Portrait of an Artist: Jonathan Schakel

Jonathan Schakel is an organist, harpsichordist, and pianist, and serves as the director of music for Westminster Presbyterian Church in Charlottesville, Va. A graduate of the Longy School of Music, he has given organ recitals all over America as well as in Germany.

On Thursday, Schakel returned to Cambridge to give a midday organ recital featuring Johann Sebastian Bach, Dieterich Buxtehude, and others at Harvard’s Adolphus Busch Hall.

The Harvard Crimson: To start off, what was the organ like in Busch Hall?

Jonathan Schakel: The organ really just sounds fantastic. It’s a lot of fun to play, and to me, it’s not very hard to play. When I come down to it and pull out any of the [organ] stops, everything sounds great. I’d never been to Busch Hall either, and it’s just a fabulous space.

THC: What is it specifically about the organ that makes it unique among symphonic instruments?

JS: I think it’s unique that there are so many different sounds at one performer’s disposal. Instruments can always vary the sounds a little bit—you know, a violin can put on a mute, and trumpets have different mutes, and they can change sounds a little bit. But an organ just has such a wide range of timbres. I think that’s the organ’s real strength when you compare it to other instruments. As one performer, you can play the complete piece in the sense that you can do polyphonic music with four parts. If you have strings, you need at least four different performers.

THC: Are those distinctive qualities of the organ the things that have drawn you to the instrument, or are there other things you find appealing as well?

JS: I think that an instrument just has to suit your personality. I’m not entirely sure what about the organ suits mine … You have to control all the different parts and keep everything straight, and on top of that … you’re changing stops during [the performance] … So I think in a way it’s a lot more cerebral than other instruments. And maybe that’s part of what appeals to me. I think also, for me, it’s the sort of music that’s written for [the organ]. When I was studying the piano, I thought you have to play Chopin and you have to play Beethoven, and that was fine, but I wasn’t really in love with it. And I think with the organ—especially with Bach and the early composers—there’s just so much fantastic music that’s written for it.

THC: You mentioned some of the composers that traditionally write for organ. What parts of the organ repertoire do you generally like performing the most?

JS: I really love the Baroque music and that early music, so I play a lot of that. But I’ve also enjoyed playing some of the modern stuff, the early 20th-century composers.

THC: What are a few specific aspects that you really enjoy about those areas of the repertoire?

JS: I guess in the Baroque music I really love how the polyphony is combined in these different ways—it’s music that’s like speaking. There’s this sort of language to it that you can articulate through how you play. It sort of communicates in its own way, and I really love that part of it. The modern stuff is wonderful—like Duruflé, Vierne, those composers. The music is just really wonderful because of the sound of it, the timbres, especially when you have a big organ in a big space. It’s really more music of timbre and sound, and that’s something I enjoy.

THC: To wrap things up, how’s your time at Harvard been? Is this your first time coming here?

JS: I did my master’s degree at Longy, just down the road. So I’ve been to Harvard before, and I’ve used the music library. It’s a great library, and it’s a great university. It’s been a lot of fun to come back for me. I haven’t played the organ here, so that was a big treat for me. It was great to come back to my old graduate school and to see everything again.