Gail Archer: Transcript
Episode Podcast, Video and Shownotes
Gail Archer:
I hate it. I will never do it. I love my choirs. I never, ever, in 36 years of conducting the Barnard Columbia Chorus, I have never ever said anything unkind or insulting to try to prod them to do whatever it is because it feels like that. It feels like a prod. Who wants to be poked in order to do something that's supposed to be art, that's supposed to be beautiful. It's supposed to be community and joyful. I mean, some of my kids will come into rehearsal and I say the word kids lightly. These are young people. They're all 18 and older. They'll come in so tired at midterm, midterm exams. They're exhausted. They're just white. They're so exhausted. I can see it in their faces. And after they've sung and breathe deep for two hours and solve the problems that Bach or Mendelssohn or Stravinsky puts in front of them. Suddenly by the time they leave the rehearsal, they look so much better. They've got color in their faces, they saw their friends, and they used a different part of their brain to solve the problem in the piece in front of us.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, you're listening to Conversations with Musicians with Leah Roseman. This podcast strives to inspire you through the personal stories of a diversity of musicians worldwide with in-depth conversations and great music that revealed the depth and breadth to a life in music. This week's episode is my first interview with an organist, the Grammy-nominated internationally touring soloist and trailblazer for women organists, Dr. Gail Archer. She has fantastic advice on not only approaching a career in music, but in living life to its fullest. We talked about learning languages, some fascinating history, the magic of choirs and so much more. This episode features music from several of her acclaimed recordings. The organization founded by Gail Archer Musforum is an international network for women organists, and it's linked in the description of this episode along with Gail's website. Like all my episodes, you can watch this on my YouTube channel or listen to the podcast on all the podcast platforms and I've also linked the transcript to my website, leahroseman.com. I hope this series inspires you and brings you a feeling of joy and connection with my creative guests. Finally, before we get to our conversation, did you know that this podcast is in Season Four and that I send out a weekly email newsletter where you can get access to Sneak Peeks of upcoming guests and be inspired by highlights from the archive? Do have a look at the description of this episode where you'll find all the links, including the support link. I find that speaking to such a diversity of people shines a light on the persistence required to attain mastery in any field. I try to constantly improve every aspect of this podcast since I take care of all the many jobs of research, production and publicity, and I really do need the help of my listeners to keep this project going. Please consider buying me a coffee through my support page, which is linked to PayPal. Now to Gail Archer.
Hi, Gail. Thanks so much for joining me here today.
Gail Archer:
You're welcome. It's a great pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Leah Roseman:
I'd like to welcome a diversity of musicians following different career paths, and you're the first organist I've actually had on the series, really, and although I'm a classical musician, I'm a violinist. I've been to organ recitals. I even grew up in a home where there were a couple of organ LPs that we listened to, but it's not a world I'm really familiar with and researching your career and all your recordings and your touring, what struck me was that first of all, the diversity of instruments you have to play on. So maybe we could start there. For example, last summer you did a pretty big European tour. You played all over. What's that like as a player when you're playing on an organ you've never played before?
Gail Archer:
Well, that's a common experience. Organs have commonalities. There are going to be principle stops. It's the principle sound of the organ. It actually is rather a stringy sound, and you're going to have some flute stops, some principle stops, maybe you have a reed stops, and the organ pipes literally have a reed in them, not a wooden reed like an oboe or a clarinet, but rather a shallot, a metal reed that's in the pipe. So there are some common features, but the organs do range widely. I've played on 17th century Italian organs that are a single small keyboard, no pedals at all. And so you must play early music, 16th, 17th century music because you'll run out of notes if you start playing modern music because the actual length of the keyboard is insufficient for modern music. But then in other cases, you play on a grand four or five manual cathedral organ, and then you can play all of the romantic and modern music and big Baroque pieces too work very nicely on those instruments, big Buxtehude Preludia or Bach Preludes and Fugues. You can play just fine on a big romantic instrument. And then of course, 19th and 20th century. So you need to know as an organist what kind of instrument you're going to be playing on so that you can design the program for the instrument at the venue and that you depend upon your colleague to tell you what's possible.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I think you've recorded so much interesting music and discovered different composers in different countries, so we'll definitely get into those projects. But I think a great entry point for a lot of people is JS Bach, and one of your earliest CDs was actually Chorale preludes, and I'm curious why you chose those works.
Gail Archer:
Oh, well, that's easy question. I am organist up at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, and we have two organs on campus. There's a large four manual romantic organ in the chapel. I just played a faculty recital there yesterday. And then there is a two manual baroque style instrument built by Paul Fritz who is up into Tacoma, Washington state, and he builds wonderful replica 18th century instruments. So this organ has a flat pedal board as one would find on Dutch or German instruments of the 18th century. It has big draw poles. There is not a single digital element on this organ. You have to push and pull the stops yourself or have your assistant help you with all of that. And so I recorded the 18 choral preludes of Bach, the gray 18 that he wrote at Leipzig in the last years between 1825 and 1850, he was working at Leipzig, and some of the pieces have earlier versions that he then updated in the mature years, but they are unquestionably my favorite Bach pieces in the whole repertoire. So I recorded that whole set on the Fritz organ at Vassar College.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. Well, I've heard some of that recording. It's really beautiful. Is there one of them you'd like to include or should I pick something?
Gail Archer:
Oh, if you want a quiet piece, you can pick An Wasserflussen Babylon, By the Waters of Babylon. We hung up our harps and wept when we remembered Zion. It's from Psalm 1 37 is the text that he was inspired by. And if you want a big one, the very first Komm Heileger Geist, Come Holy Ghost is the first one. So that's a choice between a really vibrant large piece and a very tranquil introspective piece.
Leah Roseman:
You are about to hear the Chorale prelude, An Wasserflüssen Babylon, By the Waters of Babylon from Gail Archer's album J.S. Bach, The Transcendent Genius recorded on the Fritz organ at Vassar College. (music)
Okay. Now some people listening definitely will be organists, but many people will not. And some of the terminology you're using, it's going over my head. You said something about a flat pedal.
Gail Archer:
Oh, yes. Yeah, absolutely. Romantic instruments have a concave pedal board, and my practice organ right behind me has a concave pedal board. There you are. There's the organ. And this is a digital organ, two manuals, but it has a concave pedal board. So we organist wear special shoes, literally organ shoes. There we are. They have very thin sole glove leather on the bottom, so you can find your way around on the Dutch and German pedal boards of the 17th and 18th century. They were flat to the floor. And it's more difficult to use your heel with the pedaling technique on a flat. You're mostly using your toes, occasionally using heels. It requires a different pedaling technique. And the pedalboard feels very different when it's flat to the floor as opposed to being a traditional modern organists would consider a traditional pedal board, which is concave, which easily allows for heel toe pedaling in the 19th and 20th century literature and makes heel and toe easier on early music too. So it's matter of pedal technique. Some organists are really thrown off when they have to suddenly play on a flat Dutch pedal board, they lose it completely because the technique is so very different, so I'm very fortunate. I've had a lot of experience both in this country and in Europe playing on the old organs.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. And I was researching the history of the organ because it hadn't really occurred to me that you need power to get the air pushed through the pipes. So I was reading the very first organs were using water power for that.
Gail Archer:
That's right. The ancient Romans actually invented the thing. It was called a Hydraulis. It was a great clay cistern with some rudimentary pipes and water inside this clay object. And someone would literally pump and displace the air, and that would make the sound in the pipes. And apparently it was used to call people to public spectacles, sporting events, gladiator competitions sort of thing. It's a bit like having the organ at Yankee Stadium. It literally was used in that way. And then when the Roman Empire collapsed, the organ went out to what is modern day Turkey to Byzantine empire, and it flourished there. And the organ was used for celebratory occasions. And then in the middle of the eighth century, 756 in the modern era, the emperor in Byzantium gave a diplomatic gift to Pepin. The king of the Franks Pepin won't be familiar to your listeners, but Charlemagne will be.
Pepin was Charlemagne's father. So Pepin, the king of the Franks received this organ gift in the middle of the eighth century. And in the next 200 years, the organ slowly made its way outside monastic foundations to call people to prayer, and then naturally enough inside to start supporting the singing. As the keyboard became a part of the instrument, it wasn't just someone pumping to get the air through the pipes, there was a way to specifically indicate keys. These water organs, they've reconstructed some of these things and they have little water organs, which are fascinating. I've got some stuff posted up on my course website so students can see these little pumped water organs that modern folks have developed. So yes, the organ is an ancient instrument with a vast repertoire.
Leah Roseman:
Just something I'm curious about. The older organs that you play on, like the Baroque organs, there's no electricity to get the air through. How is that working?
Gail Archer:
There was not at the time the organ was built. So all of these organs are equipped with what looks to be a StairMaster to a modern person, but not so sophisticated. They're big four by fours with a metal bar on the top, and the four by fours are attached to the canvas bellows, and you're literally up there pumping at the height of your shoulders. You have to bring your knees all the way up and pump. It's very physical and demanding while you're holding onto a rod above your head. So someone had to come to the church to pump. And even in the 19th century, I've been up in some of the French cathedrals, and there are benches up there leftover from the 19th century before electricity, the church would literally hire 25 people to go up there and sit on the benches and pump when the organist had to play.
And it took many people, not just one or two, a whole hired group of say 25 people to pump. And someone had to say, now it's time for the hymn. And they all pumped. So that's the only way that organs operated. In the 17th and 18th century, someone or ones had to pump the instrument. Bach practiced on a pedal harpsichord at home. He had a harpsichord figured out, someone built it for him. So he had the pedals on the bottom and the hands at home and just as a plucked keyboard instrument, there was such a thing. But if he went to church, he had to take his children or his students, someone had to go with him to pump for the services or to pump if he were going to practice.
Leah Roseman:
That's really interesting. I remember, yeah, another guest we were talking about, oh yes, the lutenist Elizabeth Palett. We were talking about Bach had an instrument built that was like a lute. I can't remember now. You probably know about that. He had some special instrument built that was like a keyboard lute. Anyway, he wrote organ reports, didn't he?
Gail Archer:
Yes, Bach did. He would test organs. He was often hired by a church that had newly installed an instrument, and then he would go and play the instrument and write about the strengths or weaknesses of a given new instrument and make a report on the quality of the instrument for the pastor and the church board so that they would know what the organ was capable of. He frequently did this sort of thing.
Leah Roseman:
And have you read some of these?
Gail Archer:
Yes. Some of them are fascinating. Yes.
Leah Roseman:
What kind of insights?
Gail Archer:
Well, he say something like the organ has no gravitas, for example, he'll literally use the Latin word, meaning that it might not have a 16 foot pedal or 16 foot stop on the manuals, or it might not have a 32 foot stop in the pedals. And by that I literally mean a pipe that's 32 feet high on a grand instrument. There would be a wooden 32 foot pipe. And most of the big instruments do have 16 foot pipes available for the main keyboard. If you have three keyboards on the German instruments, the main keyboard is the central one, and that central keyboard would then have 16 foot pipes available. Eight foot is singing pitch, and then four foot pipes are at octave above that, and two foot pipes are an octave above that. That would be called the principle chorus. You pull 16 8, 4 2, and that gives you the central sound of an organ with the overtones associated with all those pitch levels. That's why the organ is so powerful because you have this acoustical range from pitches an octave below singing pitch all the way up to pitches, two octaves above singing pitch. And then you can have brilliant song, the top, something called a mixture, which are the overtones, the partials of the overtones series that are very close to one another because they're higher mathematically on the scale.
Leah Roseman:
And I was shocked to learn that these big organs have thousands of pipes.
Gail Archer:
Yes, that's right. A great big instrument can have 10,000 pipes. You have tiny little pipes, little one foot pipes, and then you could have mighty 32 foot principal stops and 32 foot reeds too, and really shake the floor of the place you're in. Vassar College has both of those things. There's a 32 foot reed. I can literally shake the floor of the Vassar chapel with the thing. So big instruments do have 32 foot pipes in them, and tiny little pipes as well, the full range.
Leah Roseman:
And when you look at photos of these organs, that beautifully, beautiful architectural design, so such a varied layout and so on, that's really interesting to me.
Gail Archer:
Yes it is. You'll typically have on the right and left the big pedal towers, and then you'll have several layers. The high work or the Germans use the word hauptwerk. The hauptwerk is the main keyboard, and then you have the pipes above that, the oberwerk literally above the high work. And then on a three manual German instrument, if you're talking about traditional 18th century, the bottom keyboard of the three is called the rückpositiv zurück behind your back because your back is facing the congregation. Well, the organist are facing the organ and the pipes for that bottom keyboard are literally hanging off the edge of the balcony züruck, behind your back. And so that's a separate chest in the organ. So you have the rückpositiv, the hauptwerk right above the music desk and the oberwerk above it, if you have another, sometimes have what's called a brustwerk, a breast work. Sometimes that's right above the music desk. Sometimes that's placed above. So it depends upon architectural placement. I once took some pictures of some baroque instruments, some photos, and then I took pictures of the little 17th and 18th century houses around the church. And I thought, yeah, and in fact, the instrument builders and the furniture builders and the architects, the house builders were all part of the same guild back in the 18th century. So there's a reason that these things have this architectural symmetry because way back in the day, those people were all part of the same artistic association because there was a guild system for all of the arts and crafts, a butcher, a baker, candlestick maker, painters, painters were in fact part of the guild of the harpsishord and organ builders, which is why students of Rembrandt and Reubens painted the harpsichords for the Ruckers family. They sent their apprentices out to decorate the harpsichords cases, which is why they're so elaborately decorative, because that was a good way for the apprentices to get some experience. So there's a reason your question is very, very good because there is a reason that these people were connected professionally in guilds.
Leah Roseman:
Really interesting.
Gail Archer:
It's fascinating.
Leah Roseman:
This is Fanny Mendelssohn's Prelude in G Major on Gail Archer's album "Mendelssohn in the Romantic Century" recorded live in concert.(music)
Well, I was extremely interested to learn about your work with Musforum and your research that led to this because a lot of people may not think of the music industry and organists, but of course it's a very important part of the music industry and we need to have inclusion.
Gail Archer:
Yes, but there isn't, and that's the problem. Women organists have suffered a great deal in the culture. The most highly educated and skilled women are the ones that are most often passed over in the application process. In the promotion process, when they have a success and get reviewed in the newspapers, suddenly they're summarily dismissed because they overshadowed the pastor, the administrator, the teacher of piano in the conservatory. Suddenly the organist got the attention, oh dear. And a woman organist besides. So it's really a problem. So too often the system itself will press young people right out of college into the management agencies and the young people have no work experience and no particular achievement. They're just selected by their mentor. Oh, yes, they're prodigy of nature. They don't need to have the comprehensive education or any experience or any particular accomplishment. We say they're wonderful. So then very young women are pressed into the system and they say, well, look, we've got women except that the most highly educated and skilled, I mean the women I know are conductors, composers. They're teaching music theory, music history on the university level. They play internationally, they have CDs, they do all of this stuff. They publish articles about the work they're doing, and they're considered sort of academics, and one is diminished for having multiple skills. And the other concern is, well, frankly, when I researched the women organists, I looked at conservatories cathedrals and colleges. Right now, there are zero women teaching organ in a conservatory in North America. There is one woman teaching organ at a research university in a major city in the United States, in Tempe, in the Arizona state. And then there are two women who serve as cathedral musicians, the chief musician at a cathedral in a major city in the United States, one in New York and one in Houston.
So the numbers are zero, one and two, and there are about 80 women teaching organ in liberal arts colleges in the United States. I'm one of them. I teach at Vassar College, but Vassar's in Poughkeepsie, which is a small town, an hour and a half from New York. So it's really, really difficult for women in large cities. You're passed over, I gave up with church music long ago. You could make no progress at all. I played in several medium-sized churches, but you never could get the big church because I was looked upon as overqualified. I had a doctorate, degrees in organ, conducting, too many accomplishments, and I get press reviews all the time and the clergy, take one, look at that and say, not here. They don't want to be overshadowed. And my women colleagues tell horror stories. I can think of one woman who was the assistant in a cathedral, and she was made to- Her superior left and took another position. So she applied to be the next music director, and she was very experienced, qualified, highly educated with a doctorate, conducting experience, all the same, and they liked her, but she was made to be the interviewer and to pick the piece. She was made to vet all of the people who were coming in for this job. She was not considered at all and was treated so unkindly, the uncomfortable position they put her in. She left. She left.
Leah Roseman:
So Gail, you had done this research I understand over 10 years ago.
Gail Archer:
Yes, I did it over two years. I published it all in 2013, and then I started Musforum, which is a group of about oh 400 women all over the world, and we grow all the time. We have conferences every two years, with the pandemic, we've had a little bit of a slowdown here, but we're planning to have a meeting next spring at Arizona State University where my colleague, Kimberly Marshall is the organist. She's the one woman who teaches organ at research university in a major city Phoenix in the United States. So it's been good because we do support one another, and we have an online magazine and we have a featured artist every month, one of our members is profiled, and we're so far away from each other. It's very hard and there's so few of us. It's a very difficult field for outstanding women. You have to work four times as hard as your colleagues, and they still say you're less.
Leah Roseman:
Well, Musforum will be linked directly in the show notes of this episode if people want to go there. But what I was curious about was you did that research more than 10 years ago, and since then, do you think there's been any positive movement?
Gail Archer:
No. None at all.
None at all. No. Nothing has changed. A few women have moved into big churches. I can think of Catherine Burke Webb, who is now at the Portland, Oregon Episcopal Cathedral, but Portland is not one of the major cities. It's a smaller city, but she has a wonderful job there and recently got that position. She does have a doctorate. She's very skilled as a choral conductor, I just played one of the Vespers concerts. That's why it comes immediately to mine. I just played one of the Vespers organ recitals there in Portland, and she's doing beautifully. Someone was really earned her way with her skills and accomplishments and education. But Portland is a smaller city. It's like Omaha, Nebraska. At one point, the Catholic Cathedral and the Episcopal Cathedral had women organists as the head musician. Omaha has about a million people, so it's a smaller city, but that was a distinctive place in the whole country. The only city with two women at the two cathedrals in the town. Now, the Episcopal music director recently retired, but the Catholic Cathedral is still run by a woman musician.
Leah Roseman:
Well, it's interesting because in the orchestral world, which I'm part of, because we introduced a generation ago blind auditions, which has become, yeah, so we've become more, I'd say more blind, more of us are keeping the screens down through the last round. We don't even look at cvs. So that I think is the only reason why orchestras are now mostly 50 50 gender wise. And had we not done that, it would've been the same. In fact, I remember hearing women -
Gail Archer:
I'm aware of this. I looked into that when I was starting my own research. I looked at that as a model at how orchestral organizations have changed the audition process in order to make the playing field more level. The organists don't have that sort of thing. It really works too often on who speaks for you? Who's your friend? Which school did you go to, who is forwarding your career? And women who are on their own, who just have their own skills and their own work, they're the ones that are most shunned because you didn't stay in the system, you didn't go to the right school, the right person didn't speak for you. And there are some universities and conservatories that have inordinate power in the United States, in the organ world, someone from that particular school or can simply speak for their students and their students. Move right ahead.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Hi. Just a short break from the episode, which I hope you're enjoying so far. If you want to check out over a hundred episodes you may have missed in addition to your podcast player or YouTube, I have an extensive website, leah roseman.com with show notes, transcripts, the complete catalog of episodes, and you can sign up there for my weekly newsletter to get access to Sneak Peeks of upcoming guests. Please do share your favorite episodes with your friends. Follow me on social media and share my posts. And if you can spare a few dollars to help support the series, that would be amazing, and you can find that link in the show notes. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. Now, back to the episode.
Well, I'm in Canada. I don't know what the situation is here. Obviously we're smaller, but in Europe, you're very familiar with the scene over there in both Western and Eastern Europe. What's it like for women organists?
Gail Archer:
It's tough there too. It's better In England. There's another group of women who have got together in London and formed something similar to Musforum. So there are some women musicians who have gone to the cathedral level. In England particularly, things are better there, but on the continent it's not a whole lot better. There are very few women, Italy. Italy and Spain have a very tough time because of their traditional male culture. It's more difficult. There are more opportunities in Germany because that's becoming a more open society, and they're conscious of the need for equity and inclusion. So Germany is starting to open up too, but the rest of Europe, it's pretty challenging.
Leah Roseman:
Okay, now let's go to some music. I was thinking, we were talking about the history of organs a few minutes ago, and you were saying how in Byzantium that sort of brought the organs to Europe, and I was thinking in the Eastern Orthodox churches, there isn't a tradition of organs in the churches.
Gail Archer:
Right. So that's an interesting question. I wondered about that too. When I first started going out there, I've been going to Poland for 20 years. That's the first Eastern country I played in 2003. And then I got curious about the organ music out there because organists play, Bach and French romantic music, some people make their whole career playing only those types of pieces. So I started investigating Eastern European organ literature and found out that in those predominantly Eastern Orthodox countries, Russia, the organs are in organ Hall, there will be the philharmonic hall where the orchestra performs the large hall in the city, and then upstairs or next door, there'll be the chamber music hall string quartets, solo vocalists with piano, small vocal ensembles with wind ensembles. Yes, that's where the organ is. The organ will be in the chamber music hall. And so there are many organs in Russia, but they're associated with the orchestra of the city rather than with churches.
Now, there are some examples where a church, the congregation collapses and then the local philharmonic will buy the church or make some arrangement so that they can use the abandoned church as a recital hall and they'll be called organ halls. They were formerly churches, but now they're organ halls. And again, it's the orchestra that sponsors this. I don't know what the arrangement is for renting the space or buying the space, but that's where the organ is. So they make it a little organ hole out of the former church. That's the case sometimes in Russia, sometimes in Ukraine. There's a nice example in a city called Chernivsti. This is on the Romanian border in western Ukraine. There is a wonderful Armenian Catholic church. There was built by a famous architect, Joseph Lavka. He built the monastery in Chernivsti, and that's UNESCO World Heritage Site. So Joseph Laka was a distinguished architect.
So he built the monastery and then he built this Armenian Catholic church. The local philharmonic in Chernivsti, made a cooperative arrangement with the church. The philharmonic put in the new organ. It's a Rieger-Kloss. It's a Rieger organ. It's the Czech branch of the German Rieger firm. So the philharmonic paid for the organ, and the church uses the organ for worship services, but the Philharmonic also uses the church for the summer organ series and for chamber music as well. So this kind of arrangement has benefited the church and benefited the orchestra and the cultural life of the city, and I really love that story. It really was heartening to see that kind of artistic collaboration because it benefits everyone.
Leah Roseman:
So one of your recent recordings is of Ukrainian music recorded on that organ.
Gail Archer:
Exactly. I was in Chernivsti, that's why I know something about it because I've been to Chernivsti a number of times. Beautiful city. It's called Little Vienna because the architecture, it was part of the Austria-Hungarian Empire long ago. This part of Ukraine and the buildings in the center of the city have the same roof lines as central Vienna. It's so attractive. It's just beautiful. An fortunately, they have not been seriously attacked to this point. So those buildings are still there. Western Ukraine has been spared some of this, but I have friends in Lviv and there have been bombings there, but to date, Chernivsti is still safe.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Oh, I didn't write down the name of the composer of that Chacona on that album,
Gail Archer:
Oh, Svitlana Ostrova, Svitlana Ostrova is living in Kyiv. She is alive and well. When the war started, I posted that piece on the Musforum site so that everyone could download and play it. I wanted it to get lots and lots of exposure because it's not a difficult piece technically, but musically it's very beautiful. So I always include or attempt to include women composers. Grazyna Baciewisz is the composer who maybe you're familiar with. She wrote wonderful violin music and was a wonderful violinist. I included Grazyna Baciewisz "Esquisse", Sketch on my Polish album, so I'm always hunting around for women composers.
Leah Roseman:
This next musical selection is the Chacona by Svitlana Ostrova, from Gail's Ukrainian album, Chernivsti, Contemporary Ukrainian Organ Music. (music)
I was curious, the Polish album, Cantius, you recorded in Chicago in a special organ there?
Gail Archer:
Yes, that's right. Thanks for asking about that project. I hoped to do that project in Poland, but then the pandemic intervened, so I thought, okay, what can we do in this country in the United States? And St. John Cantius is a traditionally Polish parish in the middle of Chicago on Carpenter Street. They have a very good music program, wonderful high mass on Sunday morning. Oh my goodness, the Gregorian chants and wonderful anthems. It's just really a treat to attend services there. They rescued a four manual Casavant organ. You're in Canada. So they rescued an instrument from a Methodist church that had to close its doors. The congregation had left, and they no longer had the funds to keep the congregation going. So they sold the Casavant organ to the community at St. John Cantius. And there were some gentlemen from the Organ Historical Society in Chicago, Steven Scheuer, who's involved with the Diapason, an American publication for organ.
I know Steven was very active in that project. He's a colleague in the Chicago area, and he managed to affect the transfer of the organ to St. John Cantius and the community sent the organ up to Canada back to Casavant to be restored. It's wonderful story. They put in a new digital registration system into the organ. They cleaned the whole organ, they brought it up to speed. They fixed anything that needed fixing, and then they installed the organ in the upper balcony of St. John Cantius. It's four manuals. It's an organ from the 1930s, and Casavant did a splendid job of restoring this instrument. So with a strong Polish heritage, I thought, well, that's the place to go. And I knew the organ because I had played there the previous year or so before that. So I arranged to go there in the summer and recorded the album there, and then it was released about six months or so after that. But that was such fun. It is such a beautiful church and such a strong Polish heritage that it was a perfect fit for this particular project.
Leah Roseman:
You're now about to hear a short excerpt from Esquisse for Organ by the Polish composer Grazyna Baciewisz from Gail Archer's album Cantius (music)
Do composers specify the registers to use in terms of the tone colors?
Gail Archer:
Sometimes some composers will give you some guidance, suggestions. Other composers give you nothing. So most baroque music, you get nothing. But what we know are the instruments, because the 18th century, 17th century instruments are there, and there are some writings by people of the period that gives suggestions about stop combinations. Modern composers tend to, meaning living composers tend to give you more information. Generally, the person who's obsessive about it is Olivier Messiaen, French composer. I played his complete works here in New York in 2008 for his hundredth anniversary, so I'm very familiar with that music. Messiaen designed all of the registrations with his own instrument in mind. The Church of the Trinité in Paris where he had open access. So he designed all his music with the stops available on that instrument. So your instrument, wherever you are, may not have all the same stops. So we were going to just get as close as we can to the directions and adjust as we can.
Yeah, you just try and follow the directions. They're very helpful because it gives you some sense of the quality that the composer wanted in the sound, but you may not be able to do it Exactly because you don't have the organ at the Trinité. You have an organ wherever you are, so you get as close as you can, and it's very helpful to have the registrations. Sometimes composers are very specific about what they want. Other times they leave it all to us to figure it all out. I'm working on a Bulgarian project right now. That's what I played at Vassar yesterday. My Bulgarian program, the Union of Bulgarian composers recently published 14 volumes of new organ music. Wow, what a collection. And nobody in Western Europe or in the States has any idea about this music. So I reviewed a book by a Bulgarian writer, Pablo Ro, and I reviewed the book for the Diapason magazine here in the United States, and then connected with Pablo, and he sent me the collection from the Bulgarian composers.
I pulled out a program from those volumes, and I essentially designed the stops. There's very little in the way of registration in the music. I was choosing the music for its rhythmic irregularity, unusual harmonies that pieces based on dance music, Bulgarian dances, which are wonderfully spiky and irregular. That's what I really loved about it, the irregular rhythms in this music. But there were very few directions about stops. There's one lady, Neva Krysteva, who does, she's a woman organist and a composer, and she does give quite a bit of information about the kinds of stops that you want. So I started, so that piece, I followed her directions, but the other piece is there was virtually nothing anywhere. So then it leaves it up to us to do the creative part. And the truth is that's fun. You're orchestrating a piece. You're essentially doing what someone does when they orchestrate for the whole instrumental ensemble. So that's what you're doing. You're orchestrating.
Leah Roseman:
I'll just mention for you and for my listeners who didn't hear, I did interview a Bulgarian musician. She plays the gadulka, which is the traditional violin family instrument, and we talk Hristina Beleva. We talked about the dances and how that relates to the music and the rhythm. So just point people to that episode. Before we leave Messiaen, I just wanted to point out that Timeout named you the best of 2008 in classical music for that recording project. So congratulations.
Gail Archer:
Thank you. It was really so special. It was such a special project. I happened to be Roman Catholic, and so it meant something to me spiritually too. Messiaen uses bible verses or quotes from the church fathers, particularly St. August, St. Thomas Aquinas, and he'll put the verse at the top of every single movement in all of the music. It is extremely spiritual and meaningful music. Some people have difficulty with Messiaen because it's rather dense and you're not going to hum along with this. It's complex music, but I found it to be extremely satisfying to play. And then I played the Book of the Holy Sacrament at St. Patrick's Cathedral in May of 2008. My mother was there, my son was there. It was so meaningful to me to play that great last piece there. So yes, I really love Messiaen's music and any opportunities I have to play it. I take those opportunities because I enjoy playing the music.
Leah Roseman:
Well, we talked briefly about harpsichord playing. Now you do teach harpsichord playing at Vassar.
Gail Archer:
Yes, I do. I have one harpsichord student right now.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. So is that part of your training to play continuo and read figured bass?
Gail Archer:
I have some background in all of that playing continue, but on organ rather than harpsichord. But I always was interested in early music. My doctoral dissertation was on a woman composer in Venice, Barbara Strozzi. She wrote principally vocal music, solo vocal pieces with lute accompaniment, or you can play on a keyboard accompaniment. So I learned a lot about continuo markings, figured bass, all that sort of thing. For a period of years, I taught the doctoral performance practice seminar at the Manhattan School of Music. So I immersed myself in early performance practice for some years earlier in my career and did a lot of reading on performance practice and read the performance practice treatises Leopold Mozart's book on the Violinschule, and Quantz, the flute, the flute treatise, and CPE Bach, the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments. And there's a François Couperin book, also on performance practice and trills and scales and all the rest, fingerings, all that sort of thing. So I was really invested in all that sort of thing. So while I wasn't formally trained as a harpsichordist, I know a good bit about all of that, and I certainly know the literature because of that interest in early music. In my early career, I really played a lot of that music on early keyboards and became interested in it all. I don't perform as a harpsichordist today. I've really gone to the organ exclusively, but I know a lot about performance practice.
Leah Roseman:
And you are also a choral director?
Gail Archer:
Oh yes.
Leah Roseman:
So I want to talk about the world of choirs because I think during the pandemic it's the most difficult for singers.
Gail Archer:
Yes, it was terrible because everyone was concerned about the droplets that escape one's mouth in the process of singing that those things could be contagious and everyone had to wear a mask and they had larger singing masks that gave you a little more space. And we went through all of that, buying, singing masks for all the voice students and passing them out to everyone so that they continue to have their voice lessons. The poor choir had to come with masks, and we weathered the whole storm. It was not at all easy. I have sung in choirs from my earliest years. I joined the church choir when I was eight years old and sang in church choirs and school choirs all my life, all my life. It's always been a part of me. I love choral music, sacred and secular. And so I got a degree in one of my master's degrees is in conducting. So today I direct the main university choir at Columbia, just about 75 members, undergraduates, graduates, faculty, staff, alumni. It's everybody. It's such fun because it's everybody. And then I have a chamber singers of about 20 singers, so that keeps me busy. That's the light of my life. I just love the choirs. We have such fun together, such community, and the big choir at Columbia has sung everything from Monteverdi to Stravinsky. There's no music too hard. You challenge them, you push and you try to get the most out of them, and they push right back. They can do it.
Leah Roseman:
I was thinking how organists often their other skillset is choral conducting because of churches. Yes, but also I was thinking, I mean, you must feel kind of isolated as an organist. You're playing alone, practicing alone, so many hours. So to be with the choir, you're saying there's a sense of community. Right?
Gail Archer:
Very much. And I think that's been wonderful because I've been able to make a career in colleges, which is safer employment, meaning it's continuous. You have a contract, you are formally evaluated, and you are evaluated on your accomplishment. And in the case of church music, sometimes you're evaluated on your accomplishment and you lose your job. That happens to women all the time. The more they accomplish, the more they have public success, the less likely they are to be able to hold onto their job. I have had secure employment by making my career in colleges. So I'm at Barnard College at Columbia University and part-time at Vassar College where I am the college organist, and I teach organ there. I always have a full studio of 12 to 15 students at Vassar. They support me wholeheartedly. It's wonderful. So I do choir, an organ in the context of two colleges, and I've been able to construct a very strong career.
And then I built the performance part of it on top of that secure income so that the creative piece, all the concerts and the traveling in this country and abroad, I do on the weekends and summers, and I'm constantly traveling for concerts. I do all my own management. I would never go through the agencies. I play more because I do it all myself. I do have a publicist. I do have a recording company, but I stay independent because that way I control what I play. No one is telling me You can't play that literature. I play the literature that interests me and it allows me to continue to grow and explore without any interference from any third party.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, it's wonderful. Also, I was curious that both the Harriman Institute at Columbia, it's this interdisciplinary Slavic studies.
Gail Archer:
Yes, that was a wonderful honor. In 2017, you cannot apply to be part of Harriman. Harriman looks across the university community and identifies people who are doing creative work in their area, and they noticed my Russian CD and the wonderful reviews it got in America and in Europe. And so I was elected to the Harriman Institute. I was so humbled and thrilled at the same time. It was such a surprise. I had no idea that anybody was watching. And since then, I recorded the Ukrainian CD in Ukraine, and that was on a Harriman grant. And the Polish CD was also on a Harriman grant. I've applied for another one for the Bulgarian project. So the Bulgarian project will be the fourth one in this series because generally organists in Western Europe and the United States have no idea that there is organ music and lots of it is not sacred.
I think that's the other misconception about organists, because in America, the organists are organs are in churches or synagogues In Europe, the organs may be in organ halls, and each country has its traditions and lots of the music is secular. It's sonatas, preludes and fugues sketches, whatever kinds of titles they may give to the pieces. They're not meant for a church service, and one needs to dispel that idea that this is strictly Christian, strictly Lutheran or Catholic or something. It's not. It's just beautiful music as there might be music for the piano or the violin or the flute or clarinet or any other instrument. So you have to be exploratory, and that's my whole mission to be out there exploring. And since Eastern Europe is such an unexplored area, I've been doing my work out there and exploring the music of these countries, which is a rich treasury. It turns out.
Leah Roseman:
And I was curious, these various Slavic languages are quite different. Have you learned little bits of them for when you're there?
Gail Archer:
Yes. I study Russian quite seriously. I can read Russian now. I don't speak it terribly well, but I can read it and I most certainly can read cyrillic. I have no trouble at all reading it. That was the hardest thing, getting your tongue around it and recognizing all those little symbols, which are like little people. They're fun to write. Actually, the little Russian cyrillic letters are really, really fun. They feel like little people on the page. But yes, I read in Russian all the time, and I continued to study and teach myself more. I had a tutor for a while, for about three years, and now I do it all on my own. I know enough, there are wonderful podcasts that are sponsored by the BBC, the British Broadcasting Company, that there's a Russian language site of the BBC. So I frequently listen to the podcasts there so you can hear people speaking Russian well, and you can read the news of the day in Russian language on the BBC. So if your readers or listeners are interested, that's the place to go. And it's not propaganda, obviously, you don't want to read the Russian sites because you're going to get a slanted view of the news of the day. But the BBC, of course is reliable and one of the finest news agencies anywhere. And so that's a wonderful source for those interested in learning Russian language or listening to it. Spoken very well, very clearly. It's wonderful.
Leah Roseman:
That's a great tip. As I got interested in doing a podcast, partly I do love the medium, and as I've studied languages and there's so many great podcasts about learning languages and in different languages and for language learners, it's an incredible resource.
Gail Archer:
I did that with Italian. Italian is my good second language, because I needed to learn that from my dissertation because I was translating from the Italian into English, and I really had to hone that skill on a high level. So I still speak Italian fluently, but I did exactly what you just suggested. I listened to podcasts in Italian language. I would listen to the news daily, virtually daily, to really listen carefully and hear Italian spoken rapidly on the news. And boy, that was a wonderful resource, which is why I was so delighted to find it in Russian, because I know that was the way I trained my ear to hear the language was listening to podcasts.
Leah Roseman:
We touched on your work as a choral conductor. I'm curious, every time our orchestra plays with a choir, whatever level this choir is at, the concern always seems to be with diction. Is this the main thing?
Gail Archer:
Yeah, we have to be able to understand what we're talking about. And its diction is always hard for choirs because you have to be able to have a clean ending to the phrase, just as we instrumentalists know how long to count and when to release so that the silence becomes important too. And I always talk about that with the choir. We need enough space to be able to hear the previous phrase and allow it to settle upon the ear of our listeners before the next phrase begins. So we need a nice clear one and two and a really good tea on the beginning of that third beat so that the silence can intervene before the next entrance of the Sopranos. So yeah, diction is a huge part of what we do. Ending the phrase cleanly, holding notes or releasing notes. So that, and we rob time too.
I'm always talking about being a dirty rotten robber. You have to rob an eighth note there so that the next phrase starts exactly on the beat. You can't hold it for the whole half note because miss the entrance to the next phrase. So yeah, we're always playing with consonant endings and how to end things cleanly. And you've got 75 people, everybody's got to say T on three, not easy. And we're always working on things like that rhythmic clarity, and actually the consonants and vowels are very important. I often speak with the sopranos, it's like really high notes that'll come out flat. And I'll say, well, that's because you're kind of singing the O that's in that word. You've got to corrupt the vowels, so you're singing more of an ah. So you can drop your jaw and put the sound up in the top of your head, and then suddenly that different vowel more of an ah than an O, it comes out crystal clear and right in tune. So sometimes we're fooling around with exactly what vowel we're singing for the sake of intonation. So choral conductors talk about that stuff all the time too. Same thing with the basses down low. Sometimes it's almost too low, and I've got young baritone rather than true basses in many cases. So again, we have to go to ahs instead of Ohs or oohs. We have to give enough space for those low notes to sound in a young voice.
Leah Roseman:
Okay, now, if you don't like this question, you don't have to go there, but I have noticed that there's sort of this self deprecatory humor with choir directors and choirs, like putting the choirs down to get, I've noticed this sort of culture that I find kind of negative.
Gail Archer:
Yes, I hate it. I will never do it. I love my choirs. I never, ever, in 36 years of conducting the Barnard Columbia chorus, I have never ever said anything unkind or insulting to try to prod them to do whatever it is. It feels like that. It feels like a prod who wants to be poked in order to do something that's supposed to be art, that's supposed to be beautiful. It's supposed to be community and joyful. I mean, some of my kids will come into rehearsal and I say the word kids lightly. These are young people. They're all 18 and older. They'll come in so tired at midterm, midterm exams. They're exhausted. They're just white. They're so exhausted. I can see it in their faces. And after they've sung and breathed deep for two hours and solved the problems that Bach or Mendelssohn or Stravinsky puts in front of them, suddenly by the time they leave the rehearsal, they look so much better.
They've got color in their faces, they saw their friends, and they used a different part of their brain to solve the problem in the piece in front of us than solving problem sets for their math class on a computer. Instead, they had to breathe deeply and use their breath and their bodies to make the sound, and they look so much healthier and they feel so much better. Then they can go back to their computer and do that math problem in a better state of mind. So I've seen that kind of choral conducting too, where the choir director just insults the choir and says something really unkind to force them to do whatever it is. No, I just think that's terrible, and I never ever do it. Choir, choral music is joy for me, and I need to transmit that to the young people. Not any kind of insults, my goodness. The world is full of so much sorrow these days and wars and tragedies. Goodness. The choir should be the absolute opposite of that for young people.
Leah Roseman:
Beautifully said, Gail. Thank you. And you're obviously such a curious person and you really follow your curiosity, which I love. I believe you read a lot of biographies.
Gail Archer:
Yeah. I'm always curious about lives lived. I particularly went through this Russian period and I read a biography of Catherine the Great, and then I read a biography of Peter the Great, and I'm curious, Louis the 14th, Elizabeth the second. It was Elizabeth, the first, actually not second, Elizabeth the first. Yeah. I'm interested in people who kind of ran the world at various times and how they managed to get around a lot of difficulties and political problems. So I find that inspiring. And of course, musicians, biographies, I always found Liszt a fascinating figure. There's a three volume set by a gentleman named Walker, and I really loved that. I mean, Liszt was such a colorful character. Wish he'd written more organ music. He did leave us some and it's wonderful, but I wish he'd left - He was a pianist. So I mean, the majority of the music is piano music. Fair enough. But he lived a fascinating life between religious interests, which came back at the end. He thought he was going to be a priest in the early going and then took some holy orders at the end, meanwhile, living this mad extravagant life and having mistresses and children all over the place. So I'm fascinated by this sort of thing, how people manage their musical lives along the way. So yes, I do enjoy reading biographies for that reason. Just get a little inspiration for how to live a full life.
Leah Roseman:
Are there biographies of women composers or musicians that you've enjoyed?
Gail Archer:
I'm interested in Fanny Mendelssohn's life, and there's a wonderful, it's called Felix Mendelsson A Life in Music, and R. Larry Todd down at Duke University wrote that. And I would recommend that to anybody to find out about both Fanny and Felix. He just did detailed research. That's one of my favorite recently published musician's, biographies. The Mendelssohn family is absolutely fascinating. The grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn was a philosopher, was part of the Haskala, the Jewish Enlightenment in the 18th century and had 10 children, some of which remain Jewish, some of which converted to Lutheran church, some of which converted to the Catholic church. So they were so involved with the artistic life of their time. And Mendelssohn, of course, is, and the family is responsible for the Bach revival. The Schumanns were in that circle. The young Brahms was in that circle. So that's a wonderful place to go for information about Felix and his sister Fanny, who was a wonderful composer.
Felix put his name on some of his sister's songs and piano music, and this is all coming too light now. In the 21st century, Felix took credit for some of his sister's work and discouraged her from publishing her music and her husband and encouraged her to publish. So yeah, all of this is a fascinating part of the 19th century. The other person, of course, in that circle is Clara Schumann, who I was fascinated by. I had the opportunity to visit the Schumann Museum in Zwickau , Germany two summers ago, and they took me on a tour of the museum when it was closed. I was so fortunate they had a pedal piano there. This was an instrument in the early, no early 19th century. Clara and Robert wrote music for this pedal piano. They thought this was going to be something. It's like an organ, except it sounds like a piano.
It's got a full pedalboard. And I played some Brahms pieces. I had Brahms chorales with me, and I played some Brahms pieces, so at least I played the right music on there. But I also played it on one of Clara's pianos. They have the complete programs of all the programs. Clara played all over Europe there in their archives. And it was fascinating to see the instruments she played on, and they had a cast of her hand, which was larger than mine. I have a big hand for a lady, and Clara's was larger than mine. And so I'm really fascinated with the two Schumanns who are husband and wife of course, and Fanny and Felix, who are brother and sister, but I'm playing a program this week at Columbia University that is a Bach Revival concert with Bach's music, but then Fanny Mendelssohn two, Brahms chorales, two of the Schumann, BACH.
He took the name of Bach, B flat, A C, B natural or H in German music theory and wrote six fugues using that short theme. Four note theme of Bach's name. So I'm going to play two of the BACH Fugues that were written for that pedal piano and then a Consolation in D flat by Liszt , just a quiet piece. And then list, it's a huge fantasy and fugue on B flat A C B natural, because Wagner and Liszt subscribed to the new Bach edition that was being published shortly after 1850, and many composers subscribed to the new Bach edition, the first scholarly edition of Bach's music that came off the German presses in the last half of the 19th century. Mahler was another person who subscribed to that. So the whole BACH phenomena comes into music in the late 19th century and into the 20th century. Max Reger writes a big BACH fantasy too, and he dies during the First World War, I think 1916. So the Bach Revival starts in 1829 and goes on for about a hundred years. Bach signed his own name in his own pieces. In case folks are curious, there are pieces where Bach at the very end of the piece would be B flat A C B natural. He signs his own pieces. So later composers were stealing from the master himself.
Leah Roseman:
But if it weren't for this Bach revival, his music might've been lost.
Gail Archer:
Yes, yes. Mendelssohn got a copy of the St. Matthew passion of Bach and cut it down from three hours to one hour saving the essentials. And that short version of the Matthew Passion went through the German choral societies like wildfire in the 1830s. And then Mendelssohn himself edited four volumes of the Bach organ music, which were published in England and Germany, and he conducted what he called historic concerts at Gewandhaus. He was the conductor of the fabulous Gewandhaus orchestra starting in 1835, and he had a series there where he played the Brandaberg concertos and played instrumental pieces of Handel as well as others. Mendelssohn was interested in the historical past, which many composers in the 19th century had no interest at all, but Mendelssohn did and because of both his physical playing career actually performing the music and his scholarly work, he sparked the Bach revival. It was really extraordinary and his immediate circle carried it forward, and that would be the Schumanns and the young Brahms. And then when the music actually started coming off the German presses, many other people got interested too.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, wonderful. You mentioned you have these wonderful young organ students. What kind of advice do you give them? Because I know with the collapse of churches there's fewer opportunities in general for organists.
Gail Archer:
Yes. So I teach roughly 12 to 15 students a year at Vassar, and this is my 16th year there. So I've taught a lot of organ students. Some of them have gone on to get a master's and doctorate in organ performance. Some have done organ performance and conducting gone pretty much the way I've gone, and I recommend that to them, that getting the conducting piece will help them to have another skill to sell on the open market, you can get college jobs or at the very least have high school jobs. I started teaching in the public schools. I got a lot of my early experience doing church work and teaching in junior high and high school and directing choirs. It opens other job possibilities and also honing skills as teachers of music theory or teachers of music history. I teach music history at Barnard College in New York here, and so I have a strong skill package, and that's what I recommend that for any graduate work that they hone more skills than organ.
Just being an organist or thinking you're going to be a concert organist. No, no, no, that's not going to give you a strong enough career path. You must learn how to conduct so you can work with choirs and instrumental ensembles that's going to be invaluable to you. And developing the ability to teach one of the academic sides of music, whether it's the theoretical and composition side, some people go and get a master's in composition so that they have other skills to offer on the market, so they can put things together. You could have church and synagogue work, but you could also do some teaching and keep honing those skills. Take opportunities to conduct instrumental and vocal ensembles, compose, get your stuff published, have lots of skill sets so that you can have a life in music. Single skill is no good in this business. You're not going to make a strong enough living to live comfortably.
You don't want to be selling socks in a department store and just playing a little organ that's not going to give you the satisfaction of having a broader career in music by developing other skills that you can use to create and put together components. I've always done that. I had a church job, I taught in the conservatory, I taught in the college, and I just kept duplicating those skills and moving up, getting better jobs with those skills, and that's really how you need to do it. Now, finally, I have two jobs, yay, not three, and I'm able to enjoy choir and organ in two wonderful college settings where I have support and kindness and wonderful students. I didn't start out doing that. I started out playing in church and teaching in elementary school folks years and years and years ago, but I kept studying and teaching and studying and teaching and developing other skills, and that's the good advice that I would give to any young musician.
Leah Roseman:
And I am also just curious about two more things. So in terms of your touring, because you really tour quite a bit, especially in the summers, do you have any advice about those kind of connections or how to go about that?
Gail Archer:
Oh, let's see. It started small. I first went to Italy around 2001 to, because I had the Italian language skills at that time, and I made some connections through us contexts. That's how you start out. If someone in the United States has a contact abroad, you start out by making that connection, going over meeting those people, and they will pass you to other colleagues. My language skill, help me there, talk about skills. Sometimes the language is going to be the way in. And it was for me, Italian language was my way into my first concerts in Italy in the early two thousands, 2001 round then, and then those people start passing you to other places, and I always ask, well, are there colleagues that you know of that have concerts? And then you've got other concerts in Italy, and then you've got concerts in Germany and other, and you just kept networking.
And that's how I've done my whole thing in the United States, in Canada, in Europe, everywhere. It's networking through colleagues who pass you to other colleagues. And I have a press kit, which I've developed. I have reviews on one side, programs on the other. I put a CD in the early going, I made CDs from my live recordings. I would record, I had someone record my live concerts, and I had a company downtown here in New York, and I had my own photo on the outside. I did it very cheaply and had the CD of my Gail Archer Live, and I put that in my early press kit. I didn't have a commercial CD in my early years, but I did have a CD. I managed to do it within an inexpensive photo and an inexpensive CD. And so you have to be a little creative with the way you do it today.
I do have lots of reviews and lots of programs to put in and a commercial CD, and I send out a professional press kit. I don't do it electronically because it's too easy to delete. Some people have gone to these electronic press kits, no way, you could be ignored, but a big envelope with Gail Archer in red in the upper left hand corner. Yes, that says that there's something in there, and I make sure I address people directly, and may I type out the letter, sign it by hand. Everything is very personal, dear Ms. Smith. And that's how I've done it. It's time consuming and not easy. You get plenty of people who are mean to you on the phone. You have to rise above the no, you can't come. No, we don't have people like you here. Click. Ow. But you do get that. Yeah, you do get that. It's a little painful, but you just have to say, well, I do my standard response. Thank you so much for your kindness and consideration. All the best with your music program. That's all you can do.
I had a very funny one. It happened to be a monastic community. They were all enthusiastic somewhere in the Midwest, so it's really general. Okay. We won't specify who they were. And at first they were very enthusiastic, and then the person who was the organizer apparently made inquiry about me among some people they knew, and literally sent me an email and said, well, we've spoken to some people and we can't have people like you here. I said, okay. I did wonder what the some people had to say about me since I'm a Roman Catholic and this happened to be a Roman Catholic community. So I thought, well, it might just be that I was born female. It could just be that and nothing more than that, and that I promote women in my field that I think that's very likely the cause. But some people, that was really quite remarkable. I thought, yikes, who's denouncing me in the Midwest? Wow. So you have an interesting experience. You've got to have a really positive view of the whole thing and not let it get to you.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Well, your persistence has really paid off.
Gail Archer:
It has.
Leah Roseman:
And I just had one final question, which was just in terms of your energy level and your focus, how do you manage your projects in the different parts of your career?
Gail Archer:
I'm very organized, super organized, have to be. I just happen to be very energetic. I don't know why that is. I just am so I enjoy all that I'm doing. So I get a lot of energy back from the choirs and from my organ students and from my music history students. So the energy of the young people is part of what I'm thriving on. Their energy and idealism and creativity feeds mine. So I'm in a good business for that. When I get feeling low, it is the choirs that bring me back. You have to get a lot of rest. You have to balance your life so you're sleeping properly, you've got to eat well. I exercise regularly. Diet and exercise are really important. You can't ignore that because I'm five foot five roughly, and these are big instruments. This is not for sissies. Great big guys play the organ, and I'm just a little chick.
So I have got to stay in good physical condition to do it. So that's good advice for any musician. You would say the same. You can't play the violin if you are having problems with your neck, your shoulder, your arms, you can't do it. You've got to be physically fit and know how to stretch and care for yourself so you don't get the chronic headaches or whatever, or you don't get some kind of carpal tunnel or something terrible happens, which we know people suffer from different kinds of things and may have to do some physical therapy. I did at one point, I had to do some physical therapy. I overdid it with one hand and had some troubles. So being in good health and caring for yourself helps with the energy and helps with a balanced life. You can't ignore that and think you're going to keep the ability to perform and travel. Traveling is tiring. You can get there and be so tired, you can't do what you're there to do. So that's my advice there. You must care for yourself and you must sleep. You can't burn the midnight oil and think you're going to be up doing creative stuff half the night and then function the next day. That's unrealistic.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, beautifully expressed. Well, thanks so much today for this, Gail and for sharing.
Gail Archer:
So this was a pleasure. My goodness. You did such research for all of this. You knew the things I was interested in and asked about them. I'm very grateful. Thank you.
Leah Roseman:
My pleasure. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Pleased to share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at leahroseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support this series, that would be wonderful. The link is in the description. Have a wonderful week.
