Books September 2006
Backpedaling
A review of All the Stops: The Glorious Pipe Organ & Its American Masters by Craig R. Whitney.
Craig R. Whitney, The New York Timess assistant managing editor, proves to be a fully-fledged organist and organ expert. His other books, which include Spy Trader, an analysis of Cold War espionage, must be enviable indeed if they match this impeccably researched, humane guide to the king of instrumentsMozarts phrasein our grand- fathers America.
Here, organ history centers on two contemporaneous performers: E. Power Biggs (19061977) and Virgil Fox (19121980). These gentlemen loathed each other. Fox accused Biggs of being dead from the waist down, not specifying whether he meant Biggss pedaling or erotic life (Fox, by contrast, was an overt homosexual whose tombstone is pink).
The English-born Biggs was the musicologist: a devotee of Teutonic organ scholarships anti-Romantic, blandly styled ...
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