Porter heaps

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Porter Warrington Heaps (born May 27, 1906 in Cicero , Illinois , † May 3, 1999 in Palo Alto , California ) was an American organist and composer .

life and career

Porter Warrington Heaps was born on May 27, 1906 as the son of a clergyman and his wife in the then small town of Cicero, a suburb of Chicago , in the US state of Illinois, but lived most of his life there in Evanston on Lake Michigan . At an early age he showed a talent for playing the piano and organ and was hired as a church organist at the local church as a student at the Grammar School . At the age of 18 he was already a church organist and choir director, and he held these positions throughout his life, initially mainly at the local St. Matthews Episcopal Church in his hometown of Evanston.

In the 1920s, he attended Northwestern University , where he graduated first with a bachelor's and then a master's degree in music. For his master’s thesis, he chose songs about the American Civil War as the subject . During the summers he studied under the organist and composer Marcel Dupré in Paris and in the 1930s he taught organ playing at his alma mater , where he also appeared as the organist of the school band. In addition, he was in the same position at the Cosmopolitan School of Music and Dramatic Art in Chicago. He also appeared as a professor at the University of Redlands from 1933 , where he taught organ playing and music theory during the absence of the actual professor Arthur Poister .

During this time, a 40-year relationship with The Hammond Organ Company was established . The company began manufacturing the Hammond organ , named after Laurens Hammond , an Illinois businessman and inventor, in 1935 . In the mid-30s he found out how to make the registers sound fuller and more realistic. He demonstrated this in a competition held despite initial protests from the American Guild of Organists , in which he performed his reconfigured Hammond organ side by side with a normal pipe organ in a large chapel. A jury of three members was unable to determine which instrument the Hammond organ was. Just a few days earlier, on June 23, 1935, he had played and demonstrated the Hammond organ in the New England Church for the first time in public; while he played the music from Giuseppe Verdi's opera Les vêpres siciliennes .

Afterwards Heaps toured the whole country for the Hammond company and gave seminars and concerts to demonstrate the newly created organ. He was always anxious to popularize the Hammond organ and therefore even founded his own company, Keyboard Publications, which published compositions, arrangements and learning material. In 1949 he arranged a musical with 53 organs playing at Chicago's Soldier Field , which the newspapers described as a spectacle. He also produced background music for film and television and had international appearances as an organist. After Heaps retired from Hammond in 1970, he moved from his home state to Palo Alto, California, where he settled and continued his organist career by giving lectures and demonstrations on both the electronic and pipe organs. held.

He also had annual appearances at the Home Organ Festival at the Asilomar Conference Grounds on Asilomar State Beach on Monterey Bay . In addition, he also appeared as organist and music director of the Palo Alto Community Church and once worked as music director (1950) on the television show Sit or Miss , a panel discussion based on the game Reise nach Jerusalem , presented by Kay Westfall . During his playing days, he performed continuously for around 25 years at the Chicago Tribune- sponsored Chicagoland Music Festival , which ran from 1930 to 1966.

Heaps died of heart failure on May 3, 1999, about three weeks before his 93rd birthday in Palo Alto, the city where he had lived for almost three decades, leaving behind two daughters, Barbara Van Slyke of Stanford , California, and Portia Leet from Palo Alto, California, plus five grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

Discography (selection)

Albums

  • 1957: An Organ Serenade To My Beautiful Lady
  • A Mighty Fortress ... An Album Of Hymns For Organ
  • Beautiful dreamer
  • Music For Meditation Porter Heaps At The Pipe Organ
  • Prayers In Music
  • Beloved hymns
  • Beyond The Sunset

EPs

  • 1956: My Prayer / When My Dream Boat Comes Home
  • The Kind Of Music You Want

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Porter Heaps, `Mr. Hammond Organ ' , accessed August 22, 2017
  2. ↑ Report in the San Bernardino Sun, Volume 40, September 14, 1933 , accessed on August 22, 2017
  3. ↑ Report in the San Bernardino Sun , Volume 40, November 7, 1933 , accessed on August 22, 2017
  4. ↑ BOB MURPHY & KAY WESTFALL in the chicagotelevision Alumni Club (English), accessed on August 22, 2017
  5. ^ Chicagoland Music Festival was true spectacle , accessed on August 22, 2017
personal data
SURNAME Heaps, porter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Heaps, Porter Warrington (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American organist and composer
DATE OF BIRTH May 27, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Cicero , Illinois , United States
DATE OF DEATH May 3, 1999
Place of death Palo Alto , California , United States