Organists in Manhattan

Sixty-one years ago when the organist of St. George's Episcopal Church, Flushing, L. I. lost the use of a hand, his 13-year-old son stepped up to the console, took his father's place. Six years later Son Raymond Huntington Woodman became organist at First Presbyterian Church, Brooklyn. He is still there, a goateed, white-haired, 74-year-oldster who has written many a song, anthem and organ piece, played more than 50,000 numbers. Genteel Organist Woodman says: "When I first went into music it was regarded as equivalent to retiring from social life. Many well-known musicians of bad habits and poor principles had so harmed the profession that the public held it in little regard."

Far from being retired, Organist Woodman last week was the happy centre of attention in a great throng of his colleagues in Manhattan's Hotel Astor. In session was the 14th general convention of the American Guild of Organists which he helped found in 1896. To its 1,000 delegates he declared: "Modern music is going crazy. There is too much jazz, and jazz means dissonance. The standard of organ playing has greatly improved. The higher type music of such modern American composers as Horatio Parker, Arthur Foote and George W. Chadwick has superseded the old church music of comparatively insipid nature. But now we organists must deal with the influx of jazz."

Hastening off to Maine where he summers. Organist Woodman left the Guild members to their convention devices, which consisted of visiting churches with famed organs, listening to organ recitals, attending symposiums on organ playing. At a special service in his Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Bishop William Thomas Manning told the organists there is a "disastrous" lack of congregational singing in the U. S. The Guild announced the winners of two $100 prize contests: Chicago's Porter Heaps for an anthem, A Thanksgiving for All Created Things, and Scranton's Leon Verrees for a choral improvisation on O God, Our Help in Ages Past. Finally, Guild members united in indignantly rejecting a proposal that they affiliate with the American Federation of Labor.

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