ‘Old Hundred’. Although some earlier composers such as Handel, Buxtehude, Frescobaldi, Wesley, Krebs and, of course, Bach appeared a few times, these eight programmes show that his repertoire was unusually extensive, although largely made up of nineteenth-century composers. A notable inclusion was one of the earliest known American performances of Julius Reubke's challenging Grand Sonata on the 94th Psalm.Footnote ⁵⁰ Subsequent programmes, cited by his biographer, William Osborne, reveal a continually expanding repertoire, almost entirely of original organ works, which was unlikely to have been approached by any other American organist – possibly excepting Warren – during the last two decades of the nineteenth century.

In 1890 a large state-of-the-art four-manual organ was built by Roosevelt for the new Auditorium in Chicago. Eddy assisted in its tonal design, and premiered it to a standing-room only audience in a programme that included, in addition to organ solos, works for organ and orchestra by Dubois and Guilmant. He was soon appointed the official organist, and he gave many other recitals there. In 1893 the World's Columbian Exposition, a project substantially exceeding the Centennial one of 1876 in scope, was headquartered in Chicago, and a four-manual organ built by Farrand & Votey was installed in the Exposition's Festival Hall.Footnote ⁵¹ As might be expected, Eddy was in the thick of it, playing many of the formal programmed concerts, and arranging for the hiring of a number of the visiting organists. These included some of the older established east-coast recitalists (Whiting, Lang, Thunder Jr), but also many of the younger generation such as William C. Carl, E. Huntington Woodman, Samuel A. Baldwin, Harrison M. Wild and Frank Taft, who were to make their mark in the impending twentieth century; also included was a recent German immigrant to Chicago, Wilhelm Middelschulte, perhaps best remembered as the composer of a daunting recital showpiece for pedal solo.

Eddy's coup, though, was engaging as the star attraction, the Parisian organist Alexandre Guilmant, a student of Lemmens and already recognized as a notable performer, whose compositions were achieving considerable popularity among American organists. While European singers, violinists and pianists had been making concert tours in America for roughly half a century, and a few foreign-born organists, mostly of little importance, had immigrated to become permanent residents, Guilmant was the first European organ recitalist to make an American touring appearance, and he proved a decided attraction. This was an occurrence of some import. American-born organists had, of course, gone abroad to study with notable organists such as Haupt, Schneider, Rheinberger and Best, as well as Guilmant. But none of these eminent foreign performers had ever yet foot on American soil, to give recitals and teach, so if American audiences and students were influenced by them, it was second-hand, as it were, filtered and diluted by their American students, who were free to put their own interpretations on what they had learnt. And now one of the most notable European performers was on his way to America, and to venues where he would be heard in person, and by quite literally thousands. The Americans who had studied in Germany had turned American organists and audiences away from the old British ideas of organ music; as the twentieth century opened, tastes, at least in contemporary music, were turning from German to French, and Guilmant was an important catalyst.

Guilmant's programmes, along with those of Eddy and the majority of the other performers in the Exposition series, consisted almost entirely of true organ works, with only a slight smattering here and there of a transcription. However, with the exception of Bach and an occasional appearance of a few other Baroque composers, the 61 programmes played by all recitalists between July and October of 1893 provided a quite broad selection of works by nineteenth-century French, German, Belgian, British and American composers, a number of whom were still living.Footnote ⁵² Guilmant was lionized, and from Chicago went directly to New York, where at a dinner given by the Manuscript Society on 10 October, it was reported that ‘Never before have so many prominent organists gathered together … and all paid homage to this artist whose triumphant tour in this country has been unique’.Footnote ⁵³

Before returning to Paris, Guilmant played well-attended recitals in Newark and two New York City churches, including First Presbyterian, where his former pupil William C. Carl was organist. A reviewer in the New York Times made the interesting comment that while the organ was ‘one of the most familiar of all instruments, yet the number of people who know when it is played well and when it is not is extremely small’, and cited Guilmant's playing as a standard by which others could be judged.Footnote ⁵⁴ But that standard was already being raised by Eddy, as well as some of the recent graduates of the conservatories in Boston, Baltimore and Oberlin, and Carl would subsequently found his Guilmant Organ School in New York, where a similar new generation of organists would receive their training in the early twentieth century.

Guilmant would tour the United States again, in 1897–98 and in 1904, when the indomitable 67-year old artist would play 40 demanding recitals of pure organ literature on the large organ built by the Los Angeles Art Organ Company for the main hall of the World's Fair held in St Louis.Footnote ⁵⁵ Meanwhile, in Clarence Eddy, America soon had its first true international touring concert organist. While Americans such as Buck, Paine, Thayer, Warren and Truette are known to have given recitals abroad during their student days, these were only incidental to their studies there, and they never concertized abroad thereafter. But in 1895 Eddy embarked on a tour that included major pre-arranged solo recitals in England, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Russia, as well as a performance with an orchestra. Eddy's success was so great that he and his wife headquartered themselves in Paris for a prolonged period, returning to America in 1906, where he continued concertizing, almost to the end of his days. By then, however, he was being both challenged and overshadowed by younger and equally formidable American recitalists including Lynnwood Farnam, Palmer Christian, Harrison M. Wild and William C. Carl, plus recent immigrants such as Wilhelm Middelschulte, Edwin H. Lemare and Pietro Yon – not to mention other touring Europeans, eventually including Guilmant's most renowned pupil, Marcel Dupré.

Major changes were occurring in the American organ world at the turn of the century. Continuing prosperity and population growth prior to the Great Depression assured the building of more concert halls, music schools and large churches. The introduction of electrically operated action technology and improved blowing mechanisms by organ builders made the construction of even larger and more complex organs for these buildings possible, and concerts showing them off of increasing public appeal. Technology would soon also introduce radio broadcasting and sound recording. The founding of the American Guild of Organists in 1896, its members at first admitted only by examination, brought greater collegiality and esteem to the organist's profession, and chapters soon sprang up around the country as the twentieth century progressed. Organ recitals by major performers, both American and foreign, continue to attract audiences to the present day, and American and European organists now regularly cross the ocean on concert tours. New organ music specifically for concert performance continues to be written, although programmes today are more of a mixture chronologically, with more works by Baroque composers and proportionally fewer works by contemporary composers, while an occasional transcription is even now sometimes programmed, and the art of transcription appears indeed to be making a comeback. Yet many of the large-scale works composed in various countries during the second half of the nineteenth century and often featured in recitals of the period have retained their appeal, and some of the best and most durable of them constitute a legacy from the formative days of American organ recitals that may still be frequently enjoyed in present-day programmes worldwide.