Her death was confirmed by her son M. Christian Brown.
Mason’s concert career took her to churches and halls on five continents. In 1957, she was the first American woman to play an organ concerto at Westminster Abbey.
By then she had established herself as a performer of persuasive and vivid readings of new music, thanks in part to her 1951 recording of Arnold Schoenberg’s Variations on a Recitative (Op. 40). Mason, who had taken lessons with Schoenberg in 1949 in Los Angeles, became one of the most prominent advocates for this dense and spiky piece.
She commissioned more than 70 works from composers, including William Bolcom and Jean Langlais.
“She saw the organ repertoire as this continuum from the medieval period up to the present,” organist and composer Gregory Hamilton, a former student, said in a telephone interview. “I think she just loved everything.” Hamilton composed an evening-length work for flute, narrators and organ for her in 2003.
Mason performed cycles of the complete organ works of Johann Sebastian Bach three times and recorded the complete organ works of Johann Pachelbel. Her interpretations of early music were shaped in part by the old instruments she encountered in Europe. “The organ is the best teacher,” she would say.
Scott Hyslop, a former student, said Mason had revised her approach to Bach after studying baroque organs in East Germany in the early 1980s. “She came back from Europe with a whole different philosophy,” he said. “After close to 40 years of playing this music, she reworked all her fingerings and pedaling. She loved to learn herself.”
Mason undertook five such research trips with members of C.B. Fisk, an American organ manufacturer that had been hired to make an organ for the University of Michigan modeled on instruments by the 18th-century organ builder Gottfried Silbermann. The resulting organ, in the Blanche Anderson Moore Hall on the university’s campus in Ann Arbor, is named after Mason.
Bringing such an instrument to Ann Arbor gave her students opportunities for direct knowledge of historic organ-building principles.
Moreover, on a more practical level, she told the magazine The Diapason, in performing with the instrument “the bellows may be hand pumped and a recital could go on despite an electrical storm.”
Marilyn May Mason was born in Alva, Oklahoma, on June 29, 1925. Her mother, Myrtle (Else) Mason, was a pianist and church organist. While still a teenager, Marilyn assisted her mother at First Presbyterian Church in Alva.
Mason’s grandfather, Harry E. Mason, founded the Alva State Bank in 1901, and her father, Merritt Clark Mason, continued to run it.
After studying at Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kansas, and at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Mason transferred to the University of Michigan, where she earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees. She became an instructor there in 1947.
Although she went to New York to earn her doctorate in sacred music at Union Theological Seminary and spent time in Paris studying analysis and theory with the noted teacher Nadia Boulanger, she remained on the Michigan faculty for 67 years, longer than anyone in its history, the university said.
From Boulanger she borrowed a maxim she often repeated to her own students: “Every day we must try to do our very best.”
Hyslop, now the director of parish music at St. Lorenz Lutheran Church in Frankenmuth, Michigan, said of Mason: “She was very disciplined. She was very insistent that when you came in, you had fingerings figured out. She said fingerings are your strategy; it’s like a general going into battle.”
But in Mason’s organ studio, that rigor was wedded to warmth, humor and practical assistance in all aspects of the lives of her countless students. She found them scholarships and helped them find jobs as church organists so that they could begin to pay off tuition. She herself served a number of denominations over time, notably as organist at the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor for 27 years.
Her first husband, Richard K. Brown, was a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Michigan. They were married from 1948 until his death in 1991. She married William Steinhoff, a retired professor of English at the university, in 1993. He died in 2009.
Along with her son Christian, Mason is survived by another son, Edward, a photographer; and four grandchildren.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.