EROI Festival Set to Run 11/10-14 in Rochester

The Eastman School of Music announced the tenth annual Eastman Rochester Organ Initiative (EROI) Festival that will be presented in conjunction with the 16th annual American Guild of Organists (AGO) Conference on Organ Pedagogy. The Festival, themed "Improvisation and Organ Pedagogy," will take place November 10 through 14 in Rochester, NY.

This year's festival will present the topic of organ improvisation through a variety of compositional techniques and styles. The conference will alternate master classes featuring students at a variety of levels, panel discussion addressing the teaching of improvisation, and sessions that will provide attendees with resource material in the pedagogy of improvisation. The scholarly portion will include panel presentations on a variety of topics.

The concerts will be heard on organs throughout the city, including several church organs and a Wurlitzer theater organ. The organists will be asked to improvise on a theme (anything from a nursery rhyme ditty to a classical work to a pop song). All of the concerts will include a Gregorian chant. The performers' improvisations will be tailored to each individual instrument, to demonstrate the aesthetic of the style in which the organ was built.

The EROI project will be carried out under the direction of Hans Davidsson, Professor of Organ at the Eastman School of Music and founding director of the Göteborg Organ Art Center(GOArt) in Göteborg, Sweden, along with David Higgs, Chair of Eastman's Organ Department and Professor of Harpsichord and Organ at Eastman William Porter, in collaboration with some of the most prominent organ builders, restorers, and researchers in the United States and Europe.

In discussing this year's festival theme of improvisation, David Higgs and Hans Davidsson see a perfect corollary between how repertoire is learned and is then improvised upon- "composition at the keyboard." They believe a musician must practice improvisation the way one practices repertoire, by learning forms and then generating them in different works. The variety of organs in Rochester provide the unique opportunity to teach improvisation that shows the characteristics of different instruments, which audiences will hear during the concerts.

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