VIRGIL FOX

'Virgil Keel Fox' (May 3, 1912–October 25,1980) was a renowned organist, known especially for his flamboyant "Heavy Organ" concerts of the music of Bach. These groundbreaking events appealed to audiences in the 1970s who were more familiar with rock 'n' roll music, and were staged complete with light shows. His many recordings made on the RCA Victor and Capitol labels, mostly in the 1950s and 1960s, have been re-mastered and re-released on compact disc in recent years. They continue to be widely available in mainstream music stores.

Contents

Birth and Studies

Early career

Military Service

Riverside Church

Concert Tours

Music

References

External links

Birth and Studies

Fox was born in Princeton, Illinois to Miles and Birdie Fox, and it was soon clear that he was a prodigy. He began playing the organ for church services at the age of ten, and made a concert debut in 1926 before 2500 at Withrow High School, Cincinnati. It was at this concert he played Felix Mendelssohn's ''Sonata No. 1 in F Major''.
From 1926 to 1930, he studied in Chicago, Illinois under the German organist-composer Wilhelm Middelschulte. His other principal teachers were Hugh Price, Louis Robert, and Marcel Dupré. He was an alumnus of the Peabody Institute of Music in Baltimore, Maryland, where he became the first student to complete the course for the coveted Artist's Diploma within a year.

Early career

Beginning in 1936, Fox was organist at Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church in Baltimore while teaching at Peabody. During August and September, 1938, he played in Great Britain and Germany; Fox was the first non-German organist to perform publicly in the Thomaskirche in Leipzig — a special occasion, since J.S. Bach served as cantor of the Thomaskirche until his death, in 1750, and is buried within the church.

Military Service

During the Second World War, Fox enlisted in the Army Air Force and took a leave of absence from Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church in Baltimore and the Peabody. He was promoted to staff sergeant, and played various recitals and services. After having played more than 600 concerts while on duty, he was discharged from the Army Air Force in 1946.

Riverside Church

He then served as organist at the famed Riverside Church in New York City until 1965, when he resigned to devote himself to full-time concertizing. Recordings made during this period brought his virtuosity to ever-larger audiences.

Concert Tours

From 1971 until 1975, Fox performed his famous "Heavy Organ" concerts in auditoriums, popular music concert halls, and other non-traditional organ music venues, touring around the United States with an electronic Rodgers Touring Organ and, later, a custom designed Allen Organ (1977–1980).^[1]
Virgil Fox was one of the rare organists to perform on nationally televised entertainment programs in the 1960s and 1970s, such as ''The Mike Douglas Show'', ''The Ed Sullivan Show'', and ''CBS Camera Three'', bringing organ masterworks to mass audiences as no other organist has done before or since.^[2]
His last commercially released recording was made at his farewell Riverside Church concert on May 6, 1979. Fox's 50th year of concertizing began when he appeared with the Dallas Symphony in September 1980, in what was to be his final public performance. One month later, he died in Palm Beach, Florida, of prostate cancer, for which he had undergone unsuccessful surgery in 1976.

Music

Fox stressed pushing the limits of the instruments available to him, rather than requiring that they, or his playing, be authentic to the era of the music. His style (particularly his taste for fast tempos, flashy registrations and a ready willingness to indulgence in sheer sentimentality) was in contrast to that of his contemporaries, such as E. Power Biggs, who took an increasingly historical approach to Bach and others. Fox maintained more than 250 concert works in memory, and could call them up, playing at double speed or faster in rehearsals, which went late into the night.
On his album ''"Heavy Organ"'', Fox defended his approach to Bach and organ music in general, in the introduction to the familiar Toccata and Fugue in D minor by Johann Sebastian Bach:
:''"There is current in our land (and several European countries) at this moment a kind of nitpicking worship of historic impotence. They say that Bach must not be interpreted and that he must have no emotion, that his notes speak for themselves. You want to know what that is? Pure unadulterated rot! Bach has the red blood. He has the communion with the people. He has all of this amazing spirit. And imagine that you could put all the music on one side of the agenda with his great interpretation and great feeling and put the greatest man of all right up on top of a dusty shelf underneath some glass case in a museum and say that he must not be interpreted! They're full of you know what and they're so untalented that they have to hide behind this thing because they couldn't get in the house of music any other way!''
Despite (or perhaps because of) his controversial approach to organ music, Virgil Fox attained a celebrity status not unlike that of Leonard Bernstein and Glenn Gould. The New York ''Times'' said of him twenty years after his death, "Fox could play the pipe organ like nobody's business, but that is not all that made him unforgettable to so many people across the country. He made classical organ music appeal even to audiences that normally wouldn't be expected to sit still for it".^[3]

References

1. Allen Organ – the Virgil Fox touring organ
2. Richard Torrence, Marshall Yaeger (Hrsg.): ''Virgil Fox (the Dish). An Irreverent Biography of the Great American Organist''. (Special Edition: Book, CD, DVD). Circles International, New York 2001, ISBN 0-9712970-0-2
3. Craig R. Whitney, "Virgil Fox–an Organ Legend in Vivid Memory", New York ''Times'', October 22, 2000.

External links

★ The Virgil Fox Legacy

★ OrganArts

★ Virgil Fox YouTube Videos

★ The Virgil Fox Allen Touring Organ

★ Friends of Virgil Fox

★ Review of "The Fox Touch"