OHS Press announces the publication of Camille Saint-Saëns: Organist-Composer, by Rollin Smith ($49.99 plus shipping). The book provides a biographical view of Saint-Saëns as organist and composer, including chapters on the construction and settings of instruments he played (harmonium, Aeolian organ, and Cavaillé-Coll organs, among others). Within the eleven appendices are essays by and about Saint-Saëns, his recordings, specifications of organs that he played, and a thematic catalog of his works for harmonium and organ.
The Leupold Foundation announces a new book, Pioneers in American Organ Music 1860–1920, The New England Classicists (LE300003, $69), by Barbara Owen. The volume is a comprehensive discussion of the beginning of classical organ music in the United States with biographies of nine of the first and most prominent American composers for the organ: John Knowles Paine, Dudley Buck, W. Eugene Thayer, George E. Whiting, Samuel B. Whitney, W. Arthur Foote, George W. Chadwick, Horatio W. Parker, and Henry M. Dunham.