Artis Wodehouse performed her arrangement of Charles Valentin Alkan’s little Prelude in B created for the All Soul’s Day service at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Montclair, Montclair NJ, November 1st, 2009. She uses the percussion stop alone for the left hand to suggest the effect of the rattling of dry bones. The right hand melody she plays using the tremblant stop, a stop found on some harmoniums that has an eerie, rapidly beating vibrato. The piece ends very low in the bass, (where Wodehouse pulls the 16 foot Bourdon stop), against a tremblant chord followed by a quickly flourishing percussion scale. The skeleton vanishes! Video recording was made in the sanctuary of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Montclair, Montclair NJ on 11/05/09 by Brian Jude and Alfredo Villela.
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Pianist and harmoniumist ARTIS WODEHOUSE has devoted her careeer to preserving and disseminating neglected but valuable music and instruments from the past, with an emphasis on American music. Cited by the NYTimes as “savior of the old and neglected”, she received a National Endowment grant that propelled her into production of CDs and published transcriptions of recorded performances and piano rolls made by George Gershwin, Jelly Roll Morton and Zez Confrey. Her best-seller, “Gershwin Plays Gershwin”, on the Nonesuch label has sold over 500,000 copies. Beginning in 2000, Wodehouse began performing on a representative group of antique reed organs and harmoniums, toy pianos and an 1823 English square piano and an 1860 Steinway square piano that she had painstakingly restored and brought to concert condition. She founded the chamber group MELODEON in 2010 to present little known but valuable music from 19th and early 20th Century America, using her antique instrument collection as the basis for repertoire choice. Wodehouse has a BM from the Manhattan School of Music, an MM from Yale, and a DMA from Stanford.
