January 2025

Parsons Pipe Organ Builders, Canandaigua, New York; Saint Benedict Cathedral, Evansville, Indiana

Given the opportunity for a major instrument in a large Catholic cathedral with superb acoustics, most builders might be forgiven for playing to type. These acoustics and this liturgy implies something French in nature, no? We know the great legacy the French have given to music and Catholicism; surely one thing follows another. And yet our Opus 52 for Saint Benedict Cathedral in Evansville, Indiana, had a different genesis and, in the end, a result well apart from the above pattern.

To try and categorize Anna Lapwood’s career is a challenge. She is a hugely successful concert organist, performing across Europe, Africa, and the United States; she is a conductor, director of music at Pembroke College, Cambridge (appointed at the age of 21, the youngest ever in Oxbridge); she is a recording artist, arranger, singer, radio and television presenter, TikTok personality with millions of hits, and last year was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire by King Charles III, with Princess Anne making the presentation.

The Great Lakes Regional Carillon Gathering, which took place October 4–5, 2024, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, brought together carillonists, bell enthusiasts, and students. In addition to the thirty-eight registered participants, the public recitals attracted additional guests to this intermittently held gathering. Julie Zhu and Navajo composer Connor Chee were featured composers.

It is almost certainly unprecedented for a front-page feature article on the pipe organ to appear in a major city newspaper on the opening day of an organ festival and competition in that very city. The Hartford Courant, however, did just that on Saturday, September 21, 2024, the start of the Albert Schweitzer Organ Festival Hartford (ASOFH). Festival artistic director Christopher Houlihan and four of his Trinity College students were pictured with Trinity’s magnificent Austin organ in an article including interviews with those students.

Where it all begins

Elinore Farnum

Elinore Farnum, born in 1934, organist and music teacher, died October 30, 2024, in Schenectady, New York. She studied organ with Elmer Tidmarsh, Helen Henshaw, and Hugh Allen Wilson and piano with Jeanette Odasz. She attended workshops at St. Dunstan’s Theological Seminary and at the Eastman School of Music, Rochester, New York.