Artis Wodehouse plays Mack the Knife from Threepenny Opera by Kurt Weill on a Magnus Chord Organ at the New Year’s Day Service at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Montclair, NJ, Jan. 1st, 2012. The Magnus Chord Organ was manufactured in Linden, NJ during the 1960s. Like an accordion, pitches are sounded by a set of metal reeds triggered by depressing a key. When the key is pushed down, it permits the continuously running electrical blower to suck air through the reed assigned to that key, causing the note to sound. The instrument also has several common chords that can be triggered by a set of push buttons to the left of the keyboard. When one of the chord buttons on the left is pushed, 3 notes of the chord play simultaneously. These chords can serve as the background to a melody. In the original conception of Mack the Knife, the accompaniment was played on a barrel organ.
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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.
