Houston Chamber Choir

Jan Overduin is Professor of Music at Wilfrid Laurier
University in Waterloo, Ontario, where he teaches organ and church music. He
began studies in The Netherlands, where he was born, and continued in Canada at
the University of Western Ontario, where he received the Masters degree in
performance. The list of his teachers includes Marie-Claire Alain, Peter
Hurford, and Jean Langlais. He has directed many choirs including the Wilfrid
Laurier University Choir and Chapel Choir, the Niagara Chamber Choir (which he
founded), the Menno Singers, the Mennonite Mass Choir.

Jeanne Demessieux (1921-1968) was a brilliant French
organist, recitalist, and composer. One of a select number of European
organists to tour America in the mid-twentieth century, she fascinated
audiences with her phenomenal technique.

We have been blessed with beautiful weekends for this festival, but this year was especially lovely. The leaves don’t turn color until October, but the weather was indeed glorious. That, combined with wonderful organ music, set the stage for the fifteenth annual festival. We are grateful to be able to encourage young organists with this competition, and had some wonderful applicants who sent in CDs.

Clarence Dickinson (1873–1969) had one of the longest and most influential careers in the history of American church music. Reminiscences, Part Two, begins with Dickinson’s arrival in Berlin in 1898 and traces his musical studies in Europe with Reimann, Guilmant, Moszkowski, and Vierne, his meeting and falling in love with Helen Adell Snyder, and his return to Chicago, where he became an overnight success as organist-choirmaster at St. James Church and founding conductor of the area’s most prominent choral societies.