Brighton resident David Higgs got an early start on his career as a church organist when he was 10 years old, and he hasn’t slowed down since.
He has played Christmas concerts in San Francisco's Davies Symphony Hall and Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and regularly performs and teaches at festivals and competitions throughout the world, including the International Organ Festivals and Competitions of Bremen, Germany; Calgary, Alberta; Dublin, Ireland; Odense, Denmark; Redlands and San Anselmo, CA; and the Gilmore International Keyboard Festival.
He was director of music and an organist at Park Avenue Christian Church and associate organist of the Riverside Church, where he also conducted the Riverside Choral Society. He has also served on the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music and is now chair of the Organ Department at the Eastman School of Music.
To recognize a career throughout which the above are only highlights, St. Malachy’s -The Actors' Chapel awarded Higgs the Paul Creston Award. The award is given to those who “embody excellence in the arts and are significant figures in church music, media, and the performing arts.”
Higgs was honored at the Beacon Theatre in New York City on Nov. 12, during a Voices United Benefit Concert supporting outreach programs of St. Malachy's-The Actors' Chapel. He was cited for being “influential in coaching scores of international competition winners and fine musicians who now hold major positions at cathedrals and universities in America and abroad.”
“It’s a very good feeling when someone tells you that you have done something well,” Higgs said. “We all like when that happens.”
The organ is an enormous and relatively inaccessible instrument for learners. On what instrument did you start playing music, and how did you come upon the organ?
I first saw the organ when my mother took me to church as a child. She told me that once, when I was three years old we returned home from church and I knelt down in front of the living room sofa and pretended it was the church organ I had just seen, and I was pretending to play it.
So I took piano lessons, and if I had a particularly good lesson, my first piano teacher, a nun named Sister Bernadette, would take me into her church (where she was the organist) and let me play the church organ. I was totally hooked. I think it’s really important for children to be able to try out and experiment with musical instruments.
Brighton resident David Higgs got an early start on his career as a church organist when he was 10 years old, and he hasn’t slowed down since.
He has played Christmas concerts in San Francisco's Davies Symphony Hall and Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and regularly performs and teaches at festivals and competitions throughout the world, including the International Organ Festivals and Competitions of Bremen, Germany; Calgary, Alberta; Dublin, Ireland; Odense, Denmark; Redlands and San Anselmo, CA; and the Gilmore International Keyboard Festival.
He was director of music and an organist at Park Avenue Christian Church and associate organist of the Riverside Church, where he also conducted the Riverside Choral Society. He has also served on the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music and is now chair of the Organ Department at the Eastman School of Music.
To recognize a career throughout which the above are only highlights, St. Malachy’s -The Actors' Chapel awarded Higgs the Paul Creston Award. The award is given to those who “embody excellence in the arts and are significant figures in church music, media, and the performing arts.”
Higgs was honored at the Beacon Theatre in New York City on Nov. 12, during a Voices United Benefit Concert supporting outreach programs of St. Malachy's-The Actors' Chapel. He was cited for being “influential in coaching scores of international competition winners and fine musicians who now hold major positions at cathedrals and universities in America and abroad.”
“It’s a very good feeling when someone tells you that you have done something well,” Higgs said. “We all like when that happens.”
The organ is an enormous and relatively inaccessible instrument for learners. On what instrument did you start playing music, and how did you come upon the organ?
I first saw the organ when my mother took me to church as a child. She told me that once, when I was three years old we returned home from church and I knelt down in front of the living room sofa and pretended it was the church organ I had just seen, and I was pretending to play it.
So I took piano lessons, and if I had a particularly good lesson, my first piano teacher, a nun named Sister Bernadette, would take me into her church (where she was the organist) and let me play the church organ. I was totally hooked. I think it’s really important for children to be able to try out and experiment with musical instruments.
What is it that attracts you to the organ? What keeps you playing?
I think it’s the sound of the organ that seems sort of timeless, and connects with some of the oldest music as well as some of the newest music on the planet. It can sonically represent the infinite, and yet it can be intimate. It can be really loud and earth-shaking, and that’s fun, but it's not the only exciting thing for me — I love all the colors and expressive capabilities that you find in a good pipe organ that’s been built by real artists.
I don’t seem to have some of those negative associations with organ sound that I know some people have (funerals and the like!), so for me it’s inspiring and it sparks my imagination in ways that are difficult to describe in words.
Since it would be so difficult to fit a whole organ into your home, on what do you play there? How do you feel about synthesizers or more specialized, compact electric organs?
I can practice on a trusty old electronic “imitation organ” at home, but that’s because I use it to simply to learn the notes, and I don’t expect it to inspire me with its tone. I am very lucky that I get to play so many wonderful instruments both in Rochester and around the world, so I look to those for my aural inspiration. The digital instruments are really recordings of pipe organs, and while the technology for digital sound has become very sophisticated, I still prefer the actual sound of the instrument to the sound of a recording. But recordings of the real thing can be very helpful at the right time and for the right purpose.
What is your favorite thing about teaching? What do you enjoy most about that aspect of your career?
I love to help people do something that they really want to be able to do. I also love to see when a student surpasses his or her own expectations — that is very gratifying to experience. For me, the combination of performing and teaching is wonderful, and one discipline informs the other very nicely.
The Paul Creston Award is presented to artists who, among other things, excel in the field of church music. What do you enjoy most about performing that kind of music?
I don’t play regularly in a church any more, but I am one of the assisting organists at Christ Church in downtown Rochester, so I play there on occasion, on two fantastic organs that my department at the Eastman School has placed in that church (another significant organ we have place in Rochester is the Italian baroque organ at the Memorial Art Gallery). It may sound odd, but one of my favorite things to do is to play some of those sturdy old hymns while a large group of people sing at the top of their lungs. That’s an amazing sensation and sound, to have all those people using the air in their lungs to make the same sounds together at the same time, and then to have that sound accompanied by the magnificent sounds of air blowing through hand made organ pipes — and all of it filling a large space that is visually beautiful, and acoustically reverberant and alive — it takes you to another plane — it’s thrilling.
