In memoriam: Barbara Owen and Quentin Faulkner

Last year, the Westfield Center lost two of our long-time members, Barbara Owen and Quentin Faulkner. Both were scholars who made important contributions to our understanding of organ history and performance.

Barbara Owen was a founding member of the Organ Historical Society and was elected President of the OHS in 1956 and again in 1997. She co-authored with Peter Williams the seminal Grove article, and later book, The Organ (W.W. Norton, 1988). She was an authority on the American organ and organists, and she published on a wide spectrum of topics related to the organ, from the registration of Baroque music to the organ works of Johannes Brahms. In 2014, she was the recipient of the Edward A. Hansen Leadership Award of American Guild of Organists.

Quentin Faulkner was a scholar of church music and the performance practice of J. S. Bach’s organ music. In 1996, he published Wiser than Despair: The Evolution of Ideas in the Relationship of Music and the Christian Church (Greenwood Press). His books The Registration of J.S. Bach’s Organ Works and J. S. Bach: The Performance of the Organ Works: Source Readings were published by Leupold Editions in 2008 and 2020 respectively. He made accessible through his English translations the historical treatises by Jacob Adlung (Musica mechanica organoedi, Parts 1, 2, and 3, Zea E-Books, 2011) and Michael Praetorius (Syntagma Musicum II: De Organographia, Parts III–V, Zea Books, 2014).

Both Owen and Faulkner were dedicated church musicians; both presented organ recitals, and workshops and lectures about the organ. They were models of service to the profession, at local, national and international levels. The Westfield Center has benefitted enormously from their expertise and service to the organization, and we are honored to count them among our members.

– Kimberly Marshall, President – Feb 12, 2025