Baritone George Spitzer sings Charles Ives 1916 song, At the River live in the Melodeon concert at Church of the Epiphany, 74th and York Ave., NYC 3/25/12. He is accompanied by pianist Artis Wodehouse. Ives’ song is a reinterpretation of the famous old camp revival hymn, Shall We Gather at the River by Robert Lowry. Artis Wodehouse preceeds the Ives song by playing the original hymn on a small 1889 Mason & Hamlin foot-pump reed organ, just as it would have been heard at a camp revival meeting. Sound recording by Whitney Slaten, video by Zoe White, video editing by Ryan Hunter.
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Pianist and harmoniumist ARTIS WODEHOUSE has devoted her careeer to preserving and disseminating neglected but valuable music and instruments from the past, with an emphasis on American music. Cited by the NYTimes as “savior of the old and neglected”, she received a National Endowment grant that propelled her into production of CDs and published transcriptions of recorded performances and piano rolls made by George Gershwin, Jelly Roll Morton and Zez Confrey. Her best-seller, “Gershwin Plays Gershwin”, on the Nonesuch label has sold over 500,000 copies. Beginning in 2000, Wodehouse began performing on a representative group of antique reed organs and harmoniums, toy pianos and an 1823 English square piano and an 1860 Steinway square piano that she had painstakingly restored and brought to concert condition. She founded the chamber group MELODEON in 2010 to present little known but valuable music from 19th and early 20th Century America, using her antique instrument collection as the basis for repertoire choice. Wodehouse has a BM from the Manhattan School of Music, an MM from Yale, and a DMA from Stanford.
