Virgil Keel Fox (May 3, 1912 in Princeton, Illinois – October 25, 1980 in Palm Beach, Florida) was an American organist, known especially for his years as organist at Riverside Church in New York City, from 1946 to 1965, and his flamboyant "Heavy Organ" concerts of the music of Bach in the 1970s, staged complete with light shows. His many recordings made on the RCA Victor and Capitol labels, mostly in the 1950s and 1960s, have been remastered and re-released on compact disc in recent years. They continue to be widely available in mainstream music stores.
Birth and studies
Virgil Fox was born on May 3, 1912, in Princeton, Illinois, to Miles and Birdie Fox, a farming family. Showing musical talent at an early age, he began playing the organ for church services as a ten-year old as well as at a local movie theater "APOLLO THEATER" owned by his father. Four years later, Fox made his concert debut before an audience of 2,500 at Withrow High School in Cincinnati, Ohio. The program included one of the mainstays of 19th-century organ music: Mendelssohn's Sonata No. 1 in F minor.
From 1926 to 1930, he studied in Chicago under German-born organist-composer Wilhelm Middelschulte. His other principal teachers were Hugh Price, Louis Robert, and (once he had moved to France) Louis Vierne and Marcel Dupré. He was an alumnus of the Peabody Institute of Music in Baltimore, where he became the first student to complete the course for the Artist's Diploma within a year, at age 18.
Early career
Beginning in 1936, Fox was organist at Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church in Baltimore while teaching at Peabody. During August and September, 1938, he played in Great Britain and Germany; Fox was the first non-German organist given permission to perform publicly in the Thomaskirche in Leipzig—a special occasion, since Bach served as cantor of the Thomaskirche until his death in 1750.
Military service
During World War II, Fox enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces and took a leave of absence from Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church in Baltimore and the Peabody. He was promoted to staff sergeant and played various recitals and services at the request of Eleanor Roosevelt. He served on her Home Hospitality Committee and entertained returning troops who were in Walter Reed Hospital, by playing a piano he pushed around, and joining in with two others. They sang funny and rather raunchy songs to the bedridden. After having played more than 600 concerts while on duty, he was discharged from the Army Air Forces in 1946.
Riverside Church
Fox then served as organist at the prominent Riverside Church in New York City, from 1946 to 1965. The church's original Hook and Hastings organ installed in 1930 was rebuilt at his insistence by famed organ builder G. Donald Harrison, Master Builder of the Mormon Tabernacle organ plus others. Under his direction, the Riverside organ was expanded to become one of the largest in North America. His extemporaneous hymn accompaniments at Riverside's Sunday services and concert performances were widely acclaimed, and fans would wait after church services for hours to meet him. Recordings made during this period brought his playing to larger audiences. In 1965, Fox left Riverside Church to devote himself to concertizing full-time.
Concert tours
From 1970 until 1978, Fox performed his famous "Heavy Organ" concerts in auditoriums, popular music concert halls, and other nontraditional organ music venues, touring around the United States with a rented electronic Rodgers Touring Organ. Later on he used his own instrument, a massive four-manual, custom-designed Allen Organ (1977–1980). The Heavy Organ concerts exclusively featured works of Johann Sebastian Bach accompanied by a large-scale light show, "Revelation Lights" by David Snyder, that was synchronized with the music, thereby bringing together aural and visual elements. The spectacle attracted enthusiastic audiences numbering in the thousands, but was not without its critics. William F. Buckley was reported by the New York Times as saying Fox, "must have figured that it was more important to fill the house with listeners who would hear Bach for the first time than worry about those who would resolve, like me, to have heard Fox for the last time".