 Lorenz Maycher has recently been appointed organist-choirmaster at First-Trinity Presbyterian Church, Laurel, Mississippi. He was previously organist-choirmaster at Trinity Episcopal Church in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and was on the adjunct music faculties at Lafayette College and Moravian College, where he taught piano and organ. Prior to that, he was organist at First Church of Christ, Scientist in New York City for ten years, and, at the same time, assistant organist at St. Francis of Assisi R.C. Church, also in New York, for fourteen years. A native of Oklahoma, he has studied organ with Margaret Lindsay, Thomas Matthews, Clyde Holloway, and William Watkins, and is a graduate of Rice University. While a student at Rice, Lorenz won the Gibbons Prize in organ, placed first in the San Antonio Pipe Organ Competition, and won the Houston AGO’s Mary Ellen Bond Award. In 2004, he was awarded an honorary doctorate of sacred music by St. Dunstan’s College, Providence, Rhode Island. In 1989, Lorenz was a featured recitalist at the Organ Historical Society national convention held in New Orleans. He has since played for nine OHS national conventions, and was recipient of an OHS E. Power Biggs Fellowship in 1990. He has played over fifty recitals on the 1830 Appleton organ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and has appeared in recital in such places as Wichita State University, Rollins College, Irvine Auditorium (University of Pennsylvania), and Philadelphia’s Lord and Taylor Department Store (on the Wanamaker Grand Court Organ). In recent years, Lorenz has participated in several projects devoted to the music of Leo Sowerby. In 1994 he recorded an all - Sowerby disk on the 1949 Aeolian-Skinner organ at First Presbyterian Church, Kilgore, Texas, for Raven Records. The following year he was invited by the Leo Sowerby Foundation to give the world premiere performance of Sowerby’s recently discovered 1958 Nostalgic Poem and Heroic Poem in a Washington, D.C. concert honoring organist William Watkins. He later gave the New York premiere at St. Paul’s Chapel, Columbia University, and the Chicago premiere at Fourth Presbyterian Church. He has played three of Sowerby’s five works for organ and orchestra, including the first performance in over forty years of Concert Piece in a concert with the Richmond Symphony and a performance of Classic Concerto with the Buffalo Philharmonic. In 1998, he performed Sowerby’s seldom heard Sinfonia Brevis in a Baltimore AGO memorial concert to organist Rodney Hansen, to whom the work is dedicated. He has participated in Sowerby festivals in Chicago, New York, Richmond, and Worcester, Mass. His most recent Sowerby adventure is the release of a compact disk entitled, “Music of Leo Sowerby and Frederic Chopin,” recorded on the 1903 Hutchings-Votey organ at First Church of Christ, Scientist, New York City. This album, on the VTOA label, includes performances by organist Charles Callahan, mezzo-soprano Gwendolyn Jones, pianist Tana Bawden, and conductor William Watkins in the first professionally issued recordings of Sowerby’s “Three Psalms,” “Songs of Faith and Penitence,” and “O Perfect Love.” He has been invited by the Leo Sowerby Foundation to give the world premiere of Sowerby’s Organ Concerto #2 in May, 2007, in Omaha, Nebraska. In January, 2004, Lorenz recorded a compact disk called “The Aeolian-Skinner Sound” on the 1955 Aeolian-Skinner organ at Trinity Episcopal Church in Bethlehem, PA for Raven Records, featuring organ favorites by Bach, Handel, Franck, Dupre, Reger, Vierne, Widor and others. Lorenz’s latest venture is the forming of “The Vermont Organ Academy,” a website devoted to the pipe organ and its music, located at www.vermontorganacademy.com. The Academy produces compact disk recordings of new material as well as historic recordings of legendary masters, and features historic documents, photos, articles and interviews, an advice column by Charles Callahan, and a book/cd store. The Academy's recordings include “William Watkins Plays Two Great Aeolian-Skinner Organs,” and the historic series, “The Aeolian-Skinner Legacy,” featuring organists Dora Poteet Barclay, Charles Callahan, George Markey, Roy Perry, Albert Russell, William Teague, William Watkins, and other American organists playing the great Aeolian-Skinner organs of America in both historic and new recordings. In addition to his teaching and recording
projects, Lorenz is also active in writing articles for the major pipe
organ journals in this country, and his interviews with Marilyn Mason,
Thomas Richner, William Teague, and
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