News Release
June 2003
(Bethlehem, Pennsylvania) —Attendees from the Organ Historical
Society’s southeastern Pennsylvania conference in Harrisburg
will visit Moravian College on Thursday, June 26 to hear Lou Carol
Fix, artist-lecturer in music, play the 1790 Samuel Green organ in
Peter Hall. She’ll offer music of Moravian composers Gregor,
Van Vleck, and Latrobe, as well as works by Bennett, Frescobaldi, and
Carr.
Lou Carol Fix is an artist-lecturer in music at Moravian College where
she teaches organ, recorder, and sacred music.
The 1790 Samuel Green historic pipe organ is on permanent loan to
Moravian College from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.
The pipe organ is a manual organ with four ranks of pipes; it is approximately
nine feet high and is decorated with mahogany casework
The antique organ was assembled in Peter Hall at
Moravian's Church Street Campus in August, 1998. The organ underwent
a complete restoration
by R. J. Brunner & Company of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Samuel Green, an important English organ builder of his time, built
the antique pipe organ over 200 years ago in London. He built organs
for royalty, churches and manor houses. The pipe organ on display at
Moravian was originally built for an English manor house in 1790.
Fix will perform the music of Christoph Friedrich Gregor (1723-1801)
who was at the forefront of the most important music of the Moravian
Church in18th-century. He joined the church in 1742. He spent the years
1770-72 in Pennsylvania, where he was the teacher of Johann Friedrich
Peter, for whom Peter Hall is named. He compiled the first Moravian
hymnal, and the manuscripts for his anthems are housed at the Moravian
archives in Bethlehem and Winston-Salem, NC.
Fix will also perform works from Jacob van Vleck (1715-1831), a Moravian
minister as well as a violinist and organist. He was the director of
the Young Ladies' Seminary from 1790-1800. He was the first American-born
Moravian to be an active composer.
