Dancing Feet

September 26, 2007

Betsy Goolian, Editor, Michigan Muse

“Marilyn Mason literally walked up and down the pedal board at the Kennedy Center organ. … As she worked her way through the impassioned pages she resembled some hieratic priestess performing a dance of grief on the keyboards. … Sowerby’s jubilant Pageant closed the evening, in a blaze of harmonies and pedal virtuosity.”
The Evening Star and Daily News, Washington, D.C., June 19, 1973

This fall, Marilyn Mason, chair of the department of organ since 1960, University Organist since 1976, will mark sixty years on the faculty—a first, according to official University records. To celebrate her remarkable achievements, the 47th Conference on Organ Music, held on campus annually since Mason originated them in 1960, is dedicated to her.

And this is no retirement party, mind you. Mason’s not going anywhere. And what would we do, after all, without her?

Consider sixty years. When Marilyn joined the faculty, Alexander Ruthven was University President—followed by Harlan Hatcher, Robben Fleming, Harold Shapiro, James Duderstadt, Lee Bollinger, and Mary Sue Coleman. Harry Truman was President. A new car was the princely sum of $800; a gallon of gasoline was 18¢. Minimum wage was 30¢ an hour and the average worker earned $1,900—a year. The oldest baby boomers you know now were still in diapers. Cell phones, iPods, and microwaves were all futuristic dreams.

It’s been a long road from Alva, Oklahoma. The daughter of a church organist mother and a banker father, Marilyn Mason gravitated to the organ before her feet could reach the pedals. “I went with my mother to church while she practiced,” she says. “She would let me play while she arranged the flowers on the altar.”

Mason arrived in Ann Arbor from Alva in 1944, a junior transferring in, to study at her father’s alma mater (JD ’12) and to work with one of the best organists around, Palmer Christian, University Organist and known across campus for his Wednesday afternoon Twilight Organ Concerts. Storied for his kindness and dedication to his students, he could be counted on for the reassuring sight of his white handkerchief waving from the audience during recitals.

And it didn’t take long for the organ faculty to recognize the promise in their new student. “Palmer Christian told me that a ‘buzz bomb’ from Oklahoma had walked in that day,” recalled friend and fellow organist Mary McCall Stubbins.

In a 1944, Palmer Christian wrote a guarded yet enthusiastic letter to a colleague. “I’m beginning to realize the outstanding natural capacity Marilyn has as an organist. Every week or so of late there have been flashes of tremendous style which convince me of the possibilities of Big Time … Her youth and enthusiasm will, of course, come into mature focus with years; meanwhile all of us will do everything possible to nurture a quite exceptional talent.”

And indeed they did. Not only did Mason earn her bachelor’s degree, she came away with the coveted Stanley Medal, the School’s highest honor for any graduating senior. Encouraged by her teacher and the School’s dean, fellow organist Earl V. Moore, to go on for her master’s, Marilyn did what any self-respecting student would do. She wrote home. “My father said, ‘You keep on going, you practice, we’ll pay the bills.’”

By the spring of 1947, she had finished the coursework and was ready for her master’s recital. And, true to form, there was her beloved teacher, handkerchief waving, cheering on his young protégée. Sadly, Mason’s recital would be his last. Three days later, he was gone.

“When Palmer Christian died in 1947, there was a rising star waiting in Ann Arbor’s musical wings,” wrote Mary Alice Power in Reflections: 1947-1997, a book compiled to mark Mason’s 50th year of teaching.

As her education continued, Mason spent summers earning her Doctor of Sacred Music at Union Theological Seminary in New York City and teaching at Columbia University. In the summer of 1948, she sailed to France, to the Ecole d’Art Americaine in Fontainebleau, to study with Nadia Boulanger and with Ecole faculty member Maurice Duruflé, taking the train into Paris for lessons at his church, St. Etienne-du-Mont, in the fifth arrondissement.

The following summer, Mason was off to California to visit her grandmother. As her confidence grew, so too did her repertoire, and that summer it was Arnold Schönberg’s Variations on a Recitative, the composer’s only major work for organ. Schönberg, who lived in nearby Beverly Hills, got wind of her work through a colleague and invited her to his home for a private lesson. That private lesson turned into five. Marilyn’s interpretation, as it turned out, would be the only one Schönberg would hear in his lifetime.

Word of her virtuosity quickly spread throughout the organ community. In 1957, she was invited to play at the First International Congress of Organists, an honor reserved for only the best—and one, at that time, almost unheard of for a woman. The performance would be at Westminster Abbey. As she began rehearsing for the concert, Leo Sowerby, Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer and a good friend of Joseph Brinkman, chair of the piano department, was called in to coach her on his own Classic Concerto, which he would conduct at Westminster.

The hours of rehearsal paid off. “A stunning performance,” wrote a reviewer in The Diapason, the mainstay publication for organists. The appearance would turn out to be notable in other respects as, making her the first American woman—second only after former teacher Mlle. Boulanger—to perform at the great cathedral.

The Golden Years
Now, aspiring organists flocked to Ann Arbor to study with the legendary Mason, signing up for her seminars in Bach’s Leipzig Chorales and Orgelbüchlein, on the music of the French Baroque, of Messaien, of contemporary composers.

“I like to think of the mid-sixties and early seventies as the ‘golden years’,” said Robert Clark, who served on the organ faculty during that time period. “It seemed that every young organist with teaching and performing ambitions followed the ‘yellow brick road’ leading to Ann Arbor.”

“I will never forget the first lesson with Marilyn Mason at Hill Auditorium,” wrote the late Donald Williams, DMA ’69, in Reflections. “It was at 1:30 p.m. and it was storming. I was barely twenty-two years of age and had graduated with my master’s degree from Peabody College. … Without warning, the center doors of Hill sprang open and a woman wearing a rain hat rode in on a bicycle while she called out, ‘I’m here! Welcome to Michigan.’ This put me at ease immediately and my wonderful journey at Michigan began.”

In 1976, the University Regents appointed Mason University Organist. The grace and style she brings to that role puts her in constant demand. She presented the 1979 Honors Convocation address, as many have before and since, but with a twist—a final flourish on the organ. When 10th University President Harold Shapiro was inaugurated, it was Marilyn who was asked to perform at the ceremony. And it was Mason’s playing—and presence—that consoled the aggrieved hearts of mourners at services for both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy.

And it was in the mid-1970s that she launched her now famous Historic Tours to Europe. In 1961, on a sabbatical leave, Mason had traveled to the Catedral de Toledo in Spain, to play one of the most impressive organs in the world. And she thought she had come prepared, with a letter of introduction from University President Harlan Hatcher. The letter, however, written in English, held little cachet.

No, they told her, it was not possible. Other churches in other Spanish cities put up the same smoke screen, each seemingly more transparent than the last. “Either the organist was not available, or none of the clergy would give permission, or the key for the door to the tribune had been misplaced,” she recalls.

But true to form, Mason turned that frustration into an opportunity. Just this summer she led her 54th Historic Tour, to Denmark and Germany. Some tour participants have joined her on as many as twenty trips. And now, of course, it is Mason and her reputation that open those heavy cathedral doors.

“Marilyn’s energy is boundless,” wrote Simon Ensanian in Reflections. “My wife and I learned of Marilyn’s trip to Germany to visit Bach’s towns and Silbermann organs. … We didn’t know Marilyn prior to this trip and traveling for two weeks with a group of unknown people was cause for some apprehension. However Marilyn has a way of quickly coalescing a group of strangers into a family. In spite of her position and her scholastic and musical achievements, she is the most down-to-earth professional we’ve ever met.”

And all those beautiful organs, pouring out the music of Bach, Buxtehude, Messaien. But where were the Americans? “Palmer Christian told me there was a terrible dearth of American music for the organ,” Mason says. That comment made an indelible impression and she made it her job to right that wrong, commissioning her first work in 1947, not long after Christian’s death.

Her first commission was from new faculty colleague Edmund Haines, in 1947. Other commissions followed, from Leo Sowerby, Henry Cowell, Jean Langlais, and Vincent Persichetti, and from her own faculty colleagues William Bolcom, Ross Lee Finney, and William Albright, adding up to some 75 to date.

The Legacy
“I am confident,” says organ colleague James Kibbie, “that if you look toward the future, you will see Marilyn’s ongoing impact and influence in a department that is preeminent nationally and internationally, a department that attracts the best students to study the full range of the organ repertoire at the highest possible standard of performance, and that, without apology, seeks to place those students at the top of the job pool. In my mind, this will be the Marilyn’s continuing legacy.”

And it was Mason who built an incomparable organ department, hiring Kibbie, a leading authority on the organ works of Bach; Robert Glasgow, master teacher and recipient of the Harold Haugh Award for excellence in the studio; and Michele Johns, who directs the University’s church music program.

Si monumentum requiris, circumspice, as the Latin inscription reads. If you seek a monument, look about you. The Marilyn Mason Organ, in Blanche Anderson Hall, is named for her and built to her impeccable specifications. The Annual Organ Conference, which she imagined and launched, continues to thrive. The Ann Arbor Summer Festival Classical Series, which Mason began, draws regular and new visitors each summer. Her discography of the great, and lesser known, works for the organ is peerless.

And the Marilyn Mason-William Steinhoff Scholarship, established in her honor and with her own consistent financial gifts, will continue to provide support for students who wish to study at Michigan for decades to come.

And, most recently, a phenomenal testament to her generosity and vision: the establishment of the Marilyn Mason Professorship in Organ, to be created through a multi-million dollar gift from her estate. This professorship will ensure the leadership and prominence of the University of Michigan organ department in perpetuity.

To those who know Marilyn, we hope that this professorship won’t come to pass for a long, long time.

But most assuredly, her legions of fans and students, former and current, are the strongest testament to her imprint upon this campus and this town. Surely her blood runs maize and blue.

“Her musical prowess is unmistakable, unmatchable, and really unbelievable,” says colleague Johns. “Her uncanny sense of human nature and her ability to cut through the red tape of life is most astonishing, especially when one is in the wake of her energy. She goes full throttle through life.”

In September, this seemingly indefatigable professor of organ welcomed yet another class of students into her studio.

It surely has been a long, long road from Alva, Oklahoma.

That said, let the lessons begin.

An alumni recital in honor of Professor Mason will take place on Monday, October 1, 2007 at Hill Auditorium at 8PM.