Pianist, music scholar, harmonium and reed organist performer, CD producer and MIDI editor Artis Wodehouse has devoted her career to reclaiming music and instruments from the past and to performing new and neglected music. The New York Times has cited her as a “savior of the old and neglected”. Active for many years as a pianist in the San Francisco Bay area, she made her New York debut in 1984 and has recorded as pianist for Wergo, Etcetera and Warner Classics.

In 2000 Wodehouse discovered a little 4-octave Mason & Hamlin foot-pump reed organ in a dumpster. Her rescue and subsequent restoration of this instrument lead her to initiate her current project, learning to play and to perform the plentiful but little-heard music written for the reed organ and the harmonium. Several of her reed organ and harmonium performances can be viewed on youtube.com.

This undertaking required the acquisition and painstaking restoration of a number of different types of instruments. From 2000, Wodehouse has amassed and had restored a collection of seven representative and useful organs. Three were built by the American firm Mason & Hamlin: a Model 86K from 1916 with 16 stops (tuned A437), a small 49-note single manual portable from 1889 (tuned A440), and most significantly, a Mason & Hamlin Liszt Organ from 1887 currently undergoing restoration and scheduled to debut in 2009. Other instruments in her collection include an Estey Artist Model Z with 16 stops, (built 1916, tuned A435) and two full-bodied 1950s Yamaha reed organs, one a 49-note portable and the other, an eight-stop single manual (tuned A440). In 2006 Wodehouse acquired a French-designed German-built double manual harmonium built in 1885 by Philippe Trayser. This instrument has undergone a complete restoration and is tuned to A442. In July 2008 Wodehouse was asked by conductor Louis Langree to join the Mostly Mozart Orchestra at Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center to play her harmonium in Schoenberg’s chamber music version of Mahler’s Das Lied Von Der Erde. This performance was broadcast nationwide and was the first time a harmonium was used with this ensemble.

Other significant performances by Wodehouse have included a concert at Merkin Hall in NYC in 2006 that featured the music of the American composer, Arthur Bird for the American Harmonium. Bird’s music for the reed organ was commissioned by the Mason & Hamlin firm during the 19th century and was specifically written for the particular stop-list of her 1916 Mason & Hamlin Model 86K. In 2007 she was sponsored by the American Liszt Society to present Liszt’s Via Crucis at Montclair State University, which she played on and conducted from her Trayser harmonium. She has also recorded with the American singer, Natalie Merchant, using her 49-note Yamaha reed organ.

Prior to her work with reed organs and harmoniums Wodehouse was heavily involved in the study and dissemination of music created for piano rolls and the uniquely American novelty piano style that arose during the 1920s and 1930s. Her transcriptions of Gershwin’s 1926 and 1928 phonograph disc recordings were published by Warner Bros. (now Alfred) in 1987. A subsequent National Endowment for the Humanities Grant (1989-90) for Gershwin research lead to her two CD realizations of Gershwin’s piano rolls. These CDs (Nonesuch 1993 and 1995), realized by Wodehouse, uniquely fused old and new technologies through a conversion of the old paper piano rolls to MIDI data that could be played back on a Yamaha Disklavier. The result became a worldwide hit. TIME Magazine called her internationally best selling 1993 recording Gershwin Plays Gershwin: The Piano Rolls “A remarkable example of technology put to the service of art”. These included the CD Jelly Roll Morton’s Piano Rolls (Nonesuch – 1997), with an accompanying book of Jelly Roll Morton Piano Roll Transcriptions (published by Hal Leonard, 1999) and the CD Zez Confrey Piano Rolls and Scores (Warner Classics 2003). Concurrent with her piano roll work Wodehouse produced a series of historical reissues (Pearl 1995-98) called Keyboard Wizards of the Gershwin Era. These historic compilations of rare old 78 phonograph recordings made available to modern audiences the little-known but brilliant virtuosos male and female who were Gershwin’s composer/pianist contemporaries. The Keyboard Wizards series lead to her appearance on the 1999 American Masters PBS program, Yours For A Song: The Women Of Tin Pan Alley. She provided historical commentary and her own piano performance of music written by the great women song writer/pianists of the Gershwin era. That program has been aired many times nationally and is available on DVD. Artis Wodehouse is a Yamaha artist.

Wodehouse received the National Educational Press Award for a distinguished learned article (1988), and has published the definitive print essay about Gershwin’s piano rolls, “Tracing Gershwin’s Piano Rolls” in The Gershwin Style New Looks at the Music of George Gershwin edited by Wayne Schneider, Oxford University Press (1999). Wodehouse holds a Doctor of Musical Arts in Piano Performance Practice from Stanford University, a Master of Music in Piano Performance from Yale University and a Bachelor of Music from the Manhattan School of Music in Piano Performance.

More information about Artis Wodehouse can be found at www.artiswodehouse.com. She is currently Director of Music for the Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Montclair, New Jersey.