Translated and annotated by Harold Fabrikant, this volume contains letters sent by Sigfrid and Katharina Karg-Elert from their time in America (January to March, 1932). Both the original German and translated English texts are given on facing pages.

In Music from the Hilltop, Benjamin A. Kolodziej studies three significant academic musical figures to weave a narrative that not only details the role musical studies played in the development of Southern Methodist University but also relates a history of church music and pipe organs in Dallas, Texas. Bertha Stevens Cassidy (1876–1959), the first organ professor and the only woman on the faculty of the new university, established herself as a leader and veritable dean of the church music community, managing a career of significant performances and teaching. Her student and protégé, Dora Poteet Barclay (1903–1961), a Waco native, exhibited such musical potential that she was hired by SMU the day after her graduation. Taking over the organ program upon Cassidy’s retirement, Barclay broadened the pedagogical horizons for her students. The great French composer Marcel Dupré, with whom she briefly studied, extolled Barclay’s talents: “She is my best American student!” Many of her own students achieved great professional heights as performers and church musicians. With the hiring of Robert Theodore Anderson (1934–2009), SMU solidified its reputation as a school able to provide excellence not only in performance training but also in scholarship. A Chicago native who studied in New York and in Germany, Anderson represented a new, modern outlook to teaching and performance. He was intellectually able to bridge the gap between the theologians of the Methodist seminary and the performers at the Meadows School of the Arts. Through his example and guidance, organists were taught to think critically, whether about music or any other subject, and to attain excellence in the craft of organ performance. During the 1980s Anderson consulted with the Dallas Symphony to prepare for the installation of an organ in the new Meyerson Symphony Center, an organ that would influence concert hall instruments in subsequent decades. These three pedagogues played important roles in the development of the musical curriculum as well as the building of important organs on the SMU campus and around the city, each in their own ways nurturing the practice of sacred music in North Texas.

Louis Vierne (1870-1937), a student of C�sar Franck and Charles-Marie Widor, was organist of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris for 37 years, until his death at the console during a recital. Widor's successor as the organ's great French symphonist - an assessment the passage of time has proved correct - Vierne's music has remained in the repertoire of organists throughout the world, never undergoing the periodic eclipses experienced by his contemporaries. Vierne's autobiography, Mes Souvenirs, originally published serially in the 1930s, is here available in a profusely illustrated, extensively annotated English translation. Rollin Smith's Louis Vierne: Organist of Notre Dame Cathedral is the first major study of the great organist of Notre-Dame and includes chapters on his American tour, recordings, contemporary reminiscences, definitive textual corrections, the organ symphonies, his death and succession, and a thematic catalogue of his organ works.

Title of the first 10 volumes of the series is Germans to America : lists of passengers arriving at U.S. ports 1850-1855.

Marcel Dupré's career as an organist spanned the first seven decades of the 20th century, and took him all over Europe, North America, and Australasia. He delighted vastaudiences wherever he played, and attracted large numbers of enthusiastic students, for whom his church of St. Sulpice in Paris and his home at Meudon were their musical Mecca. Dupré had a profound influence on a host of musicians who sought his guidance, and as a composer for the organ his place in the historical line of J.S. Bach, the Couperins, César Franck, Widor, and Vierne is assured. Graham Steed is recognized for his skilled and musicianly advocacy of Dupré's compositions and he brings a keen and discerning intelligence to his analyses.

For centuries, pipe organs stood at the summit of musical and technological achievement, admired as the most complex and intricate mechanisms the human race had yet devised. In All The Stops, New York Times journalist Craig Whitney journeys through the history of the American pipe organ and brings to life the curious characters who have devoted their lives to its music. From the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, organ music was wildly popular in America. Organ builders in New York and New England could hardly fill the huge demand for both concert hall and home organs. Master organbuilders found ingenious ways of using electricity to make them sound like orchestras. Organ players developed cult followings and bitter rivalries. One movement arose to restore to American organs the clarity and precision that baroque organs had in centuries past, while another took electronic organs to the rock concert halls, where younger listeners could be found. But while organbuilders and organists were fighting with each other, popular audiences lost interest in the organ. Today, organs are beginning to make a comeback in concert halls and churches across America. Craig Whitney brings the story to life and up to date in a humorous, engaging book about the instruments and vivid personalities that inspired his lifelong passion: the great art of the majestic pipe organ. Hear the sounds of some of the pipe organs featured in ALL THE STOPS

Includes music.

Get a little seen, up close look at these fuzzy, hard-working pollinators. There's plenty to learn about these little pollinators and their world.