Phillip Truckenbrod has released a paperback book available from Amazon: Organists and Me: Half a Century as an Agent for Musicians (https://amzn.to/2CKSs1C, $12.95). Truckenbrod, who in 1967 founded the agency that bears his name, has written an account of Phillip Truckenbrod Concert Artists and its milieu along with a memoir of how he ended up living his life with organists. It is the story of the concert organist scene in the last three-plus decades of the 20th century and the first couple of the 21st, plus some memoir material about Truckenbrod growing up discovering the organ, its music, and its people. His intention was to look to the future as much as possible, since the dominant feeling of his career was trying to preserve the organ performance scene from further decline. For that reason, the book is dedicated to Christopher Houlihan.
At the beginning of the 20th century the pipe organ was a major source of music for live audience consumption. As the century unfolded the organ had to yield a portion of that stage to symphony orchestras, but despite rapidly changing musical tastes it remained a major player. The second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, however, had become a challenging period for both organists and their booking agents. This is the story of one of the two agencies which dominated the American scene during that period, as told by the man who ventured from a Lutheran pulpit in New York City into the highly competitive and somewhat rarified world of performing musicians, with a stop along the way in the city room of a major American daily newspaper. The book is part memoir, part historical account, and part commentary. It is also a peek behind the scenes of how the art of organ performance survived into the 21st century.
For information: concertartists.com.
Other recent publications:
Organ Playing from the Very Beginning
Towards the Rebuilding of an Italian Renaissance-Style Wooden Organ
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