Alain book by Helga Schauerte-Maubouet

Larry Palmer

A fascinating book by Beverly Jerold, Music Performance Issues: 1600–1900

Readers of The Diapason’s July 2018 issue most likely remember Beverly Jerold’s article about two eighteenth-century concerts of Handel’s music as reviewed by the Berlin Court Kapellmeister Johann Friedrich Reichardt, who attended the programs during his 1785 visit to London. Ms. Jerold has spent much of her life researching for period information about musical performances as reported by the persons who experienced them. One could see in the stunning color headshot of this intrepid author that she has a firm chin and twinkling eyes, ever on the lookout for authentic information about the topic that she is researching. These period verifications serve as guides for those who seek stylistic authenticity in their own present-day performances.

From the many varied essays that Jerold has published in a wide range of journals she has selected nineteen articles for her book Music Performance Issues: 1600–1900, issued in 2016 by Pendragon Press, Hillsdale, New York, as a paperback edition comprising 359 pages of useful knowledge (ISBN 978-1-57647-175-0, list price: $65, available from www.pendragonpress.com).

I would enjoy sharing many of her remarkable discoveries and observations with you, but it would be unfair for me to present you with Jerold’s discoveries, and it might rob you, the readers, of the surprises that you may have when you read the book for yourselves. I do encourage you to access the volume and to enjoy Jerold’s findings, offered with the utmost clarity and complete references to her sources. To whet your curiosities, here are the titles of the book’s chapters:

• Dilettante and Amateur: Our Evolving Language

• Bach’s Lament about Leipzig’s Professional Instrumentalists

• Choral Singing Before the Era of Recordings

• Why Most a cappella Music Could Not Have Been Sung Unaccompanied

• Fasch and the Beginning of Modern Artistic Choral Singing

• What Handel’s Casting Reveals About Singers of the Time

• Intonation Standards and Equal Temperament

• Eighteenth-Century Stringed Keyboard Instruments from a Performance Perspective [LP: You may be surprised about the clavichord!]

• The Tromba and Corno in Bach’s Time

• Maelzel’s Role in Beethoven’s Symphonic Metronome Marks

• The French Time Devices Revisited

• The Notable Significance of Common Time and Cut Time in Bach’s Era

• Numbers and Tempo: 1630–1800

• Overdotting in Handel’s Overtures Reconsidered

• Notes inégales: A Definitive New Parameter

• Distinguishing Between Artificial and Natural Vibrato in Premodern Music

• A Solution for Simple (secco) Theater Recitative

• How Composers Viewed Performers’ Additions

• The Varied Reprise in Eighteenth-Century Instrumental Music—A Reappraisal

Telemann Sonatas for Violin and Harpsichord

Totally unfamiliar music by the most prolific baroque composer Georg Friedrich Telemann (1681–1767) fills a recent compact disc featuring violinist Dorian Komanoff Bandy and harpsichordist Paul Cienniwa (Whaling City Sound, WCS 108). Originally published in Frankfort-am-Main in 1715, these six four-movement works, each comprising alternating slow-fast-slow-fast movements, were composed with the burgeoning amateur house music musician in mind. A seventh sonata of similar style and length that has survived only in the composer’s manuscript preserved in the Dresden State Library receives its world premiere recording to fill out the program.

In disc and numerical order the sonatas are in G Minor, D Major, B Minor, G Major, A Minor, and A Major; the extra seventh sonata is in F-sharp Minor. Each composition bears the TWV (Telemann Werke Verzeichnis [“work catalogue”]) number 41, followed by an indication of its individual key (in German style: g, D, h, G, a. A, fis).

I had met the harpsichordist during a long-ago Boston Early Music Festival visit. He has recently relocated to the warmer climes of Florida where (now Dr.) Paul Cienniwa is music director of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Delray. Thus it was not difficult to locate an email address for this fine artist. I especially wanted to learn who had built the harpsichord used for this recording and to ascertain whether the works were being played from a realized score or from the more probable two-line original engraving. It turned out to be the latter, which made my admiration for such beautiful collaborative musicianship ascend even several units higher. Especially an elegant solo harpsichord introduction to the “Cantabile” of the B-minor Sonata had moved me deeply, and I appreciate the sensitive musical realization of the figured bass throughout. It also pleased me that Cienniwa lists among his musical mentors Jerome Butera, a longtime editor of The Diapason and currently the magazine’s sales director. (File that in your “Small World” folder, please.)

The fine-sounding instrument, it turned out, is a single-manual 2 x 8 example inspired by the unique 1681 Vaudry harpsichord (an instrument that our readers encountered briefly last month through the illustration for Jane Clark’s article on François Couperin). It was built in 2008 by Kevin Spindler. For those who might wish to acquire this music, violinist Bandy suggests IMSLP for downloading (https://imslp.org), or, even better, a facsimile of the 1715 edition published by Anne Fuzeau Productions (http://www.editions-classique.com/en/index.php). With such a fine example of the collaborative harpsichord line for consultation, one might not be so reluctant to realize that figured bass.

David Herman

It was the only paying job I’d ever had.

So said Ralph Vaughan Williams, speaking on the biographical DVD, O Thou Transcendent, as he talked about his first—and only—church organist position.

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958), arguably the most imaginative, prolific, and engaging British composer of the first half of the twentieth century, wrote so relatively few works for solo organ.¹ Why was this? Other twentieth-century British composers (such as Matthias, Leighton, Wills, Jackson, and, especially, Howells) contributed to the organ’s literature in major ways. Some say Vaughan Williams did not like the organ. It is more accurate, I believe, to suggest he did not enjoy playing the organ. It might have been difficult for him; he was, after all, a large man and had (as noted by relatives speaking on the DVD) long fingers and “enormous” feet! Others suggest his personal brand of Christian agnosticism got in the way of composing solo organ music.² But there are, of course, British organs in not only churches and cathedrals but also in many town halls and other non-religious concert venues. There was even an organ set up in his childhood home in Surrey so that he could practice.

Perhaps Vaughan Williams could not quite sort out how to translate some musical thoughts into organistic musical thoughts. In one of his many profoundly important observations on playing the organ, the late Erik Routley once wrote, “The organist must translate the [hymn] score into organ language [author’s emphasis] when he or she plays.”³

It is true that while many places in Vaughan Williams’s organ works have the ingredients for great musical expression, they are not entirely easy to bring off at the organ, due to matters of fingering, pedaling, and especially of texture. The same could be said of organ music by some other composers (Jehan Alain comes to mind), for which the player’s creative imagination must be called upon to combine with the composer’s notes.

It is the goal of this short work to consider Vaughan Williams’s views about and experiences with the organ and to examine the organ works that he left us. In so doing we will note some of the important influences on his compositional life, including his friendship with Gustav Holst, and especially his long and admiring relationship with the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. And, we will see that the organ had an important role in Vaughan Williams’s life from his early teens through his funeral in Westminster Abbey in August 1958.

A final theory offered by some in explaining Vaughan Williams’s relatively small output for the organ is that he simply couldn’t play the organ well.

I cannot tell that I think he is justified in going in for an organist’s career which is his pet idea. He seems to me so hopelessly ‘unhandy’ . . . . I can never trust him to play a simple service for me without some dread at what he may do.

So wrote Alan Gray, Vaughan Williams’s organ teacher at Trinity College.⁴ Vaughan Williams himself, likely with a degree of false modesty, was critical of his own playing. We should take care, however, in believing that he was not a competent organist, as many factors suggest otherwise. To begin with a significant milestone, he studied for and passed (in 1898) the demanding Fellowship exams for the Royal College of Organists (only to resign his membership a few years later). John Francis, Vaughan Williams scholar, author, and vice president/treasurer of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society, suggests that the situation above that Alan Gray complained of was due to the fact that Vaughan Williams was “unpredictable rather than technically incompetent.”⁵ Francis continues:

Self-deprecatory remarks by Vaughan Williams in later years have perhaps been taken too often at face value. We have no account of his [organ] playing by anybody who heard him play.

Further, Gray himself followed his lament by adding,

And this he combines with considerable knowledge & taste on organ and musical matters generally.⁶

This essay is not a biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams; fortunately, there are many excellent volumes available, some issued quite recently. Nevertheless, many events in his childhood, youth, and university days are intertwined with a study of his organ music. The reader will note at the end a list of some twenty-four sources consulted. Also particularly useful is the Timeline found on the website of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society: www.rvwsociety.com.

Vaughan Williams’s father was the vicar of Down Ampney (which Vaughan Williams pronounced “Amney”)⁷ in Gloucestershire. He died when his son was only two years old. His mother came from families of means: she was the daughter of Josiah Wedgwood (of pottery fame) and the niece of Charles Darwin.⁸ Let Vaughan Williams’s own words summarize the next few years, as spoken in Tony Palmer’s video, O Thou Transcendent:⁹

At age 11 [1883] I was sent to a horrid school at Rottingdean. Three years later I arrived at Charterhouse [1887]. They still sing my hymns there to this day. From Charterhouse I was sent off to the RCM [1890], and there I met a fellow pupil called Gustav Holst.

In his youth Holst had also secured a church position involving considerable responsibility. Vaughan Williams’s niece, recalling these early days with Vaughan Williams, remarked,

We used to laugh about Uncle Ralph but he wasn’t very good at the organ, and yet he was always playing for funerals or weddings or things.¹⁰

While at Charterhouse he was once greatly impressed by a schoolmate’s playing of Bach’s “St. Anne” fugue—a work that would remain a favorite throughout his life and which he himself designated as the postlude for his memorial service in Westminster Abbey.¹¹

During school holidays he practiced diligently, and the family even arranged for an organ to be installed at Leith Hill Place near Dorking, the seventeenth-century house in Surrey, wherein lived Wedgwoods and Darwins and which had become Vaughan Williams’s childhood home. (He later remarked that Dorking was “my home for nearly 40 years.”¹²) He inherited the house from his brother in 1944, whereupon he gave it to Britain’s National Trust.¹³ Breakfast at Leith Hill was at 7:30, and “Mr. Ralph” normally practiced beforehand. “The trouble about the early morning was finding a blower for the organ.”¹⁴ The butler, housemaids, groom, and gardener all avoided him!¹⁵ On Sundays he would practice long after the rest of the household had started to walk the two miles to church, usually arriving just as the service was starting. While a student at Charterhouse he was allowed to practice on the chapel organ. (One wonders what pieces he was working on!) In any case, from an early age Vaughan Williams seemed committed to the organ.

Throughout his childhood Vaughan Williams was steadfast in declaring his desire to be a professional musician. His family agreed, with the provision that he became an organist. (Thoughts were different in the late nineteenth century!) He later wrote:

I believe I should have made quite a decent fiddler but the authorities [!] decided that if I was to take up music at all the violin was too ‘doubtful’ a career and I must seek the safety of the organ stool, a trade for which I was entirely unsuited.¹⁶

It should be noted that when he subsequently left his only church position after only four or so years, it would seem that, although he disliked being an organist, there is no evidence that he disliked the organ.

The Royal College of Music

Vaughan Williams entered the Royal College of Music in 1890, just prior to his eighteenth birthday, and there became a pupil of Charles Hubert Hastings Parry. His family wanted him to commute, which he usually did by rail but occasionally on foot! (Really? London to Leith Hill in Surrey—some thirty miles! Far from the 200 miles Bach supposedly walked from Arnstadt to Lübeck, but . . . ). He often announced his arrival at Leith Hill Place by first having a go at the organ.¹⁷

While studying at the Royal College of Music he also entered Trinity College, Cambridge (1892), and there experienced a “spiritual awakening.”

As my mother insisted that I had a ‘proper’ education, I was sent to Cambridge . . .
what an awakening that was! You might almost say a spiritual awakening. The sense that even if you didn’t believe in God, there was something beyond. Something mysterious.¹⁸

Vaughan Williams would have heard many organ recitals and services at Cambridge and in nearby Ely Cathedral (whose organist then was T. Tertius Nobel, later to become organist at Saint Thomas Church, Fifth Avenue, New York City). Undergraduates at Trinity College were obliged to attend chapel services, and Vaughan Williams sometimes avoided this duty by retreating to the organ loft. At Cambridge he studied the organ with Alan Gray¹⁹ (organist of Trinity College) and left the university with a B.Mus degree in 1894, returning to the Royal College of Music in 1895. There Vaughan Williams began composition study with Charles Villiers Stanford, with whom he had a famously difficult relationship; Stanford’s comment on Vaughan Williams’s music often consisted only of “All rot, me boy.” Vaughan Williams, however, was in later years to speak warmly of him.

The Church of Saint Barnabas, South Lambeth

Vaughan Williams was appointed organist here in 1895. Since this was to be his first and only church position it seems appropriate to include here some details of the place and his duties. It seems that he held this post until 1899. Vaughan Williams describes his work there, again with some false modesty:

I was appointed to my first and last organ post, at St. Barnabas, South Lambeth. As I already said, I never could play the organ, but this appointment gave me an insight into good and bad church music which stood me in good stead later on. I also had to train the choir and give organ recitals and accompany the services, which gave me some knowledge of music from the performer’s point of view.²¹

This was a large church (originally seating 1,500 people) on Guildford Road in South Lambeth. The parish, as confirmed by the Diocese of Southwark office, exists no more.

The building, however, is still there, having been gutted and refitted as a series of “council flats” (low-income housing). Interestingly, when I visited there, the building manager was astonished to learn that a very famous composer had once served as organist of the church! Vaughan Williams presided over a largish instrument built by Hill and rebuilt by Bishop.²² At the time of his tenure the church supported an ambitious music program with a sizeable budget. The duties, for which Vaughan Williams was paid a salary of £50 per year, were demanding and time consuming.²³ His wife Adeline reported that he worked very hard and practiced on the organ up to five hours per day. For Vaughan Williams the salary was probably incidental to the experience.

He did not need to earn a living, having a healthy but not excessive private income. His work as an organist was for his continuing education, not to keep body and soul together.²⁴

His time at Saint Barnabas was not easy. He told his friend Holst that his choristers were “louts” and the vicar “quite mad.” The vicar insisted on the organist’s taking communion; Vaughan Williams felt that he, as a principled atheist, could not. So he resigned, without any apparent regret.²⁵ First, however, resolving to go abroad to study (with Max Bruch), he requested from the church, and was granted, a leave of absence. It is here that his friend Gustav Holst enters the picture.

Vaughan Williams and Holst

Vaughan Williams met Holst (1874–1934) at the Royal College of Music in 1895, and they remained fast friends for forty years until Holst’s death, going for extended hikes in the countryside and critiquing each other’s compositions. These “field days,” when they played and dissected their respective works were to prove invaluable to them both. Although in his youth Holst also had various tries at being a church organist, he was instead to become a professional trombonist (recommended as a treatment for his asthma).

He [Holst] left the College of Music to abandon the eminently respectable career of an organist . . . and to get at music from the inside as a trombonist in an orchestra. The very worst that a trombonist has to put up with is as nothing compared to what a church organist has to endure.²⁶

In taking leave of the organ bench at Saint Barnabas it was natural for Vaughan Williams to think of his friend Holst. There are somewhat differing accounts of the manner in which he broached the subject with Holst. Heirs and Rebels,²⁷ the collection of letters exchanged between the two composers, establishes some clarity. First, in a letter from Vaughan Williams to Holst, probably July 1897:

I am leaving this damned place [Saint Barnabas] in October and going abroad.

And then, contrary to some accounts in which he offered Holst the job, he in fact inquired about the latter’s interest:

Suppose you were offered it would you consider the matter? The screw [sic!] is £50 [per annum] and the minimum duties . . .

And here he lays out what sounds like a demanding list of tasks, working on Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays, as well as running the choral society and giving occasional organ recitals. Vaughan Williams later states:

Mind I AM NOT OFFERING IT YOU [VW’s caps] only [sic] if you would like it I will do my best to Back you.

He concludes by asking Holst to deputize for him while he is gone and provides many specific instructions on getting through the service (pitches, cues, etc.). He suggests beginning the morning service with a “short and easy voluntary” and concluding with a “long and difficult voluntary.” He notes about the choir:

Those louts of men will slope in about 8.45 and make you mad—the only ones who can sing will be away.

As a postscript VW adds, “The vicar is quite mad.” (Does any of this sound familiar to us today?) In any event, the position was not taken by Holst but probably by William H. Harris (later a faculty member at the Royal College of Music and organist at Saint George’s Chapel, Windsor).²⁸

Vaughan Williams and Bach

Vaughan Williams showed nearly life-long fondness and admiration for the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, whom he placed above all musicians. He regarded the Saint Matthew Passion, a work that he would conduct many times, to be Bach’s greatest achievement. Vaughan Williams had clear and strongly held thoughts on performing Bach’s music. First, he insisted that, for his audiences, the choral works, including the Matthew Passion, be sung in English (a preference shared by the late David Willcocks when he was director of the Bach Choir). He did not have patience with so-called “authentic performance practices” of early music.

Bach, though superficially he may speak the eighteenth-century language, belongs to no school or period.²⁹

Vaughan Williams had a clear and oft-stated aversion to the harpsichord! He used the grand piano as the continuo instrument in his many Bach performances.

The harpsichord, however it may sound in a small room—and to my mind it never [author’s emphasis] has a pleasant sound—in a large concert room sounds just like the ticking of a sewing machine.³⁰

He had similar thoughts about the so-called Baroque organ, which in the 1950s put him distinctly at odds with those planning the new organ for London’s Royal Festival Hall.

By the way, I see there is a movement afoot to substitute the bubble-and-squeak type of instrument for the noble diapason and soft mixtures of our cathedral organs.³¹

It is interesting to note that the opening recital on the Royal Festival Hall organ included Vaughan Williams’s Three Preludes Founded on Welsh Hymn Tunes.

These views on instruments and performing practices may now be considered old-fashioned and out-of-date. They are, nonetheless, the beliefs of a great musician whose musical thoughts and ideas, planted in the mid-Victorian era, grew through more than a half-century of music making. “Vaughan Williams paid tribute to Bach practically, in his non-authentic but deeply moving performances of the major choral works at Dorking.”³² [For the Leith Hill Festivals, founded in 1905, which he conducted from 1905 to 1953.]

The Great War

The effect of war on musicians has been a topic of lengthy and interesting studies. In addition to the English composers who did not return from the First World War, the Second World War took the lives of many composers, including Jehan Alain and Hugo Distler, and affected the lives of countless others. Although space does not permit an excursion on this topic, it seems relative to touch on Vaughan Williams’s army service, which relates to his work as organist and church musician.

Vaughan Williams volunteered for military service in the Royal Army Medical Corps (in 1914, at age 42!) and from May 1915 was stationed at Saffron Walden where he spent considerable time at the organ of the parish church,³³ finding refuge from the horrors of war through playing Bach. At the outbreak of war he was for a time stationed with his unit in Dorking. When there was a death in the company and no organist could be found for the service at Saint Martin’s Church, Vaughan Williams offered to play, providing he could have some volunteers to form a choir. In the same year he was posted to a field ambulance brigade. The following year he was sent to France (at the rank of lieutenant) and was involved in the Battle of the Somme.

Vaughan Williams’s patriotic spirit was evident during the Second World War through his composing of film music to aid the war effort and in many types of volunteer work. For example, he regularly gathered scrap metal. His Thanksgiving for Victory was written and performed in 1945 in celebration of the war’s end.

Vaughan Williams and church music

We have seen that, with the one exception of four or so years at the end of the nineteenth century, Vaughan Williams never functioned as a parish musician. Nonetheless, his many choral works, large (Hodie) and small (O Taste and See), enrich the repertory of all manner of choral organizations, ranging from parish singers to concert choirs. His choral music was written not so much for places (as with Howells’s many settings of the services for various cathedrals and collegiate chapels) but for occasions (coronations, victories, and more).

One of Vaughan Williams’s most monumentally important works in the field of church music was as editor of The English Hymnal. In 1904 a committee headed by the Reverend Percy Dearmer³⁴ set about creating a new hymnbook, in succession to the venerable Hymns Ancient and Modern.³⁵ Vaughan Williams was invited to be the musical editor and, by his own testimony, in the process learned a great deal about music—the good and the bad. He introduced several new tunes of his own creation as well as folk melodies, making it a thoroughly “English” book. He succeeded in purging the new hymnal of many poor Victorian hymn tunes (while retaining the better ones), and those which he was forced to keep he banned to the back of the book in a section he called “The Chamber of Horrors.”

Songs of Praise followed in 1925, once more with Dearmer as general editor and Vaughan Williams, assisted by Martin Shaw, the musical editor. It is said that Vaughan Williams was thrilled by the sound of an enthusiastic congregation singing a great hymn. The same trio of Dearmer, Vaughan Williams, and Martin Shaw worked together again to produce The Oxford Book of Carols in 1928.

Organist friends of Vaughan Williams

Vaughan Williams loved the typical cathedral organs of the first half of the twentieth century and liked hearing them played. In return, many cathedral organists enjoyed playing for him—often at night when the building was closed, often playing works of Bach. Such special playings took place often—by Walter Alcock at Salisbury; Herbert Sumsion in Gloucester; William McKie in Westminster Abbey, as they worked together preparing for the 1953 coronation. After Vaughan Williams’s death in 1958, it was decided to place his ashes next to those of Stanford and Purcell in the Abbey.

Other prominent organists who were friends and colleagues, and from whom he no doubt learned much about the instrument: Thomas Armstrong, Ivor Atkins, Harold Darke, Walford Davies, John Dykes Bower, Alan Gray, Herbert Howells, John Ireland, Henry Ley, Christopher Morris, Boris Ord, Cyril Rootham, Martin Shaw, R. R. Terry, and George Thalban-Ball.³⁶

In considering Vaughan Williams and the organ, Relf Clark suggests an interesting comparison with Elgar:³⁷

Early in their careers, both were briefly the organist of a parish church. Neither of them appears to have enjoyed the experience very much. Both wrote for the instrument a handful of not entirely characteristic works. Both made notable use of the organ in a few orchestral scores. And both enjoyed the friendship and support of professional organists.

In a famous letter to The Daily Telegraph, January 14, 1951, Vaughan Williams makes some views clear, beginning with his thoughts on the “bubble and squeak” tones of continental organs.

Is it really proposed that we should abandon in favour of this unpleasant sound the noble diapasons and rich soft ‘mixtures’ of our best church organs?

He particularly admired the organ at Saint Michael’s Church, Cornhill (Hill; Rushworth & Dreaper), presided over by his friend Harold Darke, and believed it possessed the ideal English organ tone.

The works for organ

This essay offers not so much analyses but comments on Vaughan Williams’s music. For structural and thematic analyses of the organ works see the excellent articles by Hugh Benham [See “Sources and further reading,” B/2] and Relf Clark [See “Sources and further reading,” C]. It would seem that Vaughan Williams’s major organ works were conceived or written at Saint Mary’s Church, Saffron Walden, where he spent a great deal of time practicing while stationed there in 1915. The late Michael Kennedy, the chief authority on the works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, cites the following as “The Organ Works:”

• Three Preludes Founded On Welsh Hymn Tunes, published in 1920 by Stainer & Bell. The second prelude of the set, Rhosymedre, was played at Vaughan Williams’s funeral in 1958. Clark observes that the registrations in the score likely reflected the organ at Trinity College. He further suggests that Vaughan Williams first encountered these tunes when editing The English Hymnal (1906). The preludes are likely among the first works completed after his leaving the army in 1919.³⁸

Bryn Calfaria is at once the most interesting musically and, although fun to play, nonetheless the most challenging to bring off at the organ. It is dramatic and improvisatory; fragments of the tune are given out through a thick and tangled texture. Like many other fine organ works (some of Alain’s come to mind) the piece involves the player as interpreter: adding musical imagination to the text.

Rhosymedre is the most well liked and often played of the three. Simple, quiet, and gently dance-like, it states the tune twice, in a straightforward manner.

Hyfrydol makes a bit of an odd conclusion to the set: a very thick-textured setting of the tune (difficult to play, especially for those with small hands) above a constantly moving pedal part that romps over two octaves (get out your Gleason book to help your feet prepare).

• Prelude and Fugue in C Minor, composed in 1921 for orchestra and first performed in that year at the Three Choirs Festival in Hereford. The orchestral version was performed first (conducted by the composer). The piece was then arranged for organ between 1921 and 1930 (completed in 1921, revised in 1923, published in 1930). Vaughan Williams told the dedicatee Henry Ley that the work was modeled on Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in C Minor, BWV 546.³⁹ Ley (pronounced “Lee”), then organist at Christ Church, Oxford, commented on the piece’s difficulty. According to Ley, Vaughan Williams said that the work was written in 1915 while he was stationed at Saffron Walden using the organ at Saint Mary’s Church.⁴⁰ The prelude and fugue together occupy some ten minutes.

The Prelude is very well written for the organ. Vaughan Williams was attentive to details of registration (including frequent use of manual 16′s) and manual divisions. The piece has quite a lot of bitonal dissonance. Ley was right: it is not easy play, due to the constantly changing chord colors, large amount of chromaticism, and fast contrapuntal passages. Vaughan Williams employed chords in parallel sweeping lines, often in contrary motion. Thick homophonic passages alternate with longer sections of thinner, busy counterpoint, generating an ABABA design. The quick B sections are terrifically fast at the specified tempo of quarter = 120 beats per minute. Thinking I could not play it that fast, I initially suspected a case of “composer tempo overreach.” David Briggs, however, manages these brilliantly on the two-CD set of the complete organ music (original and transcriptions) of Vaughan Williams, Bursts of Acclamation. (Albion ALBCD021/2, available from the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society, https://
rvwsociety.com).

The prelude is somewhat impressionistic in sound, using parallelism, tonal vagueness (often resulting from mixed modes), the use of ninth and major-seventh chords, as well as tetra- and pentatonic scales. The result: the prelude clearly sounds like Vaughan Williams. It ends suddenly in C major, a somewhat astonishing tonality not really heard before in the piece.

For someone who was a master at contrapuntal writing and an ardent admirer of Bach, Vaughan Williams seems not to have written very many fugues. This fugue is a good one, a double fugue in fact, whose two subjects are first treated separately and then combined at the climax. It begins not so much in C minor but C Aeolian. The omnipresent triplets against duplets, which get a bit wearing (to this player, at least), is an element in both fugue subjects. Parallel chords in contrary motion, drawn from the prelude, occasionally interrupt the rather dissonant fugal entries.

• Two Organ Preludes, founded on Welsh Folk Songs, published in 1956. These are Romanza (“The White Rock”) and Toccata (“St. David’s Day”). These works are generally regarded as being less than indicative of the composer’s skill and imagination and not very “organistic.”

• In 1964 Oxford University Press published A Vaughan Williams Organ Album (still in print) consisting of transcriptions as well as the two organ preludes of 1956. Various composers, including Henry Ley, have made organ transcriptions of several of Vaughan Williams’s orchestral works.⁴¹

• Kennedy mentions an Organ Overture, from 1890 (the manuscript of which is in the British Library).⁴²

• A Wedding Tune for Anne, 1943 (contained in A Vaughan Williams Organ Album).

• Various incomplete sketches left at the time of his death.

Returning to the opening question

There are two Vaughan Williams organ works of relatively major stature, dating from during and just after the time of the First World War: the preludes on Welsh hymns and the Prelude and Fugue in C Minor. A generation later would come Benjamin Britten’s comparable opus, Prelude and Fugue on a Theme of Vittoria (1946). They have not much in common, save being one of few examples of their masters’ contributions to the canon of organ music. Both composers wrote for situations or performances: Vaughan Williams for the Three Choirs Festival in Hereford, for example; Britten’s was a commission from Saint Matthew’s, Northampton (for which he had earlier written the cantata Rejoice in the Lamb, containing some of the most original and dramatic writing for organ in any choral work). These preludes and fugues, valued for their singular stature, are nonetheless not entirely representative of their composers’ genius, language, invention, and musical imaginations.

Douglas Fairhurst suggests that Vaughan Williams, as a great artist, was more at ease and naturally expressive having a larger canvass for his music. Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams commented that, while it was unorthodox to consider canonization for a non-believer, the Christian church owed a great deal to him for his contributions.⁴³ In any case, after his death in 1958 Vaughan Williams’s ashes were buried in Westminster Abbey, appropriately near those of Stanford and Purcell. Of special note: his was the first funeral service held in the Abbey for a commoner since that of Purcell, nearly 300 years earlier.⁴⁴

Supplement I: some other works in which the organ is prominent

The organ has played a central role in many centuries of choral music. Vaughan Williams realized the expressive and dramatic powers of the organ and used them to good effect in some of his orchestral works as well.

• Job, A Masque for Dancing. In Scene VI (the Dance of Job’s Comforters) we see/hear a vivid representation of Satan and his retinue in Hell. Included is a part for “Full Organ with Solo Reeds Coupled,” supplementing the full orchestra.

• A Vision of Aeroplanes⁴⁵ is a substantial late work (1956) for chorus and organ, setting familiar words from the first chapter of the Book of Ezekiel. It opens with a dramatic, dissonant organ solo that, as with subsequent organ interludes, reminds one of the organ’s use in Howells’s A Sequence for St. Michael, to be written some five years later.

• A Sea Symphony includes passages for organ, more for support, as a member of the orchestra, than for effect.

• However, the dramatic blast of chords occurring about 3/4th through the “Landscape” (Lento) movement in Sinfonia Antarctica, shows the organ as hair-raising, important, and soloistic.

Supplement II: selected choral works in which the organ has a prominent role

[These lists extracted from Neil Butterworth: Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Guide To Research. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1990.]

Vexilla Regis (for the Cambridge B.Mus), 1894

Mass (for the Cambridge D.Mus), 1899

Toward the Unknown Region, 1907

Fantasia on Christmas Carols, 1912

Sancta Civitas, 1923–1925

Three Choral Hymns, 1929

Flourish for a Coronation, 1937

Six Choral Songs: To be sung in time of war, 1940

England, My England, 1941

Thanksgiving for Victory (later A Song of Thanksgiving), 1945

Folk Songs of the Four Seasons, 1949

Fantasia (Quasi Variazione) on the “Old 104th Psalm Tune,” 1949

Hodie, 1953–1954

Supplement III: some choral music for the church

O Clap Your Hands, 1920

Lord, Thou Hast Been Our Refuge, 1921

Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis (The Village Service), 1925

The Pilgrim Pavement, 1934

O How Amiable, 1934

Festival Te Deum in F, 1937

All Hail the Power (Miles Lane), 1938

Services in D Minor, 1939

Hymn for St. Margaret, 1948

The Old Hundredth Psalm, 1953

Te Deum and Benedictus, 1954

A Vision of Aeroplanes, 1956

Notes

1. In this he does not stand alone, of course. The same could be said of RVW’s best friend, Gustav Holst (who around 1930 started what he hoped would be an organ concerto). We wish Alain and Distler could have had longer lives in which to continue their composing for organ. And, although the organ parts in many of Benjamin Britten’s choral works are tour de forces of rhythm, texture, and organ color, Britten, too, left us a regrettably small number of organ works (which reveal relatively little of his musical genius).

2. Many have pondered this seeming contradiction between belief and the creative settings of sacred texts. One factor: he had, of course, a life-long love affair with Elizabethan English.

3. Church Music and the Christian Faith, by Erik Routley. Carol Stream, Illinois: Agape, 1978, p. 105.

4. Quoted in Aldritt, p. 55.

5. Francis/2. [The booklet pages are not numbered.]

6. RVW/3, p. 42.

7. Palmer.

8. Reference to the famous remark about Darwin is irresistible. As a child, VW asked his mother what was all the fuss about Great-Uncle Charles? She replied that the Bible says the earth was created in six days; Great-Uncle Charles believes it took somewhat longer.

9. Palmer.

10. Ibid.

11. Aldritt, p.30.

12. Palmer.

13. VW/3, p.258.

14. Ibid., p. 28.

15. As stated by J. Ellis Cook, son of the gardener at Leith Hill Place; quoted in Tributes, p. 25.

16. VW1, p. 134.

17. Aldritt, p. 37.

18. Palmer.

19. “Our friendship survived his despair at my playing and I became quite expert at managing the stops at his voluntaries and organ recitals.” And then wrote Alan Gray: “I cannot tell him that I think he is justified in going in for an organist’s career which is his pet idea. He seems to me so hopelessly ‘unhandy.’ I can never trust him to play a simple service for me without some dread as to what he may do.” Aldritt, p. 55. VW clearly achieved significant improvement by 1898, when he passed the F.R.C.O. exams!

20. The British title “organist” usually implies “organist and choirmaster.”

21. VW/1, p. 146.

22. Clark, p. 9.

23. In addition to services, these included four choral rehearsals each week as well as giving occasional organ recitals. Kennedy, p. 41.

24. Heffer, p. 18.

25. Ibid., p. 19.

26. VW/1, p. 71.

27. VW/4, pp. 5–6.

28. F/5, p. 9.

29. VW/1, p. 122.

30. Ibid., p. 123.

31. Ibid.

32. Mellers, p. 158.

33. F/2 (pages unnumbered).

34. Vicar of Saint Mary’s, Primrose Hill, where his organist was Martin Shaw.

35. Hymns Ancient & Modern, first published in 1861, continues to be found, in subsequent editions, in some British church pews today, often next to The English Hymnal.

36. All listed in B/3, Personalia, pp. 315–345.

37. Clark, p. 7.

38. Ibid., p. 10.

39. F/4, p. 8.

40. F/3. p. 16.

41. For details of these, see Randy L. Neighbarger’s, “Organ Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Descriptive List of Original Works and Transcriptions,” The Diapason, October 1991, p. 10.

42. K/2, p. 3.

43. Palmer.

44. Ibid.

33. Written for RVW’s good friend Harold Drake, organist at the Church of Saint Michael’s, Cornhill, the work sets the dramatic account of the whirlwind, cloud, and fire from the book of Ezekiel.

Sources and further reading

A: Aldritt, Keith. Vaughan Williams: Composer, Radical, Patriot—A Biography. Ramsbury, Wiltshire: Robert Hale Books, 2015.

B/1: Barber, Robin. “Vaughan Williams in Hamburg, 1938: A Brush with Nazi Germany.” Ralph Vaughan Williams Society Journal, Issue 66, June 2016.

B/2: Benham, Hugh. “Music for Solo Organ by Ralph Vaughan Williams.” Ralph Vaughan Williams Society Journal, Issue 55, October 2012, 3–8.

B/3: Butterworth, Neil. Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Guide to Research. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1990.

C: Clark, Relf. “Vaughan Williams and the Organ: An Anniversary Review.” Organists’ Review, August 2008, 7-15.

F/1: Francis, John. Vice-Chairman of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society (UK) in correspondence with the author.

F/2: Francis, John. Notes in the booklet accompanying Bursts of Acclamation, two CD recordings of organ works by RVW published by Albion Records.

F/3: Francis, John. “Composers of the Great War Revisited.” Ralph Vaughan Williams Society Journal, Issue 65, February 2016, 15–16.

F/4: Francis, John. “Ralph Vaughan Williams and the Organ.” Ralph Vaughan Williams Society Journal, Issue 63, June 2015, 3–11.

F/5: Francis, John. “A Question of Chronology.” Ralph Vaughan Williams Society Journal, Issue No. 74, February 2019, 9.

H/1: Heffer, Simon. Vaughan Williams. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000.

H/2: Holmes, Paul. Holst; Illustrated Lives of the Great Composers. London: Omnibus Press, 1997.

K/1: Kennedy, Michael. The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964; 2nd edition,1996.

K/2: Kennedy, Michael. A Catalogue of the Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

M/3: Manning, David, ed. Vaughan Williams on Music. Oxford University Press, 2008.

M: Marshall, Em. Music in the Landscape. London: Robert Hale, 2011.

M/2: Mellers, Wilfrid. Vaughan Williams and the Vision of Albion. London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1989.

N: Neighbarger, Randy L. “Organ Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams: A Descriptive List of Original Works and Transcriptions,” The Diapason, October 1991, 10–11.

T: Tributes to Vaughan Williams: 50 Years On. A reprint of The RCM Magazine, Vol. LV, No. 1, Easter Term 1959.

P: Palmer, Tony. O Thou Transcendent (a video commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Vaughan Williams’s death). Isolde Films, 2007.

VW/1: Some Thoughts on Beethoven’s Choral Symphony, With Writings on Other Musical Subjects. London: Oxford University Press, 1953.

VW/2: National Music and Other Essays. London: Oxford University Press, 1987.

VW/3: Vaughan Williams, Ursula. R. V. W.: A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1964.

VW/4: Heirs and Rebels: Letters written to each other and occasional writings on music by Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst. Edited by Ursula Vaughan Williams and Imogen Holst. London: Oxford University Press, 1959.

Photograph of Ralph Vaughan Williams by Frank Chappelow (used with permission)

Steven Young

Steven Young is a professor of music at Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts, where he teaches courses in music theory and directs the University’s choral ensembles. He is also organist at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, Providence, Rhode Island. Young has presented papers and performances for regional and national conventions of the American Guild of Organists, the Organ Historical Society, and the American Choral Directors Association. He research interests focus on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French organist/composers, and he has written several feature articles and reviews for The Diapason. He also wrote the liner notes for Christine Kamp’s series of recordings of the organ works of Louis Vierne on the Festivo label. Young has recorded several of the works of Boston organist/composer Henry M. Dunham on the AFKA label.

In October 1926, just a month before his death, Aloÿs Claussmann chatted with an old friend, Claude Nievre, a writer for La Montagne, a newspaper whose office was directly below the apartment where Claussmann lay dying. Nievre had written an article titled “Un grand talent méconnu, Claussmann, musicien et compositeur” (An underestimated talent, Claussmann, musician and composer).¹ Among other things, Nievre made the point that Claussmann’s many years of service to his community of Clermont-Ferrand should be rewarded by naming him to the Legion d’honneur, the highest civilian award given by the country to celebrate accomplishments given in service to one’s country. Claussmann had spent fifty years selflessly serving the musical and religious community of Clermont-Ferrand with little or no thought to promoting his own career as performer, teacher, or composer. Sadly, the award was never granted to Claussmann, despite the efforts of all his friends and colleagues. However, his tireless efforts bore many wonderful fruits in terms of quality students, artistic performances, and respected compositions.

A native of the Alsace region of France, born in Uffholz on July 5, 1850, Claussmann began piano lessons at age 11 with his uncle, a local musician and teacher. Following those lessons, Claussmann studied at the Petit Séminaire de La Chapelle-sous-Rougemont. Between 1868 and 1870, he studied with organ virtuoso Eugène Gigout at l’École Niedermeyer in Paris, during which time he was awarded the premier prix in both piano and organ.

Interrupting his studies, Claussmann returned to Uffholz to perform his military service in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 and 1871. When Alsace was lost to Germany at the end of the war, Claussmann opted to retain his French citizenship. He returned to Paris to complete his studies, where he distinguished himself as both performer and composer, earning the grand prix de composition in 1872 from l’École Niedermeyer.

In 1873, the position of maître de Chapelle at the cathedral of Clermont-Ferrand became available. Claussmann applied and was offered the position. He accepted it, and remained in Clermont-Ferrand for the entirety of his career, possibly to his professional detriment. Nonetheless, according to one writer, Claussmann wasted no time in establishing himself as a first-rate musician.²

In 1877, shortly after his appointment, the cathedral acquired a new organ with three manuals and forty-eight ranks of pipes, built by the Merklin firm, one of the most respected in France. The dedication program featured Edmond Lemaigre, then titular organist of the cathedral, and Alexander Guilmant, renowned organist. Claussmann participated as well, conducting two motets, including a Salve Regina of his own, newly composed for the event, and performing two organ works, one by François Benoist and another new work, also written by Claussmann, Offertoire.³

Claussmann’s musical work was not limited to his position at the cathedral. In 1881, Claussmann established the short-lived Société Philharmonique. Though enjoying only a brief existence, this may have been the first orchestra to provide written critical program notes for its concerts, attesting to Claussmann’s scholarly inclinations.⁴ Shortly thereafter, in 1886, he assumed position as organist titulaire, following Edmond Lemaigre’s relocation to Paris. It was at this tribune that Claussmann remained until his death in 1926.

During his tenure he composed the majority of his works for the organ (approximately 350 pieces), nearly a hundred for the piano, a fair number of songs, and a few other works for chamber ensembles and orchestra.⁵ Claussmann’s next big success was the premiere performance of his commissioned drame lyrique, Pierre, l’Eremite, composed to commemorate the 800th anniversary of the First Crusade (the text of the work was by the Abbé Raynaud). Written in 1892, the work awaited its premiere for three years. According to the reports, it was a resounding success, performed at least two times (May 15 and 17, 1895). The reviewer, while admitting that one could not analyze such a large work on one hearing, admired its beauty in both composition and performance.⁶ The performance featured an orchestra of sixty, a chorus of 200, and soloists, all led by Claussmann. It must have been quite the tour de force!

In 1909, Claussmann was appointed director of L’École municipal de Musique, and he remained its director until 1918 when he suffered from a serious health crisis that disabled him for nearly three months, at which point he was named honorary director, and Louis Gémont assumed directorship.⁷ The formation of this school was fraught with difficulties. Prior to its founding, there were two competing institutes, the Petit Conservatoire, headed by Jean Soulacroup, and the École de musique, directed by Louis Gémont, both of whom were considered for the position of director of the École nationale de musique. After several years of contentious battles about the school, and once it was decided to move ahead with the formation of a national music school that would align itself with the Conservatoire nationale in Paris, a closed door meeting took place, and Claussmann was named as director to the pleasure of many community members, and the displeasure of others, including the mayor of the city.⁸ Claussmann accepted, but wrote, with apparent jocularity, that if the conservatory were to open as planned, the undertaking would be substantial, and it would force him to cut his annual vacation very short. He did exactly that, and served with distinction for many years.

Little is known of Claussmann’s personal life; there are few letters and no personal papers. In 1877, he married Marguerite Barthélémy, and they had a daughter, Madeleine, in 1878. It is presumed that his wife predeceased him, based on the eulogies given at his funeral.⁹ According to Joseph Desaymard, writer and critic, who was his pupil and friend, Claussmann possessed a gentle spirit, keen intellect, good sense of humor, and youthful attitude.¹⁰ He rode his bike to work every day, and until the final few years of his life, he appears to have possessed good health.

Unfortunately, little is known about the critical reception of his work, at least in France. The local newspaper of Clermont-Ferrand rarely commented on musical events. However, the Société nationale included his Sonate pour violon et piano on a concert in May 1906, and the composition and performance received an extensive review reprinted in the Revue pratique de Liturgie et de Musique sacrée. The reviewer praised Claussmann’s melodic gift, his interesting harmonies, and his well-crafted forms.¹¹ This seems to be the generally held view of Claussmann as a composer.

Claussmann’s vast output of organ works includes music for any number of occasions. The two large collections, Cent pieces pour orgue ou harmonium, opus 34, and Cent pieces pour grand orgue, opus 66, encompass smaller works designed for liturgical usage, such as Entrées, Communions, and Sorties.¹² Undoubtedly he used these pieces himself over his fifty-year career at the cathedral.¹³ Even in these smaller works, Claussmann demonstrates substantial contrapuntal skill. The Entrée in D Minor, which opens opus 66, is only 63 measures long, yet it displays Claussmann’s fascination with counterpoint and with Franck, as the theme appears twice, in related keys, and then, upon returning to the tonic, is subjected to canonic treatment throughout (Example 1). The ninth piece in this set provides further evidence of Claussmann’s meticulous craftsmanship. While only 29 measures long, it has a tripartite form in which the return of the opening A section receives a new accompaniment with the melody moved to the left hand. In terms of larger organ works, Claussmann penned two sonatas, a Suite pour orgue, and several Livraisons containing varying numbers of pieces likely intended for concert use. These include fantaisias, pastorales, marches, toccatas, and many others. In these works one sees Claussmann’s wide-ranging inventiveness with their well-developed themes and solidly crafted counterpoint.

While steeped in the style of the Romantic era, the organ music often displays surprising originality. From the earliest opera, Claussmann combines both French and German styles, which may be the result of his earliest influences in Uffholtz, an area of France that reflected a great deal of Germanic influence due to its shared border with Germany. For example, opus 16 is entitled Orgelstücke rather than Pièces pour orgue. In the music, one often finds well-crafted melodies, a staple of the French tradition, fused with the intricate counterpoint that is intrinsic to German composition, making Claussmann’s organ music unique for its time.¹⁴ Claussmann’s fusion of the aforementioned styles is evidenced in Scherzo in G Major, opus 33, no. 4. While making use of a rather extended model of the scherzo and trio form—ABA′CA′, which resembles more of a Rondo—the typical French scherzo would not make use of the extensive counterpoint found in the fugal exposition that comprises the B section (in B minor). The fourth section, which itself is a small three-part form in the key of E-flat major, has a very lyrical melody for the outer parts and, again, the composer briefly employs some imitative polyphony in the middle portion.

Though Claussmann’s music is influenced by the style of César Franck, as evidenced in the Allegro symphonique, opus 33, no. 2, whose opening recalls Franck’s Pièce heroïque (Example 2), Claussmann often moves into unusual areas of tonality through his inspired use of chromaticism, following on and expanding the chromatic harmonic language of Franck. One even finds an example of progressive harmonic movement in some of Claussmann’s works, such as Pastorale, opus 26, no. 3, which begins in E major and ends in A minor, delivering an unexpected conclusion.¹⁵

In the United States, as early as 1892, one finds references to performances of Claussmann’s music. A concert review in the Indianapolis Journal accorded the Scherzo in A Minor a favorable assessment.¹⁶ (One assumes that the reviewer had heard other Claussmann pieces.) Several of the pieces from opus 26 were dedicated to American organists, including Clarence Eddy and William C. Carl, both former students of Alexandre Guilmant. (It is possible that Guilmant helped make the connection by recommending the works to Carl. Guilmant participated in the dedication of the organ at the Clermont-Ferrand cathedral in 1887 where he would have heard Claussmann’s music. It is also possible that Gigout recommended his music to Carl.¹⁷) The first volume of opus 16 was reviewed favorably by Everett Truette in The Organ, 1893, who wrote, “Three extremely interesting pieces . . . which are written somewhat in the style of reveries, and contain many passages of striking originality.”¹⁸ (It was of this Fantaisie in C Minor that Gigout wrote his praise of Claussmann.¹⁹) It is likely because of the work of Carl and Truette, who published some of this music in The Organ and other collections, that Claussmann’s music achieved some measure of popularity in America. Early twentieth-century newspaper accounts indicate that several of Claussmann’s works were performed quite regularly, especially Easter Dawn and Grand Choeur for organ and his Magnificat for choir.

Among other comments on Claussmann’s works, Pierre Balme linked him to a progressive aesthetic:

In his day, Claussmann had difficulty with being a ‘pioneer,’ even in spite of the example of his co-disciple Fauré, who remained all through to the end of his time, as innovative as younger composers. But why not have others reported rather how much he (Claussmann) was, in his prime, so profoundly ahead of the taste and knowledge of audiences and even music professionals? Twenty years ago, he was not afraid of modifying his composing technique according to the latest developments of the impressionist school.²⁰

Connecting Claussmann to the Impressionist school seems to be a stretch, though examples of augmented triads and unexpected harmonic connections are evident, as is the use of non-functional harmony, as witnessed in the frequent use of the raised fourth and fifth scale degrees, creating the sensation of whole-tone harmony. If this is what Balme refers to, then it is possible to put Claussmann in that category. However, Claussmann’s music is thoroughly steeped in the chromatic harmony of the period, and he often makes unexpected harmonic connections, such as moving between C major and F-sharp major for the middle section of the Fantaisie in C Minor, opus 10. These unexpected relationships may also be seen in the transitional passages of Au Crépusucle from opus 33, where the dominant seventh chord of the tonic G-flat resolves to a D major sonority, which is then repeated whole step below, obscuring any sense of the tonic (Example 3). If this fluidity of key relationships is considered “impressionistic” by the writer, then the term applies.

Overall, Claussmann retains a consistent style throughout his other music; one finds equally challenging tonal relationships in most pieces. Additionally, his treatment of form does not necessarily conform to expectations of his era, but a clear structure is always evident and logical. One might apply musicologist Carlo Caballero’s argument about Fauré, who he claims maintained the consistency of style throughout his works, which Fauré believes was “a crucial property of any music that is truly original,”²¹ and apply that to Claussmann as well. Hervé Desarbre would agree, according to the liner notes to his recording of selected organ works, as he claims that Claussmann’s style did not change much over the years.²² Claussmann retained remarkable consistency in his technical style and tonal language beginning with the major organ works from opus 10 and continuing through the late opera.

Many of Claussmann’s works have been recently republished, some with needed editorial emendations, as the printed editions contain numerous errors (especially clef change indications).²³ As there appear to be no extant manuscripts, it is difficult to know Claussmann’s intentions. Both B-note Musikverlag and FitzJohn Publishing have reproduced many of his works. IMSLP (www.imslp.org) has a reasonable collection available, and France’s Bibliothèque Nationale Gallica site had started to digitize many other works.

Whether Claussmann would have enjoyed the success his contemporaries did had he remained in Paris is a question that can never be answered. He made his choice, apparently without regrets, and enjoyed the respect of the community he served for nearly fifty years. The music of this underestimated talent attests to the mastery of his craft and the fertility of his imagination, and deserves to be re-examined and given a place in the concert repertoire.

Notes

1. Claude Nievre, La Montagne, October 12, 1926, p. 2.

2. Th. Mourgue, “Profil d’artistes: M. Claussmann,” Le Moniteur, June 29, 1892, p. 2.
“. . .il vient s’etabilir chez nous où on ne tarde pas à reconnaitra en lui un musician de premiere ordre.”

3. J. Merklin, Le cathédrale de Clermont-Ferrand et ses orgues, Lyon: Impr. de A.-L. Perrin et Marinet (1878), p. 28. As with others, Offertoire served as a common title for works; Claussmann wrote several.

4. Joseph Desaymard, Avenir du Plateau Central, November 8, 1926, writing Claussmann’s obituary (No page citation as this comes from the Bibliothèque de la Patrimoine of Clermont-Ferrand collection MS 1654). Present research has yet to find concert announcements or programs presented. In 1885, another community orchestra was formed which enjoyed much success, directed by Jean Soulacroup.

5. Cataloguing the works of Claussmann has presented a challenge. Pierre Desaymard made an attempt at this in the 1980s but seems to have missed some pieces. Four of the works from opus 33 do not appear in any listing of his, possibly because they were published by the English firm J. Laudy and Co. See Desaymard, Bibliographie des oeuvres d’Aloys Claussman, Bulletin historique et scientifique de l’Auvergne, vol. 1.90, pp. 305–321 (1981).

6. Le Moniteur, May 16, 1895, p. 2, and May 18, 1895, p. 2. According to Louis Gémont, the work was performed again in 1925 (Le Moniteur, November 11, 1926, p. 2).

7. In a letter to Paul Dukas, Claussmann thought that he was close to death at that time (Bibliothêque Nationale, Paris, W-48).

8. Jean-Louis Jam, “Aux origins d’une succursale provinciale du Conservatoire de Paris,” Bulletin historique et artistique de l’Auvergne, vol. XCIX (1998), pp. 127–156. An excellent and somewhat entertaining chronicle of the events.

9. Le Moniteur, November 11, 1926, p. 2.

10. Joseph Desaymard, “Le Mort de Claussmann,” L’Avenir, Nov. 9, 1926, p. 2.

11. Alexandre Georges on “Aloys Claussmann,” Revue pratique de liturgie at de la musique sacrée, nos. 103–104 (1926), p. 169.

12. These sets appear to be based upon Franck’s L’Organiste, but Claussmann’s pieces are more technically advanced.

13. In one edition of Le Courrier Musical, opus 64 was listed among the pieces that an organist should play.

14. While the fugue was certainly not an uncommon form in French organ music of this period, it was used relatively infrequently. Franck composed one fugue for the organ; he relied on canon and melodic juxtapositioning as his preferred contrapuntal devices. In examining the Widor organ symphonies, with their numerous and varied movements, one finds only two fugues, and those appear in the earliest of the symphonies.

15. This work is dedicated to R. Huntington Woodman, an American organist who studied with César Franck in 1888.

16. Indianapolis Journal, March 11, 1894, p. 8, featured a review of an organ recital by
W. H. Donley. I believe this refers to the Scherzo in B Minor from the Deuxième livre de la première collection, opus 10.

17. Gigout wrote glowingly of Claussmann’s work and was pleased to be the dedicatee of one of his pieces. See Mourgue, op. cit.

18. Everett E. Truette, The Organ, vol. 1, no. 4 (August 1892), p. 95, reviewing the Fantasia in C Minor, First Meditation in B Major, and Andante in D Major.

19. See Morgue, op. cit.

20. Pierre Balme, “Aloÿs Claussmann,” L’Auvergne littéraire, artistique, et historique, January 1926 (vol. 85), p. 15–17.

21. Peter Cirka, A profound identity: evidence of homogeneity in Gabriel Fauré’s thirteen piano Nocturnes. Unpublished DMA paper, Boston University, p. 9, and p. 26 (2015).

22. Hervé Desarbre, Aloys Claussmann Organ Works, Disque Mandala MAN 4927, 1997.

23. An example of the need for good editing appears in the Sérénade for Cello and Piano, opus 49. The cello part and the piano score have completely different notes and keys in places.

Larry Palmer

Marches for March

March: the third month of the year in the Gregorian calendar—the only month with a name that has a musical connection. March: a ceremonial procession in 4/4 time. March: a title for a musical composition (unfortunately not found very often in works for harpsichord). While I was searching for a subject to explore this month these definitions popped into my mind. What follows are the titles and some comments about pieces that include the word “march” in scores that I found in my library of harpsichord music.

From Henry Purcell (1659–1695) we have three short examples to be found in his Miscellaneous Keyboard Pieces (edited by Howard Ferguson for Stainer & Bell, Ltd.): in the “Second Part” of Purcell’s Musick’s Hand-Maid (1689) numbers 2 and 4, each comprising sixteen measures in C major, and from A Choice Collection of Lessons (1696/1699), number 19 (also in C)—twenty-two more measures, all three entitled “March.” Ferguson’s second of the two volumes that present his scholarly edition of Purcell’s complete works for harpsichord does not offer a single march in the composer’s Eight Suites. I mention this because I had also perused a Kalmus reprint of the same Eight Suites edited by the Austrian musicologist Ernst Pauer (1826–1905) who took the liberty of adding one of the aforementioned marches as an addition to Purcell’s Suite No. 5 in C Major—a rather extended addition since Pauer also assured that each of the two sections would be repeated by removing the optional repeat marks in both A and B sections, and then making them seem obligatory by printing each section a second time.

From the 1725 Little Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach we find three short marches: numbers 16, 18, and 23. In order: twenty-two measures in D major and the same number of measures in G major, both credited to C. P. E. Bach; and twenty-eight measures in E-flat major, the composer unknown—all presented in the Henle Urtext Edition. Interestingly those three marches are vastly outnumbered by nine menuets in this iconic volume of Bach family favorites.

Moving on to France, the only François Couperin entry in the “Marche-Fest” is to be found in that great composer’s Fourth Ordre: “La Marche des Gris-vêtus.” I asked author Jane Clark if I might quote her description of this marching piece as it appears in the book (written with Derek Connon), The Mirror of Human Life. With her generous permission,

"A drinking song in honor of the famous regiment with grey uniforms, the words of which go: ‘Let us sing the glory of the grey coats; Let us sing their virtues when we drink, and pay respect to their strength.’"

[My thanks to the author who informs me that a third edition of this indispensable guide to Couperin’s harpsichord works is forthcoming from London’s Keyword Press.]

More French music: from composer Jean-François Dandrieu (1682–1738) we find “Les Caractères de la Guerre” as the final work in his Premier Livre of which “La March” (eighteen measures) is the second section of this suite (Edition Schola Cantorum, 1973, edited by Pauline Aubert and Brigitte François-Sappey). And finally, an inspired and moving composition by Claude-Bénigne Balbastre (1727–1799), who signed his manuscript “le Citoyen [Citizen] Balbastre, 1792—the first year of the Republic”—obviously an astute survivor of the French Revolution and a patriotic one, as well: Marche des Marseillois et l’Air Ça-Ira. A wonderful, vigorous setting of the French national anthem with variations, it is one of my favorite recital pieces, especially during July. This march has Scarlattian hand crossings and a bass C with a downward squiggly line, marked “Canon” (for which I love to use my elbow to make it a thundering tone cluster, usually enough to wake any dozing persons among the listeners). Originally this work was designated for fortepiano, but it also works well as a harpsichord piece (Edition Le Pupitre 52, edited by Alan Curtis for Heugel, Paris).

§

There is a paucity of American-composed marches for harpsichord. A careful perusal of the indices in Frances Bedford’s magisterial catalogue of twentieth-century works for harpsichord and clavichord did not include even one such work for the revived instruments. And so I turned my attention to the earlier history of music on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. Eureka! At least our forefathers’ musical tastes will provide several entries for this month’s topic!

In W. Thomas Marrocco and Harold Gleason’s 371-page survey, Music in America: An Anthology from the Landing of the Pilgrims to the Close of the Civil War 1620–1865 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1964), chapter nine includes both words and music for several delightful additions to our keyboard repertoire. First and foremost is the one-page gem “Washington’s March” from George Willig’s Musical Magazine (Philadelphia, 1794–1795)—eighteen measures of pompous musical delight that I have enjoyed playing on both harpsichord and organ. Early versions of our national anthem and other patriotic songs are also of interest, and at least two Civil War favorites could be adapted for keyboard use: “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” (1863) and “Marching Through Georgia” (1865).

Although it does not have the “m” word in its title I think several voluntaries by William Selby (1738–1798) deserve to be mentioned. The composer, English born, emigrated to Boston, where he became organist of King’s Chapel from 1771 until his death. The beautiful Voluntary in A Major was published in London circa 1770 in a volume of pieces by a host of contributors—ten pieces in all “for the Organ or Harpsichord.” The Selby piece is also included in the book by Gleason and Marrocco and is also the second of two Selby Voluntaries edited by a more recent organist of King’s Chapel, the composer and early music enthusiast Daniel Pinkham (1923–2006). This edition was published by E. C. Schirmer Music in 1972.

Moving southward from New England, I can also recommend a delightful rarity that I purchased from a shop in the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., in 1975: A Little Keyboard Book: Eight Tunes of Colonial Virginia Set for Piano or Harpsichord by James S. Darling, who was, for many years, organist and choirmaster of Bruton Parish Church in Williamsburg. During my seven years of teaching in Virginia (1963–1970) we met fairly frequently, and both of us had the good sense to purchase a harpsichord from America’s master builder William Dowd.

For Darling’s choice of pieces from Colonial Virginia he selected eight from the manuscript books of the Bolling family, plantation owners in Buckingham County. Following introductory material the first musical item is “Trumpet March,” and the last piece, “Lord Loudoun’s March.” Also of interest to historically oriented musicians is the publication here of the only known work (“Minuet”) by Peter Pelham, organist of the Williamsburg church and jailor for the municipality. This delightful small volume was published in 1972 by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (ISBN 0-910412-93-6).

Lastly, I recommend the volume Baroque Folk by Willard A. Palmer (1917–1996), “Moderately Easy to Early Intermediate Piano Solos That Teach”—sixteen familiar melodies arranged in Baroque style (Alfred Music Co., New York, 1969). Opening with three two-part inventions and two minuets, a single march is based on the Israeli National Anthem, Hatikvah. Only one page in length, it is cleverly constructed of imitative counterpoint, and I should think that quite a few of our readers may be organists for Jewish houses of worship as well as for Christian denominations and might, therefore, find special appreciation for their usage of this iconic tune. I will not disclose the other familiar melodies that are presented in new guises in this clever and charming volume. I use several of the arrangements quite often, especially for encores, and it is always a good way to send one’s listeners on their ways, chuckling and humming a favorite tune.And so, dear readers, enjoy the employment of marches in March, and, just perhaps, we might be able to encourage (or commission) one of our American composers to write a new march for use in the year 2021? I have my own particular favorite in mind—or perhaps if we cannot achieve that lofty goal we might just improvise or commit to paper or screen something that we invent for ourselves. Happy March!

Alexander Meszler

Alexander Meszler’s performances and research aim to inspire new perspectives on the organ. He spent 2018–2019 in Versailles, France, on a Fulbright grant to study secularism and the organ. In 2020, he completed his Doctor of Musical Arts degree in organ at Arizona State University with Kimberly Marshall. He is a member of The Diapason’s 20 Under 30 Class of 2019.

In December 1516, Pope Leo X revoked Ottaviano Petrucci’s exclusive 1513 privilege to print keyboard intabulations. A lesser-known publisher, Andrea Antico, was awarded rights to the genre. Just one month later, January 1517, Antico delivered Italy its first collection of printed keyboard music, Frottole intabulate da sonare organi, Libro primo (henceforth, Frottole intabulate). This collection is the first known publication of keyboard music in Italy, the second known keyboard publication anywhere (after Arnolt Schlick’s Tabulatur etlicher Lobesang of 1512), and the second extant collection—manuscript or published—of keyboard music in Italy (after the fifteenth-century Codex Faenza, Biblioteca Comunale 117).¹ No other collection is single-genre, and no other similar collection is almost entirely secular in content. Though future Italian keyboard collections continued to include song intabulations, no other publication represents the late-fifteenth, early-sixteenth century frottola genre.

Clearly, Frottole intabulate is special if only based on the merits of its innovative, first-of-its-kind, and in some respects, one-of-a-kind status. Yet in histories and critiques of early keyboard literature, the collection is consistently received coldly. In a textbook on historical performance, Jon Laukvik, without abridgment, writes only,

Frottole intabulate da sonare organi libro primo, published in 1517 by Andrea Antico, are the first Italian keyboard works to appear in print. These frottole, intabulations of simple songs, are in four parts throughout and contain ornamental flourishes (groppi) already familiar to us.²

Even more apathetically, Willi Apel writes: “as the title indicates, it [Frottole intabulate] contains only intabulations of frottole, and is thus of little interest for the history of keyboard music.”³ If Frottole intabulate is so unique, why has it been received unenthusiastically?

While “reevaluate” in the title of this essay might on the surface seem disingenuous given Frottole intabulate’s obscurity to today’s keyboardists, the reality remains that there is a substantial body of writing related to this collection. Reevaluate, then, is to reexamine and perhaps “re-present” the body of scholarship related to the collection, but also to reconsider its value as keyboard music for listeners and performers of today. I begin by presenting a brief overview of Antico’s life and the contents of Frottole intabulate. Next, I contextualize the keyboard collection within the framework of early print culture by considering aspects of economics, reception, genre, authorship, instrumentation, and Frottole intabulate’s famous frontispiece. Finally, I analyze the intabulation technique in Antico’s collection, proving that the difficulty and artistic merit are well-situated with other contemporaneous compositions and arrangements.

Andrea Antico

The most comprehensive secondary source on Andrea Antico, both for his life and music, is Catherine Weeks Chapman’s more than four-hundred-page Harvard University dissertation from 1964.⁴ Though not impossible to obtain a copy, her document is not widely available. Chapman’s work, though significantly dated, is thorough and is still the baseline source for the Grove Music Online encyclopedia entry on Antico by Martin Picker. Figure 1 is compiled from these sources and may serve as a reference point and visual guide to Antico’s life; this chart and the following sketch of Antico’s life and publications serve as an outline, not a comprehensive biography.

It is not uncommon that the lives of sixteenth-century figures be shrouded in a degree of ambiguity, and Antico is no exception. However, since publishers were held in high regard and typically claimed ownership of their work, the level of uncertainty related to Antico’s biography is unusual. Antico began his life sometime around 1480 in Montona, present day Croatia, then governed by Venice. Some editors and authors have confused Montona with Mantua. It is not known why or when he moved, but Antico’s first work surfaced in Rome around 1510. During this early part of his career, Antico was exceptionally prolific. Chapman states,

From 1510 through 1521, Antico actually produced more music books than Petrucci—a great many more if reprints are included. But it is less the volume of Antico’s output than his use of a printing method fundamentally different from Petrucci’s that makes him an important figure in the early history of music printing.⁵

Not only was Antico a prolific printer, but he also worked by using woodcuts instead of movable type, the method used by Petrucci. Antico was Petrucci’s first significant competitor. Although Petrucci produced the first prints of polyphonic music, Antico was the first to do so in Rome in 1510 with Canzoni nove con alcune scelte de varii libri di canto (henceforth, Canzoni nove). It was during his years in Rome that Antico produced Frottole intabulate, his only collection for the keyboard.

Between 1518 and 1520 Antico was in partnership with the Giunta family of printers in Venice. Nothing is known about why he moved north or the circumstances around why he partnered with another printer, but Antico’s name continued to be featured prominently in his work. After this, for more than ten years between 1522 and 1533, references to Antico disappear. It is likely that he continued his work in Venice with the Giunta family or some other publisher. Still in Venice, Antico resurfaces in 1533 working with the Scotto family of publishers. During this time period, he produced what might be considered his magnum opus, Mottetti di Adrian Willaert, libro secondo a Quattro voci (1539). After this publication, little more is known about Antico’s life.

Frottole intabulate da sonare organi, Libro primo (1517)

The frottola (frottole, plural) is a genre of secular Italian song that was popular during the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries. It is widely considered to be a predecessor to the emerging, more complex, and now more well-known madrigal.⁶ The frottola generally contains a text with lighthearted themes and elements of humor. Frequently strophic, any discernible text painting quickly dissolves. Thus, at least in theory, the frottola can be easily accommodated by textless versions like keyboard intabulations. Intabulations are arrangements of vocal pieces for an instrument, particularly keyboard or lute.

Frottole intabulate is a collection of twenty-six frottola intabulations for keyboard. As is the case with most early music, certain aspects of performance practice are and will probably always remain unknown. Maria Luisa Baldassari suggests that there are numerous possible ways to perform the music in Antico’s collection including as an accompaniment for a solo voice or as works for keyboard alone.⁷ Until recently there were two original surviving copies of Frottole intabulate, one in Prague (National Museum, Nostitz Library) and another in Milan (Private Library Polesini), but the Milan copy (originally missing a single folio) has been lost. All but two vocal models survive in other Antico publications that predate Frottole intabulate.⁸ One of the remaining two intabulations exists in a Petrucci publication that also predates Frottole intabulate, and the other has no known vocal model.⁹

Frottole intabulate does not include the original texts other than what is provided in the title, but many of the songs would have been very well known. Even though frottola texts are generally lighthearted, the lyrics are important to a successful interpretation of the pieces because their themes still vary significantly from song to song. Despite access to almost all the texts from the original vocal models, translations are unavailable in all the modern editions of Frottole intabulate; this is most likely due to the problematic nature of translating fifteenth- and sixteenth-century poetic Italian into modern English. I have included tentative translations of the titles in Figure 2 in an effort to increase the accessibility of this music to performers and listeners.

By including partial translations in the liner notes to his Antico recording, Glen Wilson also recognized the importance of these texts. Because he only translated lyrics that he felt particularly influenced his interpretations, some of his translations only include the title while others include significant portions of text. Some of the extended texts significantly change the meaning of the title. For instance, “Fiamma amorosa e bella” (number 13) alone translates to “Flame loving and beautiful,” but with more context from the rest of the poetry, Wilson translates, “Beautiful flame of love, why have you turned to ice?”¹⁰ Still other pieces introduce elements of humor only after the initial title like in “Che farala che dirala” (number 21), which alone becomes “What will she do when she hears?” With additional context, however, it becomes something akin to “what will she do when she hears I have become a monk?”¹¹ Though the translations I provide in Figure 2 are a starting point, a future resource might work with an expert on literature of the Italian renaissance to complete full translations.

Figure 2 is a complete list of the contents of Frottole intabulate. It contains the number, title, tentative English translation of the title, a potential source for the intabulation, and possible original composers.

Contextualizing Antico’s frottole in the print culture of the early-sixteenth century

Very little is known about the culture of early-sixteenth-century music printing, and it is easy to imply inaccurate generalities. Stanley Boorman states,

We can hardly begin to say anything about the general acceptance of music, beyond the assumption that printed editions reached many more readers than did manuscripts.¹²

Boorman suggests that scholars have often arbitrarily considered smaller, less productive companies to be more important than others based on predetermined ideas about value and quality.¹³ Evaluating a print’s significance consists of studying, among numerous other factors, the success or lack of success of individual prints, how they were received, interrelationships of printers and patrons, and profitability. Because of the passing of time, trying to comprehend the cultural background of these prints can seem futile, but not doing so can make the music itself seem distant and irrelevant. Newer research into the early decades of music printing has unlocked many previously inaccessible aspects of the culture and music.

Economics

The printing process was expensive and time consuming; having a print in the early decades of the existence of printing technology brought the owner pride and prestige. Thus, just like the origins of the music that was composed and played in the first place, what was printed was largely controlled by patronage. As machinery and materials later became less expensive, demand for more publications also increased, and publishers needed to compete to stay in business. It is tempting to posit that this caused printing businesses to function within a framework similar to free-market capitalism, but Kate Van Orden maintains this competitiveness comes only from complexifying relationships of patronage.¹⁴ Even late in Antico’s life, but certainly for the publication of Frottole intabulate, privileges that limited the legal printing rights of different publishers were controlled by persons of authority, local governments, and even the pope. These privileges regulated the majority of competition among publishers. Disobeying a papal privilege for exclusive printing rights, for instance, could result in “excommunication, a fine, and confiscation of the offending copies.”¹⁵ The exclusivity of these privileges affected the publication of Frottole intabulate. Not only did Antico obtain a papal privilege in order to print his keyboard intabulations, but doing so also resulted in the inability of other publishers to print something similar, including Petrucci, his rival.

Aside from the complexities and cost of getting permission to print, the cost of carrying out the printing was astronomical; the cost of printing was so high, in fact, that it is difficult to ascertain why someone would venture to do it at all. For Boorman, financial gain could not have been a primary motive. Given these high costs, a print that was successful enough to result in subsequent prints would be one of the only conceivable ways to make a profit.¹⁶ In reprints, materials could be reused, saving the printer the time and money associated with making the materials for the initial print run. Thus, the existence of multiple editions or reprints could be evidence for profit of these early sources.

There are no extant copies from a second printing of Frottole intabulate, and it is unlikely that one ever existed. If nothing else can be said about the economics of Antico’s keyboard collection, it could not have been too successful since its subtitle, Libro primo, implies a future second volume which never came to fruition. While it is likely that economics was a factor in Antico’s failure to produce a second volume, this is far from verifiable and was certainly not the only factor.

Reception

Very little can be said about the reception of Frottole intabulate. As discussed above, multiple reprints can be considered a sign of positive reception and continued appreciation of musical repertoires, but it is unlikely that this occurred for Frottole intabulate. Almost nothing is known about the logistical dissemination of this collection, but there must have been some reason to print an edition of secular song intabulations: an audience, a patron, a desire to do something innovative? Since there was never a second volume, likely no reprints, no similar frottola or other single-genre keyboard publications in sixteenth-century Italy, the print was probably not a wide-ranging success.

Antico’s frontispiece

The publishing rivalry between Petrucci and Antico is apparent in Frottole intabulate. Not only did Antico’s papal privilege to print keyboard intabulations result in the revocation of Petrucci’s ability to do so, Antico flaunted it in the frontispiece to Frottole intabulate (Figure 3). This frontispiece, probably by Antico’s regular collaborator, Giovanni Battista Columba, has been interpreted in numerous ways in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is likely that the monkey holding a lute represents Petrucci because he previously published two sets of frottola arrangements for voice and lute. The woman dismisses the monkey and his lute intabulations in favor of Antico’s superior arrangements for keyboard. Antico’s decision to later publish frottola arrangements for voice and lute, a style he derided in this frontispiece can be interpreted in two chief ways: first, Antico’s Frottole intabulate was unsuccessful since lute was still the primary domestic instrument, which would be further supported by the fact that there was never a second volume of keyboard intabulations. Second, his attack on lute intabulations depicted in the title page was trivial and was of no consequence to the later publication of his own collection for lute and voice. It is probably some combination of the two of these. The important element to consider from this frontispiece is not the debatable specifics of the meaning of each of its characters and features, but rather that the very concept of intabulation for keyboard might have been controversial as a starting point at all. The frontispiece demonstrates that Frottole intabulate’s publisher was self-aware; indeed, it was the first of its kind.

Genre

The frottola was a popular genre in the late-fifteenth, early-sixteenth century. Ottaviano Petrucci, for instance, produced more than ten books of frottole. In addition to the multi-voice original frottola compositions, a tradition of single voice versions accompanied by lute developed, both improvised and in print. The fewer resources needed to execute a performance with just one or two musicians instead of an ensemble of singers allowed for greater versatility and improvisation. Anthony Cummings has examined this performance practice and found evidence that the practice of playing solo versions with self-accompanied improvised lute parts was widespread.¹⁷ Unwritten music (most music in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries) influenced publishers. Both Petrucci and Antico produced volumes of frottole for single voice accompanied by lute: Antico’s Frottole de Misser Bortolomio Tromboncino & Misser Marcheto Carra from around 1520 and Petrucci’s two books from 1509 and 1511, Tenori e contrabass intabulate col sopran in canto figurato per cantar e sonar col lauto, arranged by Franciscus Bossinensis.

There is severely limited evidence for a similar improvised tradition of performing frottole on the keyboard. If there was a significant unwritten precedent for Antico’s intabulations, it is difficult to understand why Petrucci would not have printed for the medium while he had held the papal privilege to do so. It is unlikely that there was a significant precedent for Antico’s collection. Nevertheless, as I have already stated, the frottola, which often contains texts deemed “frivolous”¹⁸ and disconnected from the music, lends itself nicely to textless versions.

Authorship

Understanding authorship in the Renaissance is obscured by modern notions of intellectual property and copyright. Van Orden states,

Though the notion clashes with modern definitions of authorship, one could say that it was not composers who authored printed books, but printers, printer-booksellers, and editors.¹⁹

Composers were not able to title their own music in anthology publications and their music was “rebranded” to suit the needs of the publisher. The frontispiece of a different Antico publication, Liber quindecim missarum (1516), visually demonstrates the prominence of the publisher over the composer. While Antico provides the names of the composers in its table of contents (Figure 4), the more prominent title page shows only Antico and his audience with Pope Leo X (Figure 5).²⁰ Given the beauty of the entirety of this Antico anthology (see Figure 6), one can begin to understand the printer’s prominence.

The elevated importance of publisher over composer in the Renaissance can be seen in Frottole intabulate. Van Orden states, “once again, Antico visually claims authorship of the volume, even though it is devoted almost entirely to the Frottole of Bartolomeo Tromboncino.”²¹ In the case of Frottole intabulate, unlike Liber quindecim missarum, there is an added layer: arrangement. Many past scholars have attempted to attribute or unattribute the arrangement of the frottole in this publication to Antico himself. There is not adequate evidence for or against such an attribution. This lack of information regarding who arranged the songs for keyboard can serve as yet more evidence that musical factors were less important than the publications themselves.

Conflicting attributions among different publications with the same content are pervasive in the early decades of music printing. This further illustrates the indifference publishers had for original authorship since correct attributions were clearly a lower priority than the overall quality of the publication. For example, “Fiamma Amorosa e bella,” number 13 in Frottole intabulate, first appears as number 6 in Canzoni sonetti strambotti et frottole, Libro tertio (henceforth, Libro tertio) and is ascribed to Marco Cara (Marchetto Cara).²² In the 1520 reprint in Venice with Giunta it is anonymous and in Frottole intabulate it is attributed to Bartolomeo Tromboncino. Both Christopher Hogwood and Peter Sterzinger, editors of two modern editions of Frottole intabulate, seem to ignore this issue. Sterzinger simply keeps the attributions from Frottole intabulate, while Hogwood does not include attributions, yet provides references to all the vocal sources. Hogwood’s preface seems as though he is aware of the issue but is unsure how to approach it. Maria Luisa Baldassari, the editor of another modern edition, does not dwell on the issue of attribution, but she denotes possibilities above each individual piece.

Another type of borrowing in early print culture involves using the previously printed content of other publishers. It is common to see repeated pieces among competing publishers without noting who published it first. For example, Antico’s Canzoni nove borrowed nearly half of its contents from Petrucci, his direct competitor. A publication like Frottole Intabulate is embedded in the notion of borrowing given the nature of arrangements.

Separately, composers worked to gain their own independent identity in print. Significantly later, in 1554, for instance, Palestrina paid for the publication of a high-quality volume of his own music.²³ Similarly, one can look as far back as Petrucci’s Josquin publication, the first publication dedicated to a single composer. While it is possible that this is a humanistic turn (the rising importance of the singular creative mind associated with the Renaissance), this is likely not the case. Boorman maintains that the publication of single-composer volumes like those by Petrucci (inclusive of Josquin, Obrecht, and Brumel) are probably an attempt to gain the favor of composers or flatter them into taking a position somewhere.²⁴ When composers did finally accomplish the publication of their own oeuvre, the line of authorship remained blurred: another publisher, Valerio Dorico, took inspiration from Antico’s frontispiece to Liber quindecim missarum for the publication of Cristóbal de Morales’s Missarum liber secundus in 1544. Dorico later modified this woodcut yet again to serve as the famous title page of Palestrina’s Missarum liber primus of 1554 (Figure 7). Although Dorico modified the woodcut from the version he used from the Morales publication, the changes were minimal; the music that Palestrina is holding actually belongs to Morales.²⁵ Despite almost forty years of separation, Palestrina’s frontispiece remains strikingly similar to Antico’s (see Figure 5).

The overall lack of information is not the only reason that making an attribution to Antico himself as the arranger of Frottole intabulate is not possible: publishers were not commonly musicians. Van Orden states,

Though many [publishers] had or acquired some musical literacy, none were composers. Rather, they were inventors, printers, engravers, woodcutters, type founders, and booksellers, developers of a new technology.²⁶

Though not frequently musicians themselves, there is no doubt that publishers possessed remarkable talent. Nevertheless, Antico’s musical literacy and abilities remain ambiguous at best. There is not enough biographical evidence to draw any conclusions regarding his abilities as a musician. On the other hand, given that he signed them, it is possible that two of his own frottole appear in Libro tertio.²⁷ Kimberly Marshall summarizes,

Who actually arranged the pieces for keyboard is not known, but in the absence of precise attributions, it has been assumed that the publisher Antico was himself the transcriber.²⁸

While Marshall questions the assumption that Antico arranged the frottole, Glen Wilson, going a step further, categorically denies such an attribution:

[Antico] was also clever in his choice of arranger (it was not Antico himself, as is often thought, any more than the printer/publisher Attaingnant arranged the first lute publications in France around the same time, or than Bennett Cerf wrote Ulysses). This anonymous master, doubtless one of the countless Italian organists whose works have been lost, produced a very early example of a fully-balanced polyphonic keyboard style. In 1517 Josquin still had four years to live, and voice crossings and gothicisms still frequently appear even in frottole. In Antico’s book there is a radical change: generally keeping the all-important melody and bass lines free and intact (except for modest amounts of added ornamentation), the arranger substituted supple, idiomatic inner voices for the spiky originals, which are often mere filler. Once the notational fog is dispersed, his work turns out to deserve a place of high honour in the annals of music history.²⁹

Wilson’s ideas about the need for a skilled and creative arranger to set the idiomatic inner voices in Frottole intabulate are further supported in my analysis below. However, Wilson provides no concrete evidence for his categorical rejection of Antico as arranger. Ultimately though, the focus of who arranged the frottole is probably a misguided question in the first place—one raised by a modern perspective. If anything is to be learned from this discussion of authorship in early print culture, who arranged the frottole was inconsequential.

Instrumentation

Intended instrumentation of early keyboard music is frequently a source of mystery. The frontispiece of Frottole intabulate (Figure 3) shows the collection being performed on a stringed keyboard instrument. However, as is usually the case for early music, the pieces can certainly be performed on other keyboard instruments. In the preface to his edition of Frottole intabulate, Christopher Hogwood states,

Nothing in the style of the intabulations suggests a preference for one type of keyboard instrument over another, and the title-page illustration itself reinforces the interpretation of “organo” as meaning any keyboard instrument—a usage that was normal in Italian for several centuries.³⁰

The shorter compass of sixteenth-century organs (starting on F) that is evidenced by existing organs and treatises not only suits most of the ranges of the frottole, it accounts for the transposition of several of them; numbers 5, 11, 12, 21, 22, and 23 are all transposed up a fourth or fifth.³¹ Modern recordings have generally favored the harpsichord over the organ, but Baldassari’s recording persuasively makes the musical case for using many different instruments. While they are playable on many instruments, there are characteristics of each keyboard that favor different styles. For instance, I find that “Me lasserà tu mo” (number 24), if played slowly, is enhanced by performance on the organ to accommodate the sustained tones. A testament to the instrumentation’s flexibility, Baldassari successfully uses the spinetta for the same piece. If approached creatively and openly, there are a great many possibilities for instrumentation, including the addition of text with a singer.

Intabulation technique: an analysis

An analysis of characteristics in Antico’s keyboard intabulations and the intabulation technique itself reveals that the simplicity of this collection has been overstated. Comparing Antico’s frottole with Marcantonio Cavazzoni’s Recerchari, motetti, canzoni . . . libro primo from 1523 reveals many similarities, both in terms of intabulation technique and performance difficulty. Though the textures are different due to the frottola’s less complex contrapuntal starting structure, the technical difficulty and aesthetic results are comparable.

Through pointing out shared characteristics of Cavazzoni’s “Plus ne regres” and Antico’s “Dolce ire dolci sdegni” (number 18) and “Che farala che dirala” (number 21), Figures 8 and 9 demonstrate similarities between the Antico and Cavazzoni intabulations. In Figure 8, both examples have surface-level ornamentation in the cantus part (circled in yellow). This ornamentation is generally stepwise with few leaps, almost always in the opposite direction than the way the line was previously moving. Both examples also have non-cantus ornamentation and elements of moving counterpoint (circled in blue). While moving inner voices might seem like a given, the reception of the Antico pieces as somehow simpler or completely homophonic is not demonstrated in these excerpts. From a technical perspective, both examples include challenging left-hand position changes (circled in green). While these hand position changes hardly constitute “difficult,” they are markedly active and noticeably similar.

A comparison of different excerpts reveals another similarity. Both Antico’s “Che farala che dirala” (number 21) and Cavazzoni’s “Plus ne regres” demonstrate a consistent use of parallel thirds in one hand (Figure 9, circled in red). In addition to considering the thirds as a musical element, they also present a technical challenge of comparable difficulty.

One significant difference not evidenced by these examples is that these musical elements are almost always present in the Cavazzoni and not always in the Antico (entire Antico pieces not presented here lack these elements). Figure 9, for instance, involved using a different Antico intabulation than Figure 8, while the same Cavazzoni piece could be retained. Antico’s pieces generally mix fewer elements than Cavazzoni’s. While it is possible to attribute this difference to less artistic merit of the Antico, these differences are better explained by the type of pieces they are arranging for keyboard in the first place. The motet is a longer, more complex, and freer form than the frottola. The simplicity of some of Antico’s intabulations is symptomatic of the straightforwardness of the frottola genre as well as specific elements of single pieces. Nevertheless, in isolated examples like those provided in Figures 8 and 9, it is difficult to distinguish between the two genres.

Since there is an extant copy of almost all the original vocal models for the arrangements in Frottole intabulate, it is possible to place the intabulations side-by-side with the vocal originals to illustrate the degree of difference between the two. Using a prototype comparative graphing system, I demonstrate that the intabulations of the original vocal models are less exact than has often been assumed. This approach removes the complexities of musical notation allowing for measure-by-measure comparison between the vocal original and the intabulation. The system is temporally oriented, meaning that each column represents one voice for one measure. Measure numbers are indicated along the x-axis, and the voices from the vocal model as they relate to the intabulation are along the y-axis. Thus, there is one “cell” for each voice per measure. The shading within these “cells” represents differences between the vocal model and the intabulation. There are three degrees of shading: (1) no shading if the voice in the intabulation is identical to the vocal original; (2) light grey if a voice is embellished in an easy-to-categorize manner; and (3) dark grey if the voice is altered in a hard-to-categorize manner or does not resemble the original model. This macro level analysis leaves many details undescribed, and because of this, there is a significant degree of subjectivity. If the analysis system was refined to be more precise, this subjectivity would all but disappear, but the distillation would also necessarily be more complex.

My goal is not to design a complex analysis system, but rather to uncover general characteristics about the Antico intabulations, I have opted to keep the system simpler, sacrificing specificity that would reduce subjectivity. Since there is currently no systematic way to do an analysis of intabulation technique, a refinement of this graphing system could be useful for analyzing intabulation technique across the repertoire. However, in its current state, it gleans only the most basic information about differences between vocal originals and their intabulations.

This system is put into practice to analyze the differences between “Amor Quando fioriva mia speme,” number 1 in Frottole intabulate, with the vocal model from Antico’s second book of frottole (Figure 10).³² The comparative graphic model of “Amor Quando fioriva mia speme” reveals that it is far from a simple note-for-note intabulation of the vocal original. It seems to indicate the opposite: Antico’s setting is as complex and irregular as it is categorical. By calculating the average number of “cells” that contain alterations from the vocal original, this comparative graphic model reveals that slightly over 58% of the piece’s measures include at least one alteration from the vocal original. Because of the system’s need to define temporal units (here, one measure), this percentage indicates the number of measures that contain alterations. In other words, the 58% does not indicate the exact percentage difference between the original and the intabulation because the measure unit does not account for every note. A percentage difference that accounted for every note would result in a significantly lower number.

Out of all of the “cells” that include a difference, only 34% contain easily categorizable alterations. This seems like a very low number, but it is important to note than many of the embellishments that modern ears associate with “easy to categorize” were less common in the renaissance. Some ornamentation and embellishment in the Antico intabulations may be more categorical than this system assumed. Thus, 58% of the overall number of cells is a more useful and accurate number.

As Glen Wilson identifies in his liner notes, the inner voices of the intabulations in Antico’s collection are significantly altered: “the arranger substituted supple, idiomatic inner voices for the spiky originals.”³³ Figure 10 supports Wilson’s claim because around 75% of the interior “cells” in the comparative graphic model contain alterations, and well more than half of these are substantial.

An analysis of only the outer voices, the cantus and bassus, indicates that a much lower percentage of “cells” contain alterations. 42% of the two outer voices include changes, but this time, 63% of that 42% are easily categorizable differences. This indicates two things: (1) keeping the outer voices recognizable, either by having a lower total amount of alterations or using far fewer uncategorizable alterations, is a priority, probably to retain the essential characteristics of the original song; and (2) large amounts of voice crossing in the vocal original make it impossible to set the inner voices with a high degree of accuracy while the outer voices are easier to retain. Another noticeable but predictable element is that the bassus contains significantly fewer alterations than does the more adventurous cantus. This aligns with what was likely the performance practice of embellishing the melody.

Another piece in the collection, “Per Mio Ben te Vederei” (number 2), further demonstrates the high rate at which the cantus is altered while the bassus remains virtually unchanged (Figure 11). Around 71% of the measures in “Per Mio te Vederei” contain alterations in the cantus voice, and 63% of that 71% are not easily categorizable. Meanwhile, only around 10% of the measures contain alterations in the bassus voice.

Based on these prototype analyses, it seems safe to conclude that an experienced musician, beyond someone who has basic musical literacy, would be required to arrange a polyphonic song as skillfully as has been done in Antico’s collection. Significantly more conclusive data could be drawn if this kind of note-for-note comparative analysis was done for the entire collection of intabulations as well as if the system was further refined. However, even in its present state, these analyses demonstrate that Antico’s collection is well situated and comparable in difficulty with other contemporaneous keyboard music.

Editions, recordings, and conclusions

Given the obscurity of this collection, it is surprising that there are several modern editions of Frottole intabulate. The most extensive preface is in Christopher Hogwood’s edition published by Zen-On Music in 1984.³⁴ Although still worthwhile, its editorial practices are less consistent and some of the ideas in its preface are dated. Another modern edition by Peter Sterzinger published by Doblinger is widely available.³⁵ I highly recommend the most recent edition, which is edited by Maria Luisa Baldassari and published by Ut Orpheus.³⁶

There are also several complete recordings of the collection. Fabio Antonio Falcone performs the entire keyboard oeuvre of Marcantonio Cavazzoni and Andrea Antico in The Renaissance Keyboard produced by Brilliant Classics in 2015.³⁷ He uses the organ for the Cavazzoni and the harpsichord for the Antico. As previously mentioned, Glen Wilson has also recorded the complete collection. To affect, his recording, Animoso mio desire: 16th-Century Italian Keyboard Favourites, produced by Naxos in 2015,³⁸ is mixed with dances from manuscript sources. All his performances are on harpsichord or spinetta. My own complete recording is the only to use exclusively the organ. Experimental in nature, my unproduced recording was made in conjunction with a related research project on early secular keyboard music across Europe.³⁹ I most highly recommend Maria Luisa Baldassari’s complete recording, Andrea Antico: Frottole Intabulate, Libro Primo, 1517, produced by Tactus in 2017.⁴⁰ Her recording embraces, to great success, the instrumentation possibilities of the collection. Her performance includes the spinetta, clavichord, clavisimbalum, harpsichord, and organ. Her choices are effective, but there is no reason performers should feel obliged to adhere to her instrumentation decisions. While I generally prefer Baldassari’s interpretations, much can be learned from the varied tempi and stylistic choices of many of the other performances.

There are innumerable recordings that only include several pieces. In many ways these recordings are more successful since listening to twenty-six intabulations in the same style is not particularly captivating. While I do not intend to provide a complete list, two notable recordings of this type are Kimberly Marshall’s Sienese Splendor, produced by Loft in 2002⁴¹ and, though it only includes one of Antico’s frottole, Francesco Cera’s The Organ at European Courts produced by Brilliant Classics in 2016.⁴²

Antico’s frottole, now more than five hundred years old, still sound fresh if given the energy of a thoughtful performer. This short essay revisits two areas, cultural context and musical analysis, to inspire new interpretations of this collection. Though frequently acknowledged, Antico’s collection has been largely ignored for its contents. The only factor that seems to attract attention to Frottole intabulate is that it was innovative, but this was relatively unimportant during its time. If given the chance, the music transcends simple innovation. The song intabulations in Antico’s collection can be charming, fun, serious, emotional, and intensely beautiful. The short duration of almost all its pieces (some can be less than one minute!) make them easily programmable in a variety of modern contexts. With a little creativity and musical imagination, these pieces can come to life.

The research for this project was completed in part thanks to funding from The Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

Notes

1. The intended instrumentation of the Faenza collection has been debated. See Timothy J. McGee, “Once again, the Faenza Codex: A reply to Roland Eberlein,” Early Music 20:3 (August 1992): 466–68; Roland Eberlein, “The Faenza Codex: music for organ or for lute duet?” Early Music 20:3 (August 1992): 460–66; and Timothy J. McGee, “Instruments and the Faenza Codex,” Early Music 14:4 (November 1986): 480–90.

2. Jon Laukvik, Historical Performance Practice in Organ Playing: An Introduction based on selected Organ Works of the 16th–18th Centuries, trans. Brigitte and Michael Harris (Stuttgart: Carus, 1996), 113.

3. Willi Apel, The History of Keyboard Music to 1700, trans. Hans Tischler (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1997), 109.

4. Catherine Weeks Chapman, “Andrea Antico,” microfilm (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1964).

5. Ibid., 1.

6. Grove Music Online, s.v. “Frottola,” accessed January 14, 2019, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/10313.

7. Baldassari, v.

8. Antico’s second book of frottole is of questionable origins. What seems like an existing copy is missing its title page in the Biblioteca Marucelliana in Florence. This particular copy is probably a reprint from around 1520.

9. Giuseppe Radole cited a manuscript in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze as containing the bass part to number 3. However, Baldassari has determined that this was initially incorrect and, despite being an error, has been repeated by editors who had not seen the Florence manuscript. Maria Luisa Baldassari, ed., Frottole intabulate da sonare organi, Libro primo, Andrea Antico, 1517 (Bologna: Ut Orpheus Edizioni, 2016), v. In addition to existing in Petrucci’s eleventh book of frottole, Christopher Hogwood has suggested that number 19 may have been in Antico’s lost fifth book of frottole. This would make number 19 the only intabulation that was published before its vocal model, and there is no reason beyond wild speculation to assume this would be the case. Christopher Hogwood, ed., Frottole da sonare organi, Libro primo, Andrea Antico, 1517 (Tokyo: Zen-On Music, 1984), 6.

10. Glen Wilson, Animoso mio desire: 16th-Century Italian Keyboard Favourites, liner notes, Naxos 8.572983, 2015, 5.

11. Ibid., 6.

12. Ibid., 131.

13. Stanley Boorman, “Thoughts on the Popularity of Printed Music in 16th-Century Italy,” Fontes artis musicae 48:2 (April 2001): 130.

14. Kate Van Orden, “Music Books and Their Authors,” in Music, Authorship, and the Book in the First Century of Print (Berkley, California: University of California Press, 2013), 36.

15. Ibid.

16. Boorman, 132–134.

17. Anthony M. Cummings, “The ‘Great Italian Songbook’ of the early cinquecento: Arrangements of frottole for voice and lute,” Studi musicali 2:1 (2011): 25-48.

18. Grove Music Online, s.v. “Frottola.”

19. Van Orden, 30.

20. Ibid., 31.

21. Ibid., 34.

22. William F. Prizer, “Local Repertories and the Printed Book: Antico’s Third Book of Frottole (1513),” in Music in Renaissance Cities and Courts: Studies in Honor of Lewis Lockwood, 347–372, eds. Jessie Ann Owens and Anthony M. Cummings (Michigan: Harmonie Park Press, 1997), 352.

23. Van Orden, 42.

24. Ibid., 44.

25. Ibid., 58–59.

26. Ibid., 38–39. She says that Gardano (Gardane) is an exception since he was a professional musician first.

27. Grove Music Online, s.v. “Andrea Antico,” accessed January 14, 2019, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/01015. Some have posited that Andrea Antico is the same person as the composer of frottole featured in Petrucci’s publications called A. de Antiquis. Martin Picker, however, posits that Antico never signed his name this way and that it is unlikely that they are the same person.

28. Kimberly Marshall, ed., Historical Organ Techniques and Repertoire: An Historical Survey of Organ Performance Practices and Repertoire, vol. 9, Renaissance 1500–1550 (Colfax, South Carolina: Wayne Leupold Editions, 2004), 9.

29. Wilson, 3.

30. Hogwood, 8.

31. Ibid.

32. These analyses were completed using modern editions except the first book of frottole, which is readily accessible online. Baldassari.; Francesco Luisi, ed. Il Secondo Libro Di Frottole. Andrea Antico (Rome: Pro Musica Studium, 1976).

33. Wilson, 3.

34. Hogwood. See complete citation above.

35. Peter Sterzinger, ed., Frottole intabulate da sonare organi, Libro primo, Andrea Antico, 1517 (Vienna: Doblinger, 1984).

36. Baldassari. See complete citation above.

37. Fabio Antonio Falcone, Andrea Antico & Marc Antonio Cavazzoni: Complete Keyboard Music, Brilliant Classics BC95007, 2015, compact disc.

38. Glen Wilson, Animoso mio desire: 16th-Century Italian Keyboard Favourites, Naxos 8.572983, 2015, compact disc.

39. Alexander Meszler, “Andrea Antico: Frottole intabulate da sonare organi, Libro Primo (1517) (Complete Collection),” accessed January 14, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLc8LXDy2nGngm1hmp2tNfcS2jYswvHbcT.

40. Maria Luisa Baldassari, Andrea Antico: Frottole intabulate da sonare organi, Book 1, Tactus TC480101, 2015, compact disc.

41. Kimberly Marshall, Sienese Splendor, Loft LRCD-1046, 2002, compact disc.

42. Francesco Cera, The Organ at European Courts, Brilliant Classics BC95240, 2016, compact disc.