E. Power Biggs

Edward George Power Biggs was born on 29 March 1906 in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex. He trained at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he acquired the conventional foundations of a British organist: keyboard technique, church repertory, accompaniment and familiarity with the great European organ tradition. In 1930 he moved to the United States. The American organ world he entered was dominated by large electro-pneumatic instruments capable of orchestral color, seamless crescendo and immense dynamic range. Such organs could be magnificent in late-Romantic repertory, but Biggs increasingly became interested in earlier instruments and in the ways their construction affected music by Bach and his predecessors.

His American career developed rapidly. Biggs appeared as a recitalist and with major orchestras, but broadcasting gave him a reach far beyond the concert circuit. From 1942 to 1958 he presented weekly radio programs that brought organ literature to a broad national audience. The broadcasts mixed famous repertory with less familiar works and gave the organ an unusual regular presence in domestic listening. Biggs understood that the medium could educate without sounding academic. He spoke about music and instruments in an accessible way, then let listeners hear the difference for themselves. The recurring exposure mattered: an audience could become familiar with Bach chorale preludes, old European schools, organ concertos and contemporary American works over years rather than through a single recital.

Biggs also made recording technology serve an almost documentary purpose. He traveled in search of historic organs associated with specific national traditions and composers. Instead of treating the organ as a standardized keyboard whose repertoire could be transferred neutrally from one instrument to another, he foregrounded the instrument itself. A historic organ’s wind, temperament, pipe scaling, mechanical action, room and registration became part of the musical argument. His European recording projects introduced many American listeners to sounds that contrasted sharply with the smooth, orchestral ideal familiar from large twentieth-century instruments.

This interest culminated symbolically in the mechanical-action Flentrop organ installed in 1958 in the main hall of Harvard University’s Busch-Reisinger Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Biggs had commissioned the three-manual instrument from the Dutch builder D. A. Flentrop. Its tracker action, clear tonal architecture and relationship to older European design made it a landmark in the American organ reform movement. Biggs gave recitals there and made numerous recordings, including popular Bach programs. The instrument demonstrated that historically oriented organ building was not merely antiquarian: it could be practical, modern and compelling to contemporary audiences.

Biggs’s repertory was wider than his association with Bach might suggest. He recorded and performed Handel, Mozart, Haydn, early European masters and American music. He actively encouraged contemporary composers and commissioned or premiered works by figures including Walter Piston, Roy Harris, Daniel Pinkham, Leo Sowerby and Heitor Villa-Lobos. He also edited collections and editions, among them anthologies that helped amateur and professional organists gain access to older repertory. This editorial activity amplified the educational function of his broadcasts and recordings: listeners could hear unfamiliar music and organists could then study and perform it themselves.

His artistic stance inevitably provoked debate. Advocates of the American symphonic organ sometimes regarded his preference for mechanical action and older tonal designs as unnecessarily restrictive, while later historically informed performers could find his articulation, tempos or registrations insufficiently radical. Biggs himself was a product of a transitional period. His importance does not depend on every performance choice matching later scholarship. What mattered was the direction of his curiosity. He encouraged audiences and builders to ask whether Bach might sound different on an instrument closer in conception to the organs Bach knew, whether national organ traditions possessed distinct colors, and whether the architecture of an instrument should be understood as part of musical style.

Biggs maintained an intense recording and performing schedule despite serious health problems in his later years. He died in Boston on 10 March 1977, just short of his seventy-first birthday. By then mechanical-action organs, historically oriented voicing and renewed interest in early repertory had become significant forces in American organ culture. He was not solely responsible for that transformation, but few performers did more to make it audible to the general public. His legacy survives in recordings, editions, archives, the instruments he championed and the expectation—now almost taken for granted—that a serious organist should think not only about the score but also about the history and physical character of the organ on which it is played.