My very first experience with Maurice and Marie-Madeleine Duruflé goes back to the recital they performed at First Presbyterian Church in Fort Wayne, Indiana on September 20, 1966. As a young teen who had recently discovered the instrument and who was under the incomparable guidance of the Duruflés’ host, Jack Ruhl, the evening proved to be a turning point in my life. The two major loves in my life, the French language and the organ, suddenly fit together in ways I’m still discovering today. It goes without saying that the playing was phenomenal. Who could have guessed that such virtuosity was possible on the organ? And then, the very elegant reception with both Monsieur and Madame autographing programs and providing me with my first earful of native French. Those two had cast a spell over that fifteen-year-old as they had much of the United States. I resolved to become her student, although at that point I couldn’t imagine how such an opportunity would come about.

Many years later, in 1977, while a student of Marie-Claire Alain's in Paris, I was reintroduced to Mme Duruflé, who, after considerable coaxing, agreed to take me on. There followed an intensely rich two-year period where I recast my technique, and played the Duruflé works and many of the symphonic and neoclassical works for which Marie-Madeleine Duruflé was so justly famous. My study in Paris finished, we nonetheless continued to correspond, and every time I returned to Paris, I hurried to Saint Étienne-du-Mont to find her, usually during the 11:00 mass.

Although she always remained my august teacher, the relationship invariably matured, especially during the spring semester in 1992, when she accepted our invitation to be Artist-in-Residence at the University of North Texas, where I was Coordinator of Organ at the time. It was Marie-Madeleine who decided she would live in my simple apartment on Teasley Lane, for she wanted to speak French, and felt that the accommodations I had made for her in a sumptuous home south of Denton were entirely too lavish for her modest needs. Over those six months, what had been principally a student-teacher relationship evolved very quickly to intimate friendship. There was very little about the family and about her career that wasn't discussed in detail, although I knew better than to ask questions about Maurice's first wife.