Early Life and Work
Willis was the son of a North London builder, and with George Cooper, later sub-organist of St Paul's Cathedral, he learned to play the organ with some help from Attwood, the St Paul's organist. In 1835 Willis was articled to organ builder John Gray for seven years. During this time he invented the manual and pedal couplers which he used throughout his later career. He also became organist of Christ Church Hoxton, which was the first of a series of organist posts; Christ Church, Hampstead from 1852 to 1859, and for nearly thirty years at the Chapel-of-Ease, Islington. He was renowned for always arranging his business trips so he could return by Sunday to play for service.
Following his apprenticeship he worked for three years in Cheltenham, assisting an instrument maker, W E Evans, who specialised in free reed instruments. Willis later attributed his personal skill in reed voicing to this experience. Willis met Samuel Wesley at Cheltenham, and this led to the re-building of the Gloucester Cathedral organ in 1847. Willis had become an independent organ builder and commented; "It was my stepping stone to fame...I received £400 for the job, and was presumptuous enough to marry".
Read more about this topic: Henry Willis
Famous quotes containing the words life and work, early, life and/or work:
“After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life.”
—Joseph Brodsky (b. 1940)
“We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“There is no calm philosophy of life here, such as you might put at the end of the Almanac, to hang over the farmer’s hearth,—how men shall live in these winter, in these summer days. No philosophy, properly speaking, of love, or friendship, or religion, or politics, or education, or nature, or spirit; perhaps a nearer approach to a philosophy of kingship, and of the place of the literary man, than of anything else.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There is no mystery in a looking glass until someone looks into it. Then, though it remains the same glass, it presents a different face to each man who holds it in front of him. The same is true of a work of art. It has no proper existence as art until someone is reflected in it—and no two will ever be reflected in the same way. However much we all see in common in such a work, at the center we behold a fragment of our own soul, and the greater the art the greater the fragment.”
—Harold C. Goddard (1878–1950)