The Organ in Concert

Compiled by Marilyn Biery

Marilyn Biery, DMA, AAGO, is a Pi Kappa Lambda graduate of Northwestern University, with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in organ performance, where she studied with Richard Enright and Grigg Fountain. She holds the DMA in organ performance from the University of Minnesota. In 1982 she was a finalist in the National Open Competition in Organ Playing, sponsored by the American Guild of Organists. From 1986–1996 she was director of music ministries at the First Church of Christ in Hartford, Connecticut. Since 1996 she has been associate director of music at the Cathedral of St. Paul in St. Paul, Minnesota. Biery is a former director of the National Young Artists Competition in Organ Performance, sponsored by the AGO. Her texts and music are published by Alliance Publications, GIA, MorningStar, and Augsburg Fortress. Marilyn Biery is a frequent collaborator with a number of American composers, including Libby Larsen, David Evan Thomas, Stephen Paulus, Pamela Decker, and James Hopkins. She has written a number of articles on American organ music, including “The Organ in Concert,” The Diapason, January 2005, and with her husband, James, was the subject of an interview in The Diapason (“He said, she said: A conversation with James & Marilyn Biery,” June 2008).

My lifelong interest in new music began to come alive in a vivid way when I attended a workshop on the subject given by Harold Stover at an AGO regional convention in New England in the mid-1980s. My organ studies at Northwestern University had begun my interest in contemporary music by introducing me to the music of Messiaen, Hindemith, Distler, Dupré, Duruflé, and other early twentieth-century organ composers, but my interest flamed into a slow-burning passion at this convention and this workshop, because here was the first opportunity for me to actually meet a composer. This was a huge turning point for a twenty-something musician, and not only did I meet this composer, but I discovered that he had a sense of humor and personality, he was approachable and friendly, and he knew how to generate interest in new music. It was a defining moment, and I’ve never forgotten Stover or the workshop. His distinguished career has demonstrated the vigor with which he has championed new music, his personality has brought vitality and style to the field through his commitment to composing with unusual subjects and methods, and his vision of new music and its role in worship and concerts tells a compelling story of past and future for those who listen.
I don’t remember much about the workshop content but vivid in my mind is Stover telling about a performance of his Nocturnes where the button on his shirtsleeve got caught in-between the keys during a forearm cluster. He took a serious subject and made it fun instead of stuffy. I have also heard him tell of doing such a cluster at another performance where someone from the audience, concerned about his lingering, prone position on the keys, shouted out during the piece: “Are you okay??” According to Stover, he has since learned to tell the audience what he will be doing before starting any piece with such an effect, so as not to raise any concerns during the performance that he might be ill or incapacitated.
And so the workshop reflected the nature of the music written by Stover: engaging, slightly quirky, decidedly and wholeheartedly American (with homage to Virgil Thomson, Charles Ives, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, among others), and reflective of his interest in stretching technical boundaries of the organ through use of clusters, glissandos, tremolos and random repetitive patterns. Stover juxtaposes styles from various periods of music history and mixes musical genres not commonly found in compositions for organ.
Much of the information contained in this article comes directly from Harold Stover, beginning with his biography. Stover was also gracious enough to provide most of the analysis of his pieces, except for Shall I Tell You Who Will Come to Bethlehem?. My work in bringing this article to the public was primarily that of compiler, not as author. So I am grateful to him for all his enthusiasm and responsiveness to my myriad requests for information and clarification. It is my hope that readers will be intrigued by this presentation and discussion of Stover’s music, and that they will add these pieces to their repertoire.
Harold Stover was born in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, in 1946. He graduated from the Juilliard School in New York in 1969 with a major in organ, having also previously attended Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His principal teachers were Vernon de Tar, John R. Lively, Robert Ivey, and Donald G. Wilkins in organ and church music, Nikolai Lopatnikoff and Carlos Surinach in music theory, composition, and orchestration, and Abraham Kaplan and Richard Strange in choral and orchestral conducting.
From 1968 to 1992 he served as organist and choirmaster of Second Presbyterian Church in New York City, where he directed the church’s amateur and professional choirs and was founder and director of the “Music at Second” concerts, which presented a wide variety of choral, instrumental, and keyboard music, including many first performances of new works. In 1986 the church’s music program was the subject of an hour-long profile on the nationally syndicated radio program IBM Salute to the Arts. During this time, Stover also served as director of music of the Alexander Robertson School, a private elementary school in New York, and as organist of the St. Andrew’s Society of the State of New York.
In 1992 he was appointed organist and director of music of Woodfords Congregational Church in Portland, Maine, where he directs the adult choir in service music and in concerts of major choral works with orchestra, directs the Pilgrim vocal choir and the Woodfords Ringers handbell choir, and serves as producer of the choir’s recordings. He also directs the Portland-based chamber chorus Renaissance Voices, a position to which he was appointed in 2001. In May 2008 Stover was honored and his music celebrated during an all-Stover concert sponsored by Woodfords Congregational. At that time he was presented with the gift of a two-week creative leave each year in honor of his fortieth year as a professional musician, and fifteenth year at the church.
From 1977 to 1992 he served on the faculty of the New York School of Liturgical Music, where he taught organ, choral conducting, sight singing, music theory, and church music history. In 1995 he was appointed to the faculty of the Portland Conservatory of Music, where he teaches organ and music theory.
His compositions include keyboard music, choral and vocal music, chamber and orchestral music, electronic music, and two film scores. In 1986 his Triptych on the Name of Bach was one of the prize-winning entries in the international composition competition held at Southern College, Collegedale, Tennessee. In 1989 he chaired the New York City AGO chapter’s “Organists Against AIDS” benefit, and twice served as chair of that chapter’s Presidents’ Day Conference. His writings on organ and church music have been published in The American Organist, The Diapason, The New England Organist, The Tracker, and Worship, Music, and Ministry. Harold Stover lives in Hollis, Maine, with his wife Elizabeth. They have two daughters: Alice, of Washington, D.C., and Lucy, of Portland.

Concert music for organ and piano
The first two pieces highlighted are examples of his concert music, beginning with his duet for organ and piano, Neumark Variations. At first hearing, this piece enthralls the listener with its sense of fun, its continuity, and its elegant, charming and innovative variations, each with a clear intention and purpose. Performance length is just under fifteen minutes; six of the eleven variations are discussed here in some detail.
“In January 1987 I was asked by organist Daniel Junken for a piece for organ and piano, to be performed by him and pianist Nancy McDill, the request specifying a work based on a hymn tune. I chose the Lutheran chorale Wer nur den lieben Gott lässt walten, better known in American hymnals as Neumark, after its composer Georg Neumark (1621–1681). The tune is a solemn one in a simple AAB form, and it proved an ideal subject for the construction of a set of variations ranging widely across the stylistically diverse landscape of late twentieth-century American music. The result is a postmodern1 work in that all eras of musical history are freely drawn upon for the styles of the different variations. Neumark Variations was first performed in October 1987 at Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey, by its dedicatees.
Variation I: Musette with Ghost Image. Two flutes are heard in the organ pedal, the upper one sounding a sustained note, the other repeating quarter-note beats in the manner of an 18th-century French musette. Above this, two voices sound the A portion of the chorale in a tonal and rhythmic canon. The theme is given to a reed stop in values that produce a 9/8 meter (the quarter note of the original version now equaling a dotted eighth), and to a 2′ stop in values that produce a 3/8 meter (the quarter of the original now equaling an eighth). The pedal’s steady pulse of 3/4 accentuates the polymetric effect. The piano, joined by pianissimo string stops in the organ, sounds the B portion of the theme in minor-12th chords. These mysterious chords, following the bright sounds of the musette, were inspired by the images that remain in the eye after a photographic flash has gone off. (See Example 1.)
Variation III: Trio with Sound Effects. Organ and piano here coexist in different historical times. The organ sounds a chorale prelude in 18th-century trio style, manuals in a strict canon based on the chorale, pedal sounding the cantus firmus in longer notes. The bass of the piano inserts loud clusters intended to sound like the cannon in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, using the “cannon” as a bad pun on the “canon” in the organ part. The treble of the piano further contributes to the historical mélange in a crazed distortion of the baroque organ’s Cymbelstern bells, identified in the score as le cymbelstern maudit, after César Franck’s cursed huntsman,2 in a further blending of music history’s epochs. (Example 2.)
Variation VII: Second Dialogue. The 19th century here makes an appearance in a dialogue whose keyboard textures are modeled on the piano works of Brahms. The romantic virtuosity of both parts builds to the principal postmodern surprise of the work, Variation VIII: Country Dream Sequence. This variation transposes Neumark’s chorale from its original key of g minor into G major, and transports it from 17th-century Germany into the American countryside. The piano part—influenced by the country piano stylist Floyd Cramer—and the organ part—drawn more on the urban theatre organ style of the 1920s—are synthesized into a variation based on the American vernacular music the love of which Daniel Junken and I shared, both in its original form and as transformed by composers like Charles Ives and Virgil Thomson. (Example 3.)
Variation IX: Bitonal Canon. The theme is harmonized in triads in D major and E-flat major, heard in a canon à 4 over a G pedalpoint. (See Example 4.)
Variation XI: Finale. The tempo indication is “Rocking out!”, indicating that the source of this final variation is the sound of American popular music as it was transformed in the 1950s and 1960s. The repeated chords in the piano (a characteristic sound of early rock and roll) and the syncopated ground bass set up a back beat (one-AND-two-AND), augmented by a triplet toccata figure in the treble of the organ and a syncopated variant of the theme in the bass of the piano. (Example 5.) These elements are exchanged among the registers of the instruments as the variation unfolds and the harmonic and rhythmic tensions build to a climactic piano cadenza in double octaves and a fortissimo, dissonant organ harmonization of the first half of the chorale’s B section that ends with the pedal repeating C-naturals and E-flats, decreasing in tempo and volume and finishing on a sustained E-flat. Over this sustained tone, the piano quietly completes the chorale, its original harmonization quietly calling across the centuries. In the last two measures, the piano sounds the opening notes of the theme rapidly and loudly in the bass, but what seems to begin a new statement of the chorale is cut off by a low G marked “very long—hold till all sound has died away.” This is a final postmodern gesture, this time toward an iconic musical moment of the late 20th-century, the E-major chord that ends John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s A Day in the Life.”

Concert music for solo organ
“Mountain Music is a suite of three movements, each based on a Shaker melody. The Shakers are the oldest surviving religious communal society in the United States; the last active community is at Sabbathday Lake, Maine. At Evening, a quiet nocturne, quotes Fr. James’ Song No. 1, notated by Elder Thomas Hammond at Harvard, Massachusetts, in 1853 but originally sung by Father James Whittaker in 1783 (Example 6). The second movement, Quick Dance, featuring Quick Dance No. 2 (South Union, Kentucky, 1838) (Example 7), is a comedic scherzo that seeks to reconcile the disparate worlds of the classical organ and the country fiddle (Example 8). Pilgrimage, based on The Happy Journey, also notated by Hammond, but sung at Hancock, Massachusetts, at least as early as 1808 (Example 9), is a set of variations over a descending ground bass. Performance length of the set is about fifteen minutes.
All three of these tunes were created by Shakers with a religious intent, but only the final movement of Mountain Music could be construed as overtly sacred music. In adapting the other two melodies to secular purposes, I have tried to take my cue from the way in which the Shakers were able to instill in the most utilitarian tasks a purity of purpose and devotion that reflected their mantra of ‘hands to work, hearts to God.’”

Music for concert or worship
The next two compositions, Angel and Toccata Brevis, are shorter works for solo organ, each less than five minutes in length, and are appropriate for concert or worship.
“The initial inspiration for Angel was non-musical: a radio broadcast in 1997 commemorating the launching of the first man-made satellite 40 years earlier, and featuring a recording of the signals that it sent back from space. I remembered listening to the original broadcasts of those signals as a young boy and being struck by how otherworldly they sounded—a message from a vast beyond. The work begins with a musical evocation of the radio signal and continues to depict the visitation of an entity that draws nearer, assuming various guises as it does, and then retreats leaving radio signals alone in the vastness of space. The musical material consists of several short themes heard in various harmonic and contrapuntal combinations.
In 1998 I was invited to play one of the 30-minute Sunday afternoon organ recitals at Westminster Abbey in London. I naturally wanted to include a work of my own in that historic venue, but one that would not consume so much of the short recital time as to limit the options for the rest of the program. I decided to compose a three-minute piece that would serve as a musical calling card and curtain raiser, and thus Toccata Brevis was born.
The work takes its title not only from its short length, but from the brief motifs on which it is constructed. These consist of:
• a fanfare-like theme heard in the first measure (Example 10)
• a sixteenth-note figure that twists and turns back on itself (Example 11)
• a series of overlapping broken chords in eighth notes played on only the black keys by one hand and on only the white keys by the other, producing the effect of a kaleidoscopic burst of sixteenth notes (Example 12)
• a series of homophonic chords that punctuate the toccata texture (Example 13).
These elements are freely developed and juxtaposed throughout the brief duration of the piece, which ends with a six-measure coda built on variants of Examples 12 and 13.
The metrical structure throughout the piece is a measure of nine eighths divided into four plus five, giving the effect of steady but uneven larger beats. The tonal center is C major, although the keys of D major, F-sharp major, G major, and E-flat major are alluded to in the course of the material’s development.”
The last composition mentioned in detail is Stover’s newly published composition for SATB choir and organ, a Christmas anthem on an old Spanish carol translated by Ruth Sawyer, Shall I Tell You Who Will Come to Bethlehem?.
Shall I tell you who will come to Bethlehem on Christmas morn?
Who will kneel them gently down before the Lord new-born?
One small fish from the river with scales of red, red gold.
One wild bee from the heather, one grey lamb from the fold.

One ox from the high pasture, one black bull from the herd.
One goatling from the far hills, one white, white bird.
And many children, God give them grace,
Bringing tall candles to light Mary’s face.3
This delightful anthem features an organ ritornello, inspired by the 18th-century French tambourin noëls, alternating with choral statements of the text. The ritornello comprises a drum-like rhythmic pattern in the left hand and a right-hand melody on a 2′ stop (Example 14). The vivid picture painted by the Sawyer text matches the musical diversity as the anthem provides charming and unexpected shifts from the tonal center of G major through C major, E minor, A major, B major, A-flat major, F major, G minor, A-flat major, C minor and E minor on the way back to G major.
Harold Stover’s music is intentionally eclectic as he draws from all angles and aspects of musical styles and periods. The vision and skill with which these diverse ingredients are mixed together creates an impression of delightful juxtaposition and creative innovation. This music, brimming with vitality, is to be delighted in and chuckled at, vigorously proclaimed from organ lofts and pipe chambers, savored and internalized. Harold Stover’s compositions paint vivid pictures for listeners to conjure up their own visions of musical storytelling.

Available compositions
by Harold Stover
All music without publisher listing is available directly from the composer at <www.haroldstover.com&gt;.

Sacred Choral
And We’ll All Sing Hallelujah (SATB, org)
None Other Lamb (SATB a cappella, ECS Publishing)
Shall I Tell You Who Will Come to Bethlehem? (SATB, org, Paraclete Press)
Jubilate Deo (SATB, org, Triune Press)
Forth in Thy Name (2-pt, org, handbells, Triune Press)
Thus Sings the Heavenly Choir (2-pt, org, H. W. Gray)
Phos Hilaron (SATB, vc, handbells, org)
Psalm 150 (SATB, org, opt br quartet, timp)
A Litany of Praise and Thanksgiving (SATB, br quintet, org)
Across the Desert (SATB, fl, perc, org)
This I Am (SATB a cappella)
Earth Eternal (SATB, org, br quartet, perc)
The Spirit of the Lord (SAB, org)
God Is Love (SAB, org)
I Find My Refuge, Lord, in You (SATB, org)
Sweet Was the Song (SATB a cappella)

Secular Choral
springsongs (SATB a cappella)
Three Shakespeare Songs (SATB a cap)

Organ
Te Decet Hymnus Deus in Sion (Boosey & Hawkes)
Nocturnes, Book I* (MorningStar Music Publishers)
Five Preludes on American Folk Hymns (H. W. Gray)
Tambourine
Symphony No. 2
Mountain Music (MorningStar Music Publishers)*
The Stations of the Cross (w/2 narrators)
Toccata Brevis
Angel
Carillon: Nine Chorale Preludes (Augsburg Fortress)

Organ and instruments
Nocturnes, Book III (w/tpt, perc)
Neumark Variations (w/piano, MorningStar Music)**
An Easter Carillon (w/br quartet, perc)

Piano
Souvenir
Chaconne

Two pianos
Rag, Pastorale, and Carillon***

Voice and piano
Celtic Invocations (m-sop)

Voice and organ
Sayings of Jesus (sop)

Chamber ensemble
String Quartet No. 1 (Rag–Very Slowly–Tango)
String Quartet No. 2 (Allegro agitato–Passacaglia)

* recorded on Albany TROY765 and ACA Digital 20094
** recorded on ACA Digital 20050
*** recorded on ACA Digital 20023

Musical Examples
Toccata Brevis examples reproduced with the permission of Harold Stover.
Mountain Music and Neumark Variations: Copyright 2006, Birnamwood Publications (A division of MorningStar Music Publishers). Used by permission.
Music from “Shall I Tell You Who Will Come to Bethlehem” (PPMO0828) by Harold Stover, ©2008 Paraclete Press, used by permission of Paraclete Press,
<www.paracletepress.com&gt;.

 

James D. Hicks

James D. Hicks is a native of Fredericksburg, Virginia, and holds degrees in music from the Peabody Institute of Music, Yale University and the University of Cincinnati. Other studies include instruction at the Royal School of Church Music in England. He is an Associate of the American Guild of Organists. Hicks has held liturgical positions throughout the eastern United States and in 2011 retired from a twenty-six-year tenure at The Presbyterian Church in Morristown, New Jersey, the community in which he still resides. 

James Hicks has performed throughout the United States, Australia and Europe. Most recently in July 2013, he was a featured recitalist in several organ series in Finland, including the Helsinki Organ Summer and the Turku Summer Festival. He performed for Swedish National Radio in March 2012, a broadcast that included world premieres of several modern works from that country. He has recorded two collections of organ music on the American Pro Organo label. The first, 2003’s American Classic, highlights the rebuilt Austin organ at The Presbyterian Church in Morristown, New Jersey, and contains many recorded premieres of twentieth and twenty-first century American works, including two original compositions. Hicks traveled to Sweden in 2010 to record a double CD (Nordic Journey, Pro Organo #7239) of Nordic works on the historic Setterquist organ at Linköping Cathedral. This collection includes many unusual works from Nordic lands and a commissioned composition, Variations, by the Nordic cathedral musician Fredrik Sixten. Hicks recorded three separate CDs of Nordic music at the following Swedish venues in August 2013: St. Johannes’ Church, Malmö, Skara Cathedral and Västerås Cathedral. These discs include four commissioned works and the first modern recorded performances of many unpublished, hitherto unknown, compositions from the romantic and modern periods and are due to be released during the first half of 2014. 

In addition to his endeavors in organ literature, Hicks is a student of Celtic music, and has performed extensively throughout the New York metropolitan area on instruments associated with this tradition. He appreciates playing bellows-blown bagpipes, particularly the Border Pipes and Scottish Small Pipes. He plays the Great Highland Bagpipes as well, and competes on the Grade II level in the Eastern United States Pipeband Association’s sponsored Highland Games.  

Situated on the rugged west coast of Norway, the city of Trondheim is the location for one of the most compelling sacred spaces in all of northern Europe. The Nidaros Cathedral, a Romanesque and Gothic structure dating from 1140 is the spiritual heart of Norway, a shrine to St. Olav, and a centuries-old place of pilgrimage. It is also the home of composer and cathedral musician, Fredrik Sixten, a Swedish composer whose liturgical works are quickly garnering international acclaim. Sixten was appointed Domkantor of Nidaros Cathedral on April 1, 2013, and is responsible for conducting the Domkor and Oratoriokor. Prior to this prestigious appointment, Sixten spent twelve years as Cathedral Organist at Härnösand Cathedral, Härnösand, Sweden. Located over two hundred miles north of Stockholm, the university city of Härnösand is situated near the High Coast, a UNESCO-designated area of considerable natural beauty. The cultural and historical features of Härnösand and, now, Trondheim, have been the stage for the creation of a large and fascinating body of new compositions for the church by Fredrik Sixten. On the occasion of the composer’s fiftieth birthday in October 2012, I had the privilege of interviewing this musician about his life’s work thus far. This essay seeks to provide an introduction to Sixten’s life and career as well as identifying and briefly describing his many contributions to the contemporary organ repertoire. 

The son of a Lutheran pastor, Fredrik Sixten was born in Skövde, Sweden on October 21, 1962. Sven Sixten was a vital influence on the composer’s life from his earliest years and, perhaps, an initial source for Fredrik’s emerging creativity. The younger Sixten’s Epilogue for violoncello and piano (published by Gehrmans Musikförlag-GE11353) dating from 2001, is an eloquent testimonial to the composer’s father upon the latter’s death. Sven Sixten was a respected author of poetry, contemporary commentary for a wide variety of publications and novels, as well as serving as a priest at the Lutheran church in Fristad. It was this heritage that brought Fredrik into the musical world of the church. From a young age, he sang in choirs, participated in the life of the church, and displayed a precocious fascination with musical scores, spending countless hours copying diverse compositions without knowing how they sounded. Piano study ensued at age ten and, eventually, organ as well. 

As the aspiring musician reached adolescence, Sixten’s musical passions extended to other means of expression. Teaching himself to play guitar and drums, he formed a rock band called Birka, the original name of Stockholm, and the group covered many of the pop songs of the 1960s and 1970s as well as writing original material. Sixten cites the horn arrangements found in such works as the early albums of Chicago and Blood Sweat & Tears, as well as other jazz-rock fusion groups as a necessary balance to his primary tuition in classical music. He believes that his mature compositions would not have the same character now without these contradictory influences. 

Sixten enrolled in the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm at the age of eighteen. The diverse cultural opportunities available in the capital city, regular practice on some of the important organs there, including the instrument at the Hedvig Eleonora church, and private lessons in composition with the acclaimed composer Sven-David Sandstrom, were crucial influences in Sixten’s artistic development. In addition, Sixten cites the mentorship of Professor of Piano Eva Luthander, who encouraged him to perform his original compositions, including, for example, an early work, Sonata for Violoncello and Piano for a jury examination. 

After five years of study, Sixten began his career in church music, serving first as assistant organist at Västerås Cathedral from 1986–1991. He proceeded to serve as organist at Vänersborg Church from 1991–2001 and as artistic director of the Gothenburg Boys Choir from 1997–2001. His 2001 appointment as cathedral organist in Härnösand proved to be critical to Sixten’s development as a composer. Whereas he previously had insufficient time for composing, it was this fortuitous opportunity at Härnösand that allowed Sixten the requisite time to follow his own creative path. The cathedral authorities encouraged him to provide new works for this community of faith as a part of his ministry. The impressive number of large-scale choral works conceived during these years includes 2004’s St. Mark Passion (the first Swedish-language Passion setting), 2007’s Requiem, and 2009’s Christmas Oratorio. A host of smaller works for “everyday use” attests to the possibilities inherent in this situation. 

Evidence of Sixten’s mature style became apparent with this prodigious output. The composer cites “the usual suspects” with Bach, Brahms, Prokofiev, Poulenc and, particularly, Duruflé as role models. He has also mentioned the melancholy demeanor of Swedish folk music as the essential component of his music. In addition, Sixten’s penchant for pop music, previously mentioned as an interest in his formative years, finds expression in the music of Prince. Going beyond Prince’s more popular discs such as Purple Rain, Sixten appreciates, instead, the American musician’s more experimental recordings as a vital influence. Sixten claims that Prince often “challenges the listener,” and is not afraid to make “ugly, strange sounds.” A final sphere of influence belongs to American music’s most characteristic indigenous forms: blues and jazz. Sixten often borrows from the modal characteristics of the former and the rhythmic syncopation and harmonies of the latter. 

It is this diversity of experience that leads Fredrik Sixten to state that “there is no single organ style that can adequately interpret his music.“ He attempts to be “a citizen of the world.” An authentic series of recordings of his complete organ music “would require the use of several contrasting instruments.”

More can be learned about the music of Fredrik Sixten at his website:

www.fredriksixten.com

 

The Organ Works of Fredrik Sixten, 1981–2013

 

Three Chorale Preludes:

Härlig är jorden (1981) 

Wachet Auf (1983)

Jesus, Du Mitt Hjärtas Längtan (1983)

The first work of this set appears in the anthology Lux Aeterna (Gehrmans Musikförlag GE 6713) and uses a melody that American musicians will recognize as Fairest Lord Jesus, while the second and third compositions are available from the composer at his website. 

These early essays are meant as postludes rather than serving as introductions to congregational singing. The direct nature of these pieces bears comparison to some of the preludes of American composer Paul Manz, although the virtuosic nature and intense chromaticism of the third prelude betrays the influence of the German Romantic master Max Reger. 

 

Festmarsch (1983)

This occasional piece, composed as a march for a friend’s wedding, is unpublished but available from the composer at his website. 

Although an early work, Festmarsch demonstrates the composer’s willingness to go beyond a normal commission. This “occasional piece” bears little resemblance to normal wedding fare such as Clarke and Purcell. Sixten, at the bride-to-be’s request, instead wrote a work in mixed meters that employs thickly textured chords and a light, scherzo character, giving this composition as the composer states, “a circus-like attitude.” 

 

Prelude et Fugue (1986)

This composition was published by Wessmans Musikförlag (#200768).

“The culmination of my student experiences,” Prelude et Fugue was composed in 1986 as an act of homage to Maurice Duruflé upon the occasion of the death of the French master. The spirit of Duruflé certainly informs the Prelude in its warm harmonies, chant-influence melodies and scintillating rhythms. The introspective, angular fugal subject gives way to an animated second section and triumphant conclusion. Sixten considers this his “first mature work” and it has gained popularity with organists throughout the world. It is an ideal introduction to his music.

 

Toccata Festival (1996)

Toccata Festival was published by Gerhmans Musikförlag and originally appeared in the anthology Jubilate (CG 7352). Gerhmans published it separately in 2008 (GE 11162), given this composition’s positive reception. It is dedicated to Claes Holmgren, organist of Visby Cathedral on the island of Gotland, Sweden.

This short fanfare is another composition that, like the Prelude and Fugue could be a newcomer’s entry into Sixten’s music. Two versions of Toccata Festival exist. The published version meets the requirements of Jubilate, being written for “organists of average ability,” while the composer originally created a version whose second section is of some greater technical challenge. 

This three-part work is a fine example of Sixten’s usage of “blue notes” (Example 1). Toccata Festival’s three pages offer a brief summation of Sixten’s approach.

 

Missa Mariae (1998)

Missa Mariae is a five-movement composition (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei) that was commissioned by Visby Cathedral Parish in 1998, and premiered by cathedral organist Claes Holmgren. This work remains unpublished but is available from the composer at his website.

Missa Mariae is intended for liturgical use, functioning as an organ Mass. Each movement relates to a Biblical quote concerning the Virgin Mary:

Kyrie—And the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.” (Luke 1:30)

Gloria—My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior. (Luke 1:46-47)

Credo—And Mary said, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me

According to your word.” (Luke 1:38)

Sanctus—For he who is mighty has done great things for me. (Luke 1:49)

Agnus Dei—And she exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women,

And blessed is the fruit of your womb.” (Luke 1:42)

Although often lyric in its expression, this Mass represents a marked shift in Sixten’s development, containing some of his most pungent, astringent writing.

 

Triptyk (2000, 2002, revised 2004)

Triptyk, as its title indicates, is a three-movement work based on the Trinity. It was commissioned by Holy Trinity Church, Gävle, Sweden, and premiered by that church’s organist, Per Ahlman. 

Triptyk’s movements are

I—Prelude: The Holy Father

II—Hymn: The Son

III—Toccata: The Holy Ghost

Triptyk was published by Gehrmans Musikförlag (GE 11241) in 2008.

This composition evolved over the course of several years, beginning with the second movement, composed while Sixten was still working in Gothenburg. Hymn is a set of variations on a Swedish hymn, Christ Who Art the Light, and is a movement the composer still “holds very dear.” Sixten indicates that this movement may be performed as an independent composition. The first movement finds much of its thematic interest on the Gloria in excelsis chant while the concluding Toccata is based on the chant Veni Sancte Spiritus.

 

Messa Misteriosa (2002, revised 2008)

Preludio

Kyrie

Gloria

Credo

Sanctus

Agnus Dei

Communio

Postludio

Messa Misteriosa, excepting the final two movements, Communio and Postludio (published Gehrmans Musikförlag- GE 11243 and 11244), is unpublished and available at the composer’s website. 

This composition was another commission from Visby Cathedral as a part of its 2002 International Organ Festival. The composer premiered Messa Misteriosa.

Messa Misteriosa, as was the case with Missa Mariae, was composed to accompany the Swedish liturgy. The Mass takes its impetus from the melodies that are currently sung in the worship life of the Church of Sweden. The title reflects the composer’s desire to return the worshiper to the inexplicable mystery of the sacraments. There is a dichotomy to this music as each movement celebrates the Good News of Jesus Christ, yet is at the same time mindful of the Savior’s ultimate sacrifice. Although it celebrates an ancient tradition, Messa Misteriosa is the composer’s closest embrace of a post-modern sensibility. It is replete with dense harmonies, tone clusters and unpredictable textures, all working within a colorful palette of sound. Sixten lists such diverse influences as blues (Kyrie), Swedish folk music, and contemporary French harmonies alongside the pervasive Swedish liturgical melodies as appearing in this sprawling work. The final movement, Postludio, seems to have, according to Sixten, a humorous, almost ironic means of expression.

 

Arioso (1998)

Arioso was commissioned for the Swedish collection “Lux Aeterna II” (Gehrmanns SKG 10059). It is a melancholy bagatelle of two pages that within only a few measures amply displays Sixten’s lyric gifts.

 

Mourning Blues (2006)

Mourning Blues was published in 2007 by Wessmans Musikförlag (#200742) and premiered by the composer at the Holy Trinity Church, Gävle, Sweden.

Mourning Blues is another example of the composer working within different styles. Sixten creates a work using a blues scale, yet harmonically is “combined with other influences such as French Romanticism.” There are frequent alternations of mood in this brief movement. Lyricism and bombast are juxtaposed in Mourning Blues as the work unfolds. Sixten concludes the composition with a chord that contains both major and minor thirds. Sixten states that this kind of a chord with both thirds plus a minor seventh is his “favorite chord,” and one that regularly appears in his music.

 

Organ Sonata (2006)

Organ Sonata was published in 2008 by Gehrmans Musikförlag (GE 11240).

This composition was a third commission from Visby Cathedral Parish, premiered in December 2006 by the composer at the Excelsior festival of liturgical music. This was Sixten’s effort at creating a “contemporary interpretation of sonata form.” It contains four movements:

I—Maestoso (ma non troppo lento)

Composed in “Swedish Romantic style with influence from Otto Olsson.”

II—Scherzo

Contains thematic influence from the Swedish folksong tradition. 

III—Adagio

A movement whose mysticism is reminiscent of contemporary French style.

IV—Finale

A movement that could be performed separately, it is a brilliant “mixed-bag”: a Rondo containing a scherzo, a fugal section, and many points of imitation, all brilliantly concluding in a virtuoso coda. 

 

Tango över Psalm 303 (2006)

Non-Swedish musicians should be aware that “Psalm” denotes a hymn from the Swedish hymnbook rather than a passage from the Old Testament.

Gehrmans Musikförlag published this composition in 2007 (GE 11017). 

Composed on a trip to Milan, Italy, this remains one of Sixten’s most often-performed organ compositions. It is based on a Swedish hymn that originally was a Nordic folk song (Det Finns en Väg Till Himmelen, sv. Ps 303). The composer says his intent was to “marry a serious, melancholic dance with a correspondingly serious Swedish tune,” producing a hybrid that has all of the rhythmic qualities of dance, yet retains the modality of Nordic music (Example 2). 

 

Hymn (2006)

Gehrmans Musikförlag published this composition in 2007 (GE 11168).

Sixten composed Hymn at the same time as Tango över Psalm 303. It is a lyric meditation based on an original theme and harmonically romantic in style. 

 

Allegro Festivo (2007)

Gehrmans Musikförlag published this composition in 2008 (GE 11242).

This is another “occasional piece,” composed for the wedding of some colleagues on the staff at Härnösand Cathedral. The couple was interested in choosing new music to celebrate their nuptials. 

 

Variations for Organ (2008)

Variations for Organ was commissioned and premiered by James D. Hicks at Princeton University Chapel in March 2010. It was published by Gehrmans Musikförlag (GE11636) in 2010.

The theme upon which this composition is based is a Swedish folk song entitled Visa från Åhl (Song from Åhl). This theme comes from the quintessentially Swedish province of Dalarna, and its A-minor tonality is redolent of the folk music of that part of the country. Intended for the myriad colors possible on a large, symphonic instrument, each of the eleven variations possesses a distinct identity. The contrasting movements include a section for double pedals, a scherzo, varying contrapuntal techniques, tender adagios, and a fugue (which the composer describes as “a three-part canon”), all of which are concluded by a toccata. The composer considers this to be his favorite of all of his organ works.

 

Passacaglia (2011)

Passacaglia was commissioned and premiered by James D. Hicks in February 2012 at Princeton University Chapel. It was published by Gehrmans Musikförlag (GE 12115) in 2012.

When commencing work on this composition, Sixten searched for new ideas in presenting a form “overloaded by tradition.” The work is described by the composer as “his most difficult creation in a technical sense” and is music of tremendous impact and scope. After a turbulent, Regerian introduction, Sixten introduces the passacaglia theme in an unusual way by placing it in the treble register, rather than the more usual pedals (Example 3). The theme appears in various registers as the composition ensues, but still always functions as a bass line. Sixten guides this theme through a highly diverse set of variations and increasing tension, all culminating in a final statement that combines a Swedish folk song with the passacaglia melody. 

 

Toccata & Fugue on B-A-C-H (2012)

Toccata & Fugue on B-A-C-H was commissioned and premiered by Lars Fredriksson in September 2012 upon the occasion of the dedication of the new choir organ at Härnösand Cathedral. 

Toccata & Fugue on B-A-C-H was published by Gehrmans Musikförlag (GE 12277) in 2013. It was nominated for best new chamber work by the Swedish Music Publishers Association.

Toccata & Fugue on B-A-C-H, as with so many compositions based upon this time-honored motive, employs the notes B-flat, A, C, B-natural as the foundation of a composition. Sixten goes a step further in homage to J.S. Bach by opening his Toccata in much the same fashion as in the older master’s famed BWV 565. The BACH motive permeates every fiber of the composition, and the following double fugue is effective in contrasting the two subjects. 

 

Lamentation (2012)

Lamentation was commissioned by James D. Hicks and premiered in July 2013 at the Turku Cathedral Summer Festival, Turku, Finland. At the time of the publication of this article, it was still in manuscript form. As a part of the commission, the composer used a medieval Norwegian folk tune for the composition’s foundation. The ensuing work is music of great pathos and anguish, one of Sixten’s most expressive creations.

Carolyn Shuster Fournier

Carolyn Shuster Fournier expresses her gratitude to Pierre Cogen and to Ann Labounsky for providing material and advice for this article, to Marie-Christine Ugo-Lhôte for the loan of her father’s collection of the review L’Orgue, to Mifa Martin for having read through the text, and to the Ruth and Clarence Mader Memorial Scholarship Fund for its grant in 2006.
An international concert artist, Dr. Carolyn Shuster Fournier is titular of the Aristide Cavaillé-Coll choir organ at La Trinité Church in Paris, France. She has written several articles for The Diapason. In October 1983, she was privileged to perform Jean Langlais’ Double Fantasy for Two Organists with the composer, in his concerts during his last tour to England: at the Royal Festival Hall in London (on October 26), at the Salisbury Cathedral, and at the Christ Church Chapel in Oxford.

The Sainte-Clotilde Tradition1 is based on the lineage transmitted in a teacher/student relationship from Franck to Tournemire to Langlais.2 Especially beginning with Charles Tournemire, these organist/composers, as well as many of their substitutes (among others, Maurice Duruflé, André Fleury, and Daniel-Lesur), the choirmaster Maurice Emmanuel,3 and other titular organists at Sainte-Clotilde—notably Joseph Ermend Bonnal, Jean Langlais, and Pierre Cogen—had an intimate, spiritual understanding of the Gregorian chants used in the traditional Catholic liturgy. This was manifest in their deeply poetic and colorful interpretations, and in their use of Gregorian chants in their improvisations and compositions. They all served their art with humility. This article is dedicated to Pierre Cogen, a French organist-composer in the Sainte-Clotilde Tradition.

Pierre Cogen’s musical formation under Jean Langlais’ guidance

Pierre Cogen (see illustration 1) was born in Paris on October 2, 1931. From 1944 to 1951, he studied at the Petit Séminaire de Paris in Conflans.4 He sang in the Schola choir, directed by the Abbot Jean Revert.5 Such a framework provided Cogen with a musical training in the ancient, pure classical tradition—in a church choir school that sang Gregorian chants as well as the classical polyphonic choral repertory. At the age of 14, Cogen began to accompany this choir on the 12-stop Cavaillé-Coll organ6 in the school chapel. Each year, Jean Langlais was invited to give a concert on this instrument. When Cogen heard him improvise brilliantly on the Gregorian Sunday mid-Lent Introit, Laetare Jerusalem, he was moved so deeply that he immediately requested to become his student. At the age of 19, Cogen studied privately with him, taking lessons either on the two-manual harmonium with a pedalboard in Langlais’ home, on the Cavaillé-Coll organ in his class at the Paris Institute for the Blind, or on the chapel organ at Cogen’s school.
After graduating from this school in 1951, at the age of 20, Pierre Cogen studied for one year with Edouard Souberbielle at the César Franck School in Paris, during Langlais’ first tour to the United States. This distinguished and cultivated professor helped Cogen to solidify his technique. Cogen then continued to take private lessons with Langlais, studying organ interpretation (especially of the works associated with the Sainte-Clotilde Tradition), and also harmony, counterpoint, fugue, and improvisation (notably of the fugue). Cogen also studied harmony with Jean Lemaire and took preparatory courses for the exam that would qualify him to become a music professor with Eliane Chevalier (Marie-Madeleine Duruflé-Chevalier’s sister) and Raymond Weber. After obtaining his Certificat d’Aptitude as a music education professor, he taught in Paris, in public schools and at the private Alsatian School from 1961 to 1993. In the meantime, from 1952 to 1966, he directed a children’s choir, Les Petits Chanteurs de Championnet, which sang four-voice a cappella music from Palestrina to Langlais. It toured, notably to Germany in 1964 and 1965.
From 1952 to 1979, in exchange for numerous lessons, Cogen assisted Langlais’ wife Jeanne7 as a musical secretary, notating Langlais’ compositions onto paper and proofreading them for publication. In 1954, he helped Langlais prepare his edition of C. P. E. Bach’s Six Sonatas.8 When Langlais urgently composed his Salve Regina Mass for the Christmas Eve midnight mass at the Notre-Dame Cathedral in 1954, his wife notated the text during the day; each night, Cogen prepared the separate vocal scores. Among other compositions, he notated Langlais’ In Paradisum (Triptyque grégorien) in a hotel in Haarlem, during the International Improvisation Competition in 1978. In 1971, Pierre Cogen decided to complete his musical training, in both organ and improvisation, as well as in counterpoint and fugue. He therefore enrolled at the Schola Cantorum—in Langlais’ organ class from 1971 to 1973, then in Yvonne Desportes’ fugue class from 1974 to 1976—obtaining the Prix de Virtuosité in organ and improvisation in 1973, and Superior Diplomas in harmony, counterpoint and fugue in 1975–76. During the first term of 1973, when Langlais took a leave of absence for illness, Cogen took lessons with his substitute, André Fleury, studying his Prélude, Andante and Toccata, acquiring a more dreamlike interpretation of the Prélude and a more flamboyant spirit in the Toccata. Fleury insisted upon absolute precision and rigor in carrying out registration changes. Cogen greatly appreciated his honesty, his rectitude of character, and his constant friendship.9
In July 1975, Pierre Cogen participated in an improvisation academy in Nice with Pierre Cochereau, driving from Paris to Nice with the American organist George Baker. When Cogen improvised an “Elevation,” Cochereau immediately put him at ease, with his customary simplicity and warmth. Cogen recalls that they began with modulation exercises, all types of canons and toccata formulas, developing numerous forms: the sicilienne, various suite movements, and, of course, the fugue. Among the advice that Cogen retained:

Carry out your effects tactfully. Don’t say everything initially!
Interweave all of the elements, one upon another.
Don’t abuse the use of major and minor scales.
Establish the tonalities of your development.
Beware of your repeated chords, too many arpeggiated formulas.
How can you return to the principal tonality? And the 6/4 chord!10

In 1979, Pierre Cogen obtained, by competition, the Aptitude Certificate for Teaching Organ and Improvisation (C.A.) in the national French conservatories. In 1984, he created the organ class at the Maurice Ravel Conservatory in Levallois, near Paris, remaining there until his retirement in 1993.

Titular at the Sainte-Clotilde Basilica in Paris

Beginning in 1955, Cogen began to substitute for Langlais at the Sainte-Clotilde Basilica when his official assistant, Pierre Denis,11 was not available. The Grand Orgue gave solemnity to the church services, and prepared and prolonged the atmosphere of the liturgical chants during the masses, vespers, weddings and funerals. When Langlais asked him to substitute for him, Cogen played for three Sunday morning masses: the 9:30 a.m. high mass was in Latin and Gregorian chant; the two others, at 11 a.m. and noon, were low masses. At the high mass, Cogen played the Prelude, the Offertory, the Elevation, the Communion, and the Postlude. During the low masses, he played continuously while the celebrant recited his prayers in a “low” voice. During the church services, Cogen based his improvisations and his choice of repertory on the appropriate chants of the liturgical year. For the vesper services, after playing a processional entrance, he improvised fifteen verses, first for the repeated antiphons that follow each of the five psalms, then, in alternation with the choir, for the verses of the hymn and the Magnificat, and then again for the antiphon.
In 1972, Pierre Cogen played the organ regularly, becoming Langlais’ official assistant. During this period, he only played two Sunday morning masses, at 11 a.m. (preceded by a long prelude) and at noon. Although the vespers were no longer held, he still played for weddings and funerals. At the beginning of 1973, when Langlais fell ill, Cogen played for all of the services. When Langlais resumed his activities, he dedicated to Cogen the fourth of his Cinq Méditations sur l’Apocalypse: “Oh oui, viens, Seigneur viens, Seigneur Jésus.”12
On January 31, 1976, at Langlais’ request, Pierre Cogen was named as a co-titular organist at Saint-Clotilde. He still played for the same number of masses. Even more important, since he had unlimited access to the organ, he became well integrated into the Sainte-Clotilde Tradition, playing much of its related repertory. On the occasion of his nomination as co-titular organist, Langlais presented him with Léon Vallas’s biography of César Franck13 with the following inscription (see illustration 2).
From 1978 to 1985, in addition to the two morning masses, Cogen played for a traditional low mass in Latin every Sunday at 6:30 p.m. (except in the summer). On May 17, 1987, Cogen accompanied Langlais’ Messe Solennelle for four-part choir and two organs15 while Langlais played solo pieces during a televised Sunday morning mass that celebrated Langlais’ 80th birthday. In April 1988, when Langlais resigned at the age of 80 due to a bad heart condition, he was named “Honorary Organist at Sainte-Clotilde.”16 Cogen succeeded him as titular, and Jacques Taddei was also named as titular, joining the list of their illustrious predecessors:

1863–1890 César Franck17
1890–1898 Gabriel Pierné
1898–1939 Charles Tournemire
1942–1944 Joseph Ermend Bonnal
1945–1988 Jean Langlais
1976–1994 Pierre Cogen
1988–present Jacques Taddei

After his nomination, Cogen dedicated his Offrande to Langlais and premiered this work during the 11 a.m. Easter Mass at Sainte-Clotilde on April 3, 1988, the day he succeeded Langlais as titular. At the beginning of this piece, a beautiful pentatonic melody is harmonized with refined simplicity (see illustration 3). After Langlais’ death on May 8, 1991, Cogen and Taddei, with other instrumentalists and choirs, played for his funeral on May 30.
From 1988 to 1991, in addition to his service playing, Cogen organized organ concerts at Sainte-Clotilde every Friday after the noon mass. These concerts continued until the church was closed in 1992 for restoration work. When it reopened in 1993, Cogen and Taddei only played for the 11 a.m. mass, but a song rehearsal that immediately preceded the mass prevented them from playing a prelude. On June 21, 1994, Cogen retired at the age of 62, after 39 years of service to this parish (21 years as a substitute organist and 18 years as a titular). On April 2, he played there for the last time—for the Easter Vigil and the midnight Easter mass, ending it with the following postlude: Langlais’ Incantation pour un jour saint, which combines the Lumen Christi chant from the Easter Vigil and the Litanies, which had been sung by the congregation during the vigil to implore heavenly aid.

International concert organist and recording artist

As a concert organist, Cogen had the privilege of premiering several of Langlais’ pieces. On December 30, 1979, he inaugurated his Noëls avec Variations, Op. 204, at the Saint-Louis des Invalides Church in Paris. On November 18, 1985, he premiered Langlais’ Talitha Koum, Op. 225, at a second concert that celebrated Langlais’ 40 years of service as an organist at Sainte-Clotilde. On Sunday, December 13, 1987, at Sainte-Clotilde, Cogen premiered, with Claire Louchet, soprano, Langlais’ Antiennes à la Sainte Vierge, Op. 242, for one voice and organ.
On February 1, 1987, Pierre Cogen performed at the Madeleine Church in Paris, along with François-Henri Houbart and Georges Bessonnet, in a concert that celebrated Jean Langlais’ 80th birthday. On February 15, 1987, Langlais’ 80th birthday, he attended Cogen’s recital at the Notre-Dame Cathedral. Cogen performed Langlais’ Chant de joie, Rosa mystica, Triptyque, and Dans la lumière, an extract from L’Offrande à une âme. At Sainte-Clotilde, Cogen also performed in several memorable organ concerts: one was held in Tournemire’s honor on November 16, 1989. It is particularly moving to note that Cogen heard Langlais play for the last time during this concert—a moving rendition of the second of Tournemire’s Sei Fioretti, which had been dedicated to him 57 years earlier, in 1932!18
Also at Sainte-Clotilde, Cogen played in two concerts that celebrated the centenary of Cesar Franck’s death in 1990 and in several recitals that were held in Langlais’ memory in 1991. On Good Friday in 1989, 1990 and 1991, Cogen was privileged to perform at Sainte-Clotilde Tournemire’s Sept Chorals-Poèmes pour les Sept Paroles du Christ, Op. 67. Father Choné, the church priest, introduced each piece with a commentary of the Gospel.
Cogen also rendered homage to his two predecessors by recording their works on the Sainte-Clotilde Grand Orgue:
1. Langlais’ works (carried out in the composer’s presence): Incantation pour un jour saint, Ave Maria, Ave Maris Stella, Offrande à Marie, Suite medievale (a 33 rpm record published by Tempo FR 760310), 1976;
2. Langlais’ Première Symphonie, Suite folklorique, Triptyque by Cybélia (CY-867), 1986; 3. Tournemire’s Sept Chorals-Poèmes pour les Sept Paroles du Xrist en Croix, L’Orgue Mystique (the Assumption and the Epiphany Offices) (CD, Cybélia, CY-883), 1990. In 1997, he also recorded Langlais’ Suite médiévale, Suite brève, and Suite française on the organ at the Church of the Holy Spirit in Mannheim (CD, Aeolus, AE-10081).

Pierre Cogen’s organ works

After retiring from his post at Sainte-Clotilde in 1994, Pierre Cogen was able to devote more time to performing and to composing. His compositions were inspired by Tournemire’s poetic language and by Langlais’ colorful harmonies. The influence of the Sainte-Clotilde Tradition is also manifest in Cogen’s use of modal tonalities, Gregorian chants, and the imitation of bells. Several of Cogen’s organ works were commissioned, notably by the Austrian organist and composer Thomas Daniel Schlee, by two organists in Switzerland, Eva and Marco Brandazza, and by the Austrian organist Herbert Bolterauer. In the following list of Cogen’s works, the titles are given in French, along with information concerning their dedications, their premieres and their publication. A brief description of each piece provides the composer’s remarks concerning his works.

1. Deux Chorals, dedicated to his dear master Jean Langlais, composed as birthday presents for him; they were premiered privately, on Langlais’ house organ, on February 15, 1974 (the second choral) and in 1977 (the first choral): “Es ist ein Ros’ entsprungen,” 1977; “Herzlich tut mich verlangen,” 1974.
Published in Paris: Combre (C 5464), 1993 (6'30").
The association of these two chorals recalls two vital extremities, one’s birth and death, as Cogen explains.
The first choral, with its inherently intimate character, uses the famous Praetorius Christmas carol in a clear, contrapuntal style, with particularly soft registrations (Gambe and Voix Celeste, Bourdon 8', with a soft Pedal Flute). The melody, in long note values in the soprano, is accompanied by a discreet movement of eighth-notes in the inner voices, while syncopated rhythms in the bass line (played on the pedal) lull the upper voices.
Cogen was studying improvisation with Langlais when he composed the second choral. Langlais had insisted that the pedal part should not stagnate in the lower notes. His student followed his advice far beyond his master’s wishes, since the pedal sings entirely in the upper range on the following stops: Flute 4', Nasard 22⁄3', Larigot 11⁄3' and Piccolo 1' (registration that was dear to Messiaen in his Banquet céleste). The choral melody, resolutely sustained with homophonic writing, is confined to the manuals (Bourdon 8', Voix Humaine and tremolo on the Swell or, if this is not available, on 8' foundation stops that can sufficiently balance the opposing chant in the pedal). If the pedalboard does not contain a G3, it is possible to play the entire pedal part an octave lower on a registration based on 2' stops.

2. Nocturne sur un thème populaire Breton, 1976, dedicated to Michèle Vermesse, his future wife; premiered by Ann Labounsky in a concert at Sainte-Clotilde in Paris on May 21, 1979.
Published in Paris: Combre (C 5396), 1992 (7'30").
Recorded by Hans Leitner at the Passau Cathedral in 1995, in Klangfarben der grössten Kirchenorgel der Welt, CD 118, Symicon, Passau, and by Ulrich Karg at the Saint-Vith Church in Belgium, 1999, in Organs in Wallonie, a province of Liège, Blawète Records, Liège.
The theme of this nocturne is a Breton hymn proposed to Pierre Cogen as an improvisation theme to conclude a concert given at Douarnenez (in the southern Finistère) on August 17, 1975. This evening hymn affirms a faith as solid as the granite that is exposed to harsh atmospheric conditions; it is presented as such in the old Breton night legends (ankou, korrigans, etc.). Cogen tried to bring this atmosphere to life in this symphonic, three-part Andante: following the triple exposition of the theme, interspersed with mysterious bell tolls, a sombre and anguished central section develops certain fragments of the theme; then a re-exposition is calmer and more lyrical. This piece finishes with a reminder of the bell tolling: at the beginning and the end of this work, two chords are superposed in the lower keyboard range, solely on the Nasard 22⁄3' and the Tierce 13⁄5' stops.

3. Chorale “Erbarm dich mein, ô Herre Gott,” 1978, unpublished (5').
In an ecumenical approach, Pierre Cogen had planned on writing several suites that would combine Lutheran chorales with Gregorian themes. This is the only work that was completed. In a particularly slow tempo, the chorale theme passes successively from the lower to the upper ranges, from pianissimo to triple forte with dense polyphonic writing, whereas the Gregorian theme, Miserere mei, Deus, serves as a countrapuntal element.

4. Deux Hosannas sur des textes grégoriens: I. Hosanna in exsilio, 1980, to François Tricot; II. Hosanna Escalquensis, 1982, to Jeanne Langlais, in memoriam.
Published in Das neue Orgelalbum II, Vienna: Universal Edition (UE 17480), 1985 (7'30").
The first piece begins with an excerpt of the Sanctus from the Missa Orbis Factor. Then, a two-part development built around a group of four descending notes is followed by a recapitulation with a canon at the seventh and a brief coda. The fear-stricken character of the music alludes to the title of the piece: we are not in heaven (in excelsis), but in this world of banishment (in exsilio), to which the Salve Regina alludes.
In the second movement, the theme, a fragment of the Missa Cunctipotens Genitor Deus in the second mode, appears three times. A fugato, based on a fragment of the theme, introduces the development section. A large-scale rallentando leads to a mysterious carillon: that of the Escalquens Church (near Toulouse), where Jean and Jeanne Langlais are buried. This carillon is played very slowly (see illustration 4, page 28). The bell tolling and the thematic fragments are developed with a crescendo, leading to a brilliant, luminous presentation of the theme in a canon at the interval of a fifth.
5. Psalmodie, composed at Cernay la Ville on December 31, 1985, dedicated to his mother.
Published in Pedals Only, Vienna: Universal Edition (UE 18601), 1988 (5').
The author could have inscribed an epigraph under the title of the piece, citing the passage in the Gospel of St. Luke (chapter I, verse 39), following the text concerning the Annunciation: “Mary left hastily to visit her cousin Elizabeth in the mountains.” At the beginning of Psalmodie, a series of three groups of three quiet F-sharps on the Flute 4' stop recall the Sainte-Clotilde church bells when they toll for the Angelus.19 As Cogen explains, after this introduction comes a three-voice fugue, whose joyful subject is none other than that of the psalmody in the eighth mode, sometimes used to sing the Magnificat. After several expositions and divertimenti, the movement is accelerated while the subject is compressed through several canons (strettos), leading to the tutti, a radiant B-major chord. Two codas are proposed, with solo pedal or with the addition of the manuals.

6. Offrande, 1988 (initially composed in 1963 for an a cappella four-voice choir with the title Le Lotus d’Or), dedicated to his dear master Jean Langlais; premiered by Cogen during the 11 a.m. Easter Mass at Sainte-Clotilde on April 3, 1988, the day he succeeded Langlais as titular.
Published in Paris: Combre (Collection Horizon), 1990 (3').
Recorded by Andrew Cantrill, at St. Paul’s Cathedral in Wellington, New Zealand.
This is a unique piece: Cogen’s only work from the 1960s, when he was strongly influenced by early twentieth-century composers such as Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Bartók, and Milhaud. It is based on a Birman folklore melody in the pentatonic mode and is structured according to its four original strophes. The melody initially appears in the soprano on the Swell Oboe 8', accompanied by the left hand on the Positive Salicional 8' and a soft 16' and 8' in the Pedal. In the second strophe, a trio, the melody appears in the left hand on the Positive Cromorne, while the alto is played by the right hand on the Swell Cornet, with a Grand Jeu de Tierce in the Pedal. In the slightly agitated third strophe, the melody in the soprano is sustained by the two voices in the alto, which develop in imitation before sounding together in parallel thirds. The work finishes peacefully on the Swell Gambe and Voix Celeste stops that accompany the melody on the Great Bourdon 8'. As Cogen indicates, the absence of the B and E notes in the pentatonic melody allowed him to truly modulate: while the first and the last strophes maintained their “white” key signature, the B-flat intervenes in the second strophe and joins the E-flat in the third one.

7. Fantaisie sur une Antienne for organ with four hands and pedal, 1988, finished at Cernay-la-Ville, near Paris, on November 4, 1989, dedicated to Claire and Thomas Daniel Schlee; premiered by Cogen and Schlee in a concert that celebrated 50th anniversary of Tournemire’s death, at Sainte-Clotilde on November 23, 1989, along with T. D. Schlee’s Prisme, also a work for four hands and pedal.
Published in Vienna: Universal Edition (UE 19550), 1988 (7').
Recorded by Eva and Marco Brandazza at the Schloss Church in Bad Mergentheim (Germany), in Ite, missa est, Organum Musikproduktion, Öhringen, 1996; and by Sylvie Poirier and Philip Crozier on the Casavant organ at the Très Saint Sacrement de Jésus Church in Montréal, Canada, in Historic Organs of Montreal, CD 1.
Pierre Cogen’s fantasy contains three main sections of polyphonic writing—Lento, Andante and Allegro—that alternate with freely expressive recitatives. The Lento section sounds like a funeral march on the soft 8' foundation stops, After progressing from the lower to the upper registers, a heavy pedal note imitates a bell-like toll on low C. The Andante presents a fugue whose vigorous rhythmical theme appears in the alto, then in the tenor and in the bass. In the final Allegro, a litany-like dialogue on the foundation stops with the mixtures, the composer presents the Gregorian antiphon on which this piece is based: the “Ego dormivi” from the Easter matins, which Tournemire used several times in his L’Orgue mystique, notably in his Paraphrase Carillon. Cogen’s work ends majestically on the full organ.

8. L’Epiphanie du Seigneur, 1991, in homage to the painter, Werner Hartmann, dedicated to Geneviève and Daniel Hartmann; premiered by Pierre Cogen on November 10, 1991, for the tenth anniversary of the death of this painter, at the Parish Catholic Church in Gerliswill-Emmenbrücke, near Lu-cerne, Switzerland. Unpublished (14')
Werner Hartmann’s series of large paintings (5.60m x 1.90m) of the Epiphany of the Savior, which inspired this piece, are located in the choir of the Catholic church, Pfarrkirche Gerliswill, in the Gerliswill-Emmenbrücke district of Lucerne. They depict the three miracles related in the Epiphany Gospel: the star followed by the Wise Men (who ride on horses instead of camels), the water changed into wine, and the descent of the Holy Spirit during Christ’s Baptism. While looking at these paintings, Cogen was struck by their link with the Gregorian antiphon in the first mode, the “Tribus miraculis” from the Magnificat of the Second Vespers of Epiphany. Since this work is based on this theme, it may be sung as an introduction.
According to Cogen, in the first movement, “The Star, the Three Wise Men and the Manger Scene,” mysterious and stark sonorities (due to the light discord on the Nazard stop) recall the night and the starlit sky. The central part of this movement recalls the Wise Men (who travel on horseback to follow the star that led them to the cradle). At the end, a slow descent leads to a lulling movement, a sweet evocation of the manger scene.
In the second movement, “The Wedding at Cana and the Baptism of Jesus,” light flutes sound a discreet carillon, while the rustic reed stops introduce a folk melody full of Mediterranean light. The development, initially calm, becomes more intense, leading up to a brief and turbulent agitato that represents the servants’ astonishment when the miracle takes place. Then, the melody is transformed into a Grand Plein Jeu—solemn and hieratic—the manifestation of the Divine Presence. This fragment finishes with the first notes of Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est.
The Baptism of Jesus by John, a penance baptism, begins with low notes and rustic sonorities that depict the universe filled with minerals and the dry desert where John the Baptist carried out his mission. This long tension is resolved in less dissonant harmonies, the first fruits of the salvation announced by John the Baptist. The quotation of the Veni Creator recalls the descent of the Holy Spirit onto Jesus. The work concludes in a luminous atmosphere with the initial Gregorian theme—that of the antiphon Tribus miraculis.

9. L’Exaltation de la Sainte Croix, Diptyque for Organ, 1994, dedicated to Monseigneur Jean Revert, Honorary Choirmaster at the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, for the 50th anniversary of his ordination to the priesthood; premiered by Pierre Cogen at the Notre-Dame Cathedral on Palm Sunday, on March 27, 1994. Unpublished (11')
According to Cogen, this work is a grand Gregorian paraphrase in the spirit of similar pieces by Tournemire and Langlais. The title refers to the Feast of the Holy Cross. The melodic material is taken from several liturgical antiphons and hymns from the Holy Week, in particular, the antiphons Ecce lignum Crucis, Crucem tuam adoramus, and the hymn Vexilla Regis. A Meditation on the Mystery of the Cross, an instrument of Christ’s torture but also a symbol of the Redemption, this work is in the form of a diptyque in two connecting parts:
I. After an introduction inviting one to the Adoration of the Cross, a somber procession intones the hymn Vexilla Regis in the lower ranges of the organ. This first part ends peacefully, in expectation of the Resurrection.
II. At the very beginning of the second part, the atmosphere changes. A theme of exaltation, Exaltavit illum, first in the upper range of the organ, gives birth to a fugato. Profiting from secondary episodes, the theme of the hymn Vexilla Regis winds its way into the low ranges before powerfully bursting forth. The work concludes with a fanfare, recalling its various themes.

10. Lucernaire for two organs, “Paravi lucernam Christo meo” (Ps. 131/132, v. 17), for the Christmas season or for a celebration of the Light, 1994, commissioned by Eva and Marco Brandazza and premiered by them on January 10, 1995, at the Jesuit Church in Lucerne, Switzerland (with Eva on the choir organ and Marco on the tribune organ). Unpublished (17')
Recorded by Eva and Marco Brandazza (see item 7 above).
Underneath the title, the composer placed a verse of the Psalm 131 (132): “I have prepared a lamp for my Christ.” According to Cogen, this expectation and coming of the Light, an idea that repeatedly occurs in the Christmas season liturgical texts, guided him during his preparations, from the antiphon O Oriens (for the winter solstice) and the Lumen ad revelationem gentium of the Feast of the Purification, until the hymn Jesu, Redemptor omnium and its verse. By referring to these texts that were sung during the vespers of the Christmas season, the composer thought of structuring his work in the manner of an evening service, notably the one that was formerly referred to as Lucernaire, because one lit lamps during this service. In addition, the composer did not neglect to bring out the similarity between the Latin word lucerna, the lamp, and the name of the city of Lucerne.

11. Cortège, 1996, in memory of Adrien Maciet, the organ builder; Herbert Bolterauer premiered it on November 8, 1996, at the Mariahilf in Graz, Austria.
Published in Paris: Combre (C 05909), in Enluminures. Dix Pièces pour orgue sur un thème donné, 1999 (5').
Herbert Bolterauer, the organist at the Mariahilf Church in Graz, Austria, had requested nine different composers to write a short piece on a theme by Alexandre Schrei. The title of this collection, Enluminures [Illuminations], refers to the way the composers, through the variety of their styles, were able to “illuminate” the various aspects of the thematic material. Since Cogen’s piece is a memorial one, he chose a writing style that is essentially contrapuntal, quasi-vocal. He begins his piece in a slow and grave tempo: Schrei’s theme initially appears when the pedal enters. The piece intensifies until its conclusion. According to the composer, each interpreter can choose either to maintain its restrained character throughout the work, or to increase the sonorities, leading to a maximum of sound at the end of the piece.

12. Psalm “De Profundis” for organ and brass, 1998, in memory of his father-in-law, Edouard Vermesse; Pierre Cogen premiered it on July 17, 1998, with the brass ensemble Hexagone and the solo trumpeter Pierre Dutot, at the Abbatial Church in Guîtres, France (in Gironde, near Bordeaux). Unpublished (8')
This piece develops the various aspects of Psalm 129 (130), from its initial distressful plea to its message of the Lord’s kindness and redemption expressed in verse seven. It uses various Gregorian melodies: the antiphons from the Requiem and the Christmas Vespers, the Offertory from the twenty-third Sunday after Whitsun, and the chorale Aus tiefer Not schrei’ ich zu dir (the Lutheran equivalent of the De profundis).

13. Introduction, Thème et Variations sur “Innsbrück, Ich muss dich lassen” (Variations on a song by Heinrich Isaac), 1999–2002, dedicated to Thomas Daniel Schlee; on July 8, 1999, Cogen premiered an excerpt of this work at the parish church in Igls-Innsbruck; he then premiered it in its entirety on June 18, 2002, at Saint-Sulpice in Paris, France.
Published in Paris: Combre (C 06460), 2006 (13').
In 1996, when Cogen gave a concert in Igls, in the immediate vicinity of Innsbruck, he was inspired to compose a work on Isaac’s tune known as Innsbrück. The association between its name and that of the river Inn inspired him to write an introduction followed by five variations on this theme. As in most variations, this work enables the performer to present the various tonal colors of the organ. An initial Andante introduction develops several motives of the theme, on the foundation stops and the Swell Trumpet 8¢; the theme is then presented un poco più vivo, on the 16', 8', and 4' foundation stops. After the addition of the manual mixtures and the Pedal Basson 16', Isaac’s theme is entirely presented on the full organ, with harmonies reminiscent of those of the fifteenth century, when the melody was originally composed. The following five variations present the various colors of the organ:
Variation 1: an Adagio presents the theme in the lowest part of the pedalboard, using the Swell Bourdon 8', Voix Humaine 8' and tremulant, with the Pedal Flutes 8' and 4' and, if possible, the mutation stops forming the Grand Jeu de Tierce;
Variation 2: an Andante, with the theme played by the left hand, in a light character, on the Gambe stops;
Variation 3: a lyrical movement that dislocates the theme, using dissonances and “harsh” sounding reed stops, such as the Great horizontal Trumpet 8' with the mixtures;
Variation 4: a Moderato movement on the Swell Gambe 8' and Voix Celeste, with a canon between the alto (played by the right hand) and the soprano (played on the Pedal Flute 4');
Variation 5: a vigorous Fugue, Allegro ma non troppo, that begins on the Swell 8', 4', and 2' foundation stops with the mixtures; a progressive crescendo leads to the triumphal return of Isaac’s song, in a “resolutely modern harmonization” (P. Cogen).
A coda concludes this work on the full organ, resounding an open fifth: D–A.

Marcia Van Oyen

Marcia Van Oyen is Director of Music Ministry at First United Methodist Church, Plymouth, Michigan, and continues to serve as Director for the National AGO Committee for Membership Development and Chapter Support. She received her master’s and doctoral degrees at the University of Michigan, where she studied organ with Robert Glasgow.

The 46th University of Michigan Conference on Organ Music took place October 1–4, 2006. The event focused on music of Germany, France and the USA, featuring performances by Marie-Claire Alain, Michigan faculty members Marilyn Mason, James Kibbie, and Michele Johns, and a slate of lectures on a variety of topics. The majority of events took place at Hill Auditorium, home of the 4-manual, 124-rank Frieze Memorial Organ.

Children’s choir festival

The conference opened with a children’s choir festival organized by the Ann Arbor Chapter of the American Guild of Organists. Thomas Strode, AGO board member and director of the Ann Arbor Boy Choir, gathered over 85 children from six area churches and schools to sing together. Approximately half the program featured music sung by the combined choir directed by Strode; several groups sang individually as well, including the Messias Temple Youth Choir, whose inspired performance brought the audience to its feet. Charles Kennedy skillfully accompanied the choir, and played three Sketches and a Canon by Schumann. The audience of several hundred comprised largely families with young children, and I was glad to see them exposed to the sounds of both well-trained children’s voices and the pipe organ. Given the disposition of the audience, the stage was perfectly set to engage the multi-generational crowd with organ repertoire or a demonstration designed for such a purpose. Tom Strode did give some impromptu remarks about the organ, which seemed to pique the interest of the adults seated near me, but the program would have had greater impact had it included one of the many light-hearted, educational organ demonstration pieces of recent vintage. Based on the interest of more choirs in participating, the Ann Arbor AGO plans to continue this event in the future. I encourage them to make the most of the opportunity to educate young people about the pipe organ.

Michigan faculty performances

Sunday evening, Marilyn Mason and flautist Donald Fishel gave the Ann Arbor premiere of Breath of the Spirit—Pentecost for flute, organ, and narrators, composed by Michigan graduate Gregory Hamilton, based on poetry by Kenneth Gaertner. The pattern of the work was inspired by Dupré’s La Chemin de la Croix, with the ten sections of the work musically interpreting and commenting upon the poetry. In her opening remarks, Marilyn Mason noted that this concert was one of the first events to take place following the official renaming of the music school. In collegial spirit, she appropriately included two members of the theatre department as narrators in this performance presented by the School of Music, Theatre and Dance.
Here is a brief synopsis of the work, with a few noteworthy quotes from the poetry:
1. Overture—organ alone, featuring big solo trumpet melody.
2. Annunciation—the organ and flute trade motifs, suggesting a dialogue between Mary and the Angel Gabriel, the rounded sounds of the Hill organ blending beautifully with the flute.
3. Children in Praise—children caught up in the excitement and wonder of the quiet Rabbi Jesus healing a crippled man and a man with a withered hand. The flute introduces a sprightly theme, which is echoed by the organ, spiced with mild dissonance.
4. Herod—the poem speculates on Herod’s thoughts about John contrasted with those about his lover Herodias. He is simultaneously upset and intrigued by John, comforted and attracted to Herodias. Unaccompanied flute plays long passages in the low register contrasted with passages in the instrument’s uppermost register.
5. Mary Dancing—the story of Jesus changing water into wine at the wedding in Cana and the dancing at the wedding. For solo flute, nearly moto perpetuo.
6. Judas—for organ solo, beginning with a crashing chord and descending pedal solos, then a decrescendo to a sighing Bach-like fugue section. The movement ends with more clashing dissonance alternating with a funereal fugue. “Mankind’s future is mankind’s sin.”
7. Mary Magdalene/Doubting Thomas—the extended poem is followed by long flowing melodies portraying gentle happiness.
8. Poverty Shared—illustrates the experience of a poor man listening to Jesus preach. It begins seething with tension, then eases and flows into comforting, surging waves of lovely harmonies. The poetry preceding the movement offers these paradoxical thoughts: “Listening to the Rabbi preach, shedding the shroud of poverty, words flew into the ears of his poverty’s corpse. Had not his curse always been his salvation?” The initial tension returns to close the movement.
9. Desert Grief—Jesus appearing to Mary, resurrected. An oboe solo on organ alternates with the flute melody, perhaps indicating an undulating, leaping soul—“the burned sins of the world fell in gray ashes.”
10. Pentecost—recaps the overture, framing the work. Several strong poetic phrases wrap up the ideas in earlier poems: “delusions were ashes,” “truth cut through the oppression of their past,” “died and could not die again.”
Mason and Fishel proved themselves well-synchronized partners performing Breath of the Spirit, deftly navigating the work’s changing rhythmic landscape. For an extended work, it is easy to grasp and enjoyable on first hearing. Its accessible, attractive music would no doubt be enhanced by a church setting to give it a sacred context. The work will be published in the near future, perhaps with some of the movements simplified to promote more performance, especially in a liturgical setting.

James Kibbie: Leipzig Chorales

James Kibbie played all of Bach’s Leipzig Chorales in two sessions, the first on the Fisk organ at Blanche Anderson Moore Hall at the School of Music, and the second on the Wilhelm organ at First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor. Kibbie takes a natural approach to these chorales—his playing is unfussy and elegant. He works with the organ’s natural articulation, adding his own subtle touches, all in keeping with the musical flow and not distracting from the overall effect. His pacing of the chorales is cohesive and appropriate, each tempo and transition carefully considered, and the registrations are apt, tastefully chosen for color and not solely dramatic effect.
The audience sang each chorale tune before Kibbie played Bach’s settings, having been provided with a booklet including the chorales. The booklet also contained comprehensive notes written by Larry Visser in 1992 when he performed the Leipzig Chorales as part of his doctoral studies at Michigan.
James Kibbie is on sabbatical leave during winter term to begin a three-year project to record the complete organ works of J. S. Bach on historic organs in Germany. During 2007, he will record approximately one third of the Bach organ works, including the Leipzig Chorales on the Silbermann organ of Dresden Cathedral and the Kirnberger Chorales on the Silbermann organs in Rötha.

Michele Johns and Kristen Johns

Michele Johns and her daughter Kristen performed a delightful concert of music for horn and organ on Monday afternoon. Kristen Johns has recently earned a DMA in horn performance, and has compiled a list of over 100 pieces originally composed for horn and organ as part of her research. The program included a selection of works composed in the last third of the 20th-century, opening with the fanfare-filled Celebration for Horn and Organ by Randall Faust. Next, Craig Phillips’ tuneful Serenade for Horn and Organ was filled with the composer’s signature harmonies, while Dutch composer Jan Koetsier’s Choral-Fantasie on Gib dich zufrieden un sei stille reminds one of Mendelssohn or Rheinberger. Daniel Pinkham’s The Salutation of Gabriel was commissioned by Joan Lippincott in honor of Karen McFarlane’s retirement. It is a programmatic work in three continuous sections—Gabriel delivers the message, Mary replies, Gabriel departs. Pinkham effectively portrays both the excitement and weightiness of the message, going so far as to instruct the performer to walk off-stage before playing the closing notes of the piece to signify Gabriel departing. Arnatt’s Variations on Divinum Mysterium is a beautifully composed work, keeping the familiar chant tune prominent most of the time. Works by Paul Basler and Gunther Marks rounded out this enjoyable mother/daughter collaboration.

Student performances

Students of Marilyn Mason and James Kibbie performed in several concerts during the conference. Monday morning, doctoral candidate Seth Nelson gave an excellent lecture-recital on Mozart’s flute clock pieces. The temperament of the Fisk organ brought out the character and color of these pieces, particularly the F-minor Fantasy. Doctoral students Marcia Heirman, Andrew Meagher, Alan Knight, Christine Chun, Susan De Kam, and master’s student Thomas Kean performed works ranging from Messiaen to Brahms to Vierne on Monday afternoon. Undergraduate Joseph Balistreri, master’s student Paul Haebig, doctoral student Michael Stefanek, and returning DMA graduates Shin-Ae Chun and Seth Nelson played works by Le Bègue, Langlais, Franck, Sowerby, Bolcom, and Dupré on Wednesday afternoon. Following the organ program, Christine Chun performed her first dissertation recital as pianist of the Michigan Trio, performing chamber works with cellist Amar Basu and violinist Jane Yu. David Saunders gave his second doctoral recital on Wednesday evening, playing music of DeGrigny, Guilain, Franck and Grandjany. Carillonneur Steven Ball gave a short carillon concert prior to the evening event.

Mozart lecture

Music theory professor Ellwood Derr gave an outstanding lecture on Mozart on Tuesday morning. He began by offering a Native American saying, “It is good for the living to perform ceremonies for the dead,” and invited his audience to actively participate in the lecture. Comparing Mozart to Michelangelo and Shakespeare, Derr asserted that Mozart is a magician, a freak due to his unusually high level of skill and his ability to innately and directly communicate with his audience, whether or not they are educated. His corpus of works, which Derr believes to be technically perfect, is so vast it is nearly impossible to listen to it all.
Derr has done research that identifies more than 80 Mozart works that borrow material from J. C. Bach, whom Mozart greatly admired. He recognizes three ways in which existing material can be incorporated into new works: reuse of thematic material, a technique so widely used as to be in common domain; unadorned borrowing for effect; and material retrieved from memory, the most common method of borrowing. He discussed examples from the Great Mass in C minor and the Requiem. In connection with remarks on the high quality of Mozart’s unfinished works, he played a selection from a recent recording of a gorgeous unfinished aria from Davide Penitente. Following the conference, Derr was slated to give this lecture and two additional lectures as part of a series of events celebrating Mozart, his era and his influence.

Classical French music

Monday afternoon, Susanne Diederich and Jean Randall offered a session on the Classical French organ and its music. Using the Frieze organ in Hill Auditorium, Randall demonstrated at the console and Diederich spoke. The main points of the lecture were the importance of stylistic specialties in giving character to French classic music, and that this period represents a rare confluence of instrument, music, style, and performance practice all working together. This era is unique in history; organ builders and organists worked closely together, and the organ was participating in the general development of music. Following this lecture, Stephanie Nofar gave a lecture-recital, “The Other France: Tribute to Unknown Masters.”

Maurice Clerc recital

Maurice Clerc played a recital featuring several transcriptions at Hill Auditorium on Monday evening. Having played at several previous conferences, Clerc seemed at home at the console and utilized the organ’s resources to great effect, preferring full registrations such as he can create at his home church, Notre-Dame in Paris. He began the program with his own bombastic transcription from Verdi’s Don Carlos, and moved on to Franck’s Pièce Héroïque, playing it with a very legato touch. He captured the excitement of the piece effectively, adding an arpeggiated fanfare before the closing chords. His transcription of a suite of character pieces by Fauré provided enjoyable listening, enlivened by colorful registrations. He followed with the Suite Medievale by Langlais, and closed the program with his transcription of a scherzo improvised by Pierre Cochereau in 1974.

Clerc: The art of transcription

On Tuesday afternoon, Maurice Clerc gave a lecture on preparing transcriptions. He cited transcription practices in the 18th century—Bach’s Schübler Chorales, Rameau’s arrangements of his own operas, and Balbastre’s transcriptions of his own works. After being abandoned for a time, transcription again became popular in the latter half of the 19th-century. Liszt arranged favorite orchestral and choral works for organ, and is known to have played the Kyrie from Mozart’s Requiem and transcriptions of classics for Widor. Karg-Elert made arrangements of Wagner’s works, using every possible technique available on the organ. Organ performance was very popular at the time, giving people the opportunity to hear great orchestral works performed on the instrument, since they would have had little or no opportunity to hear the likes of Wagner otherwise. Many composers did not write for the organ at all, deterred by having secular works performed in a sacred space, since most organs are located in churches.
Transcriptions allow us to play works by composers who didn’t write for the organ. The body of organ repertoire can be increased, and allow us to study a composer’s techniques. In addition, Clerc believes organists make transcriptions for their own enjoyment, giving the examples of David Briggs and Daniel Roth, as well as Jean Guillou, who made transcriptions when it wasn’t considered a legitimate art. Clerc discussed two types of transcriptions: adaptations of existing works to the language of the organ, and notations of improvisations. Both Dupré’s and Tournemire’s improvisations have been notated, allowing us to observe their improvisation styles. Clerc has transcribed works of Pierre Coche-reau, whom he describes as “having sparkling musicality, and endowed with staggering speed and an innate ability to use the whole organ from soft to loud.” Transcribing these improvisations captures a moment in time and preserves the uniqueness of the improviser’s art.

Michael Barone

Michael Barone opened his session with this statement: “We think we know everything, but if we don’t know history, we’re destined to repeat it.” His goal was to give a survey of how performers have approached French music over the years. Tinkering patiently with recalcitrant hi-fi equipment, he began with the first recording of early French music, a disc recorded by André Marchal on a Gonzales/Beckerath at Attignon in 1936, wondering “Can we play this music any better today?” Barone created a pastiche of Franck’s Pièce Héroïque, alternating passages played in 1929 by Marcel Dupré and in 1962 by E. Power Biggs, and offered a composite of several recordings of Gigout playing his own B-minor Toccata. He offered 15 examples of the opening section of Franck’s B-minor Choral, noting the balance shift between the manuals and the pedal among the various recordings.
Barone’s open-minded approach allows his audiences to be exposed to many performers and performances that might be ruled out in narrower definitions of what is worthwhile. He chooses recordings of instruments or performances that he deems so beguiling or interesting that they deserve a hearing, and to his credit is not bound by fashionable definitions of authenticity or correctness. He encouraged the audience to spend time listening to how our predecessors performed, noting that any organist worth his or her salt “speaks French.” Known for closing his sessions with a memorable aural example, Barone did not disappoint. He closed with a recording of Messiaen’s La Nativité by a Russian accordion player.

Marie-Claire Alain

When Marie-Claire Alain stepped onto the platform to perform her concert Tuesday evening, she was greeted by an extended ovation from the capacity audience of conference attendees, church members, and locals. She had given a masterclass on the music of Jehan Alain that afternoon, and the evening’s event only seemed to bring forth more energy in her. She began with a set of guitar pieces by Campion transcribed for organ, which showed off the colors of the instrument, followed by two settings of Schmücke dich by Bach. She took the familiar BWV 654 at a lively pace, and deftly negotiated handfuls of notes in BWV 759. Closing a set of three Bach works, the C-major prelude and fugue, BWV 547, sparkled in her hands. This work too often suffers from plodding and heavy rendition, but Marie Claire moved it along under perfect control, clearly feeling very comfortable with the piece and the instrument.
The second half included Dupré’s Virgo Mater, op. 40, which is dedicated in memory of Jehan Alain, followed by three pieces by her father, Albert Alain. Though written in the 20th century, these pieces hark back to earlier styles, and are particularly akin to the works of Vierne and Widor. The contrast between Albert’s music and Jehan’s is interesting, the former steeped in French tradition, and the latter unbound by tradition. The younger Alain’s Deux Danses and Suite bring this point home. Marie-Claire had played well all evening, but her performance really caught fire performing her brother’s works. Following a long standing ovation and her 85-minute program, she tossed off a riveting performance of “Litanies” as an encore as if it was the first piece of the evening.
Brandon Spence: multi-cultural worship
Brandon Spence, a Michigan graduate, is director of music at St. Andrew’s Cathedral in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This parish is home to people who speak English, Spanish, and Polish, as well as some who neither speak English nor are able to read. Spence approaches his task by asking two questions: who is present in worship? What are your musical resources? How do we make the music relevant? He cleverly illustrated with the movie “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” asserting that there is a parallel between preparing a meal according to the needs of diverse guests and preparing music for worship. For Spence, the main issues are inclusiveness, enculturation, and fidelity to tradition. Worship should be inclusive, inviting, and engaging. Worship works best when people can feel that they belong and feel invited. With the assistance of a cantor from St. Andrew’s, he demonstrated using settings of Psalm 34 in different styles ranging from the Basilican Psalter to jazz and gospel in order to reach the various sectors of his diverse congregation.

Conclusion

The varied events of the 46th annual organ conference once again combined to provide current students and attendees with an excellent opportunity to delve into the riches of pipe organ repertoire and performance. Many thanks to Marilyn Mason and her colleagues who organize this valuable conference each year.

Peter Hardwick

Dr. Peter Hardwick is a retired music professor who, during his career, taught at the University of Guelph, Guelph, and Agincourt Collegiate Institute, Toronto, Ontario. In addition, he served as organist of St. John’s Cathedral, Winnipeg, Manitoba, and St. George’s Church, Guelph.

In 2003, Scarecrow Press published his book British Organ Music of the Twentieth Century. Over the last two and a half years he has been writing a monograph on the life and music of Kenneth Leighton, which will probably be finished sometime this year. Dr. Hardwick has written feature articles and numerous reviews of recordings and organ music for The Diapason

Kenneth Leighton was born on October 2, 1929, at Wakefield, West Yorkshire, England. His formal education was at Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, Wakefield (1940-47) and Queen’s College, the University of Oxford (1947-51). He continued his composition studies privately with Goffredo Petrassi in Rome (March-September, 1951). Leighton was principally a composer, but he also appeared quite frequently as a concert pianist, and he gave the first performances of a number of his own piano works. In addition, he was a highly regarded teacher of composition. Except for two years as a lecturer and fellow at Worcester College, Oxford (1968-70), he taught composition in the Faculty of Music at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, from 1956 until his death on August 24, 1988.1

Musical training

The composer was involved with church music throughout his life. In his childhood, the Leighton family were parishioners of Holy Trinity Anglican Church in downtown Wakefield, and Kenneth sang in the choir there, as did his father and brother. In 1938, he gained admittance to the Wakefield Cathedral Choir. Years later, the composer reminisced that

 . . . my career as a Cathedral chorister left some of the most vivid impressions in my mind of that time of life. I didn’t particularly ask to become a chorister . . . but my father had sung in church choirs all his life, my brother had been a choral scholar before me, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world--nobody questioned it--that I should follow in their footsteps. Unlike my brother I didn’t have much of a voice, I fear, and I would never have made a soloist--but I was able to sing reasonably in tune, and I was able to sight-read; and so I became one of those worthy and stalwart leaders at the bottom end of the stalls--hooting away with not a very strong voice--but to be relied on in moments of crisis. . . .

As far as the repertoire it was pretty wide for those days--we sang some Palestrina, we sang the old favourites--Noble in B minor, Walmisley in D minor, and the Stanford (all fine music in its own right--and thank God that we are getting over our prejudices against the Victorian and Edwardian church music)--and we also sang what was then the latest thing--Darke in F minor--a most exciting experience--Warlock carols, and even a piece by Britten which I didn’t like very much because it seemed so outrageously modern and cacophonous. And then there were many great occasions like the Stanford TE DEUM with Trumpets and Drums--and [Handel’s] Messiah for the first time. I was so completely overwhelmed--emotionally--by the Messiah that I was completely unable to control myself and had to escape from the stalls half way through. Curiously enough I have never heard the Messiah since.

On the whole what an extraordinary richness of musical experience it all was--and what a marvellous musical training!2

Wakefield Cathedral was a High Church of England establishment, and during these years, the composer had his first taste of plainsong. He clearly liked the old chants, and later they were sometimes used verbatim in his compositions. In other works, original themes cast in the plainsong mold were introduced. In the Cathedral Choir, he also sang sacred Tudor polyphonic music, which impressed him,3 and he used a modernized version of the cut and thrust of this style in his own counterpoint later.

In 1947, he was awarded a Hastings Exhibition to study Classics at Queen’s College, Oxford, and a year later he gained permission to continue with Classics, but to also focus principally on music under the direction of the Queen’s College music lecturer, Bernard Rose. Vaughan Williams, Walton, and Britten were Leighton’s idols at this time, and they were to have an effect on his music to a limited degree during the next few years. He learned much during his Oxford music studies, but perhaps the only lasting skill that he acquired was his immense contrapuntal technique.

During his six months of composition studies with Petrassi in 1951, Leighton became more aware of modern Continental musical styles, especially those of Bartók, Hindemith, Stravinsky, as well as the techniques of the Second Viennese School’s serial procedures, and, thereafter, Leighton adopted a much more highly chromatic, mid 20th-century style.

Compositional style

However, he did not adopt one style thereafter for all his compositions. For instance, the choral music, including the works for church services, is quite conservative. In the sacred scores, links with traditional musical style are maintained, yet they sound modern. He achieves this partly by retaining elements of tonal and modal music, while making little use of conventional functional harmony and key signatures. The highly dissonant chords, including cluster chords, in the sacred music have a modern ring to them, but most of these are coincidental, the result of linear counterpoint, not, primarily, vertical thinking.4 At least occasionally, in most of the church pieces Leighton likes to cadence on diatonic chords, which help underline his adherence to tonal/modal traditions. There is also a conventional versus forward-looking ambivalence in the voice leading in Leighton’s church music. This is the result of the contours of the vocal lines being essentially conventional, while at the same time there is a liking for such “dissonant” leaps as augmented fourths and major sevenths.

Almost a third of the ninety-six published works in The Kenneth Leighton Trust’s Opus Index are for use in church services. They consist of nineteen anthems, motets and carols; ten masses and communion services; eight canticles for matins and evensong; one set of preces and responses; five hymn tunes; and two hybrid works that may be sung at the Mass or as concert works.5

Like most 20th-century English church composers, he generally wrote for a four-part all-male choir consisting of trebles, altos, tenors, and basses, and quite frequently called for one or more vocal soloists. In his fondness for centuries-old poetry and prose of the highest literary quality, he showed decided insight into what words blended best with his elevated, emotionally intense musical style. In particular, he set many passages from the King James I version of The Holy Bible of 1611, and the Church of England’s The Book of Common Prayer, whose origins may be traced to 1552. The other old British religious writers whose work he set include Robert Herrick (1592-1674), George Herbert (1593-1633), Sir Thomas Browne (1605-82), Isaac Watts (1674-1748), and Christopher Smart (1722-71).

The organ parts in the church music are idiomatic and important, yet Leighton was not fond of the instrument. He revealed his feelings as early as 1952, when, after playing the new organ in Wakefield Cathedral, he wrote: “It is a very large instrument with five manuals but . . . I don’t like the organ very much. On this instrument, one can produce magnificent effects but I find it incapable of expressing those fine feelings which are the secret of a truly human music. It is an instrument without heart.”6 His reservations were reinforced later when he heard the criticisms of British Romantic/Orchestral instruments of his colleague in the Edinburgh University Faculty of Music, the celebrated organ historian, Peter F. Williams.7

Three Carols

Among the earliest works in the genre is the miniature a cappella Three Carols, Op. 25 (1948-56), for soprano soloist and SATB choir. The modality, occasional open fifth chords, and Picardy third cadences match well the archaic English language and imagery of the texts.

These points are illustrated in the second carol, titled Lully, Lulla, Thou Little Tiny Child. One of the composer’s most celebrated sacred choral works, it echoes, characteristic of his music of the late 1940s, with the style of Vaughan Williams. There is much word painting. For example, the introductory gentle rocking motion of the ostinato musical phrases, as the choir repeatedly sings the words “Lully, Lulla, thou little tiny child,” paints an intimate scene of Mary lovingly, and with gentleness, caring for the baby Jesus in the cradle. The music’s Mixolydian modal harmony enriched with seventh chords, and two cadences containing a Picardy third, enhances the ancient ambiance of the old words. In addition, the waves of close position concordant triadic upper vocal lines over a pedal in the bass capture in sound the image of the nativity scene, with the mother rocking her child to sleep in her arms. (Example 1)

In the second strophe, a loud setting of the words “Herod the king, In his raging, . . . All children young to slay,” the mood changes from the idyllic happiness of verse one to deadly chilliness. This iciness reaches a peak at the word “slay,” which is sung to a dissonant forzato chord consisting of two simultaneous augmented fourths.

With verse three, a setting of words beginning “That woe is me, Poor child for thee!,” there is an abrupt return to the mystical, cradle-song style of the first verse. The choir softly performs a varied version of the music heard at the start of the carol, with the harmony consisting of leisurely paced block chords, embellished with faster moving harmonic and non-harmonic tones. Over this rich four-part choral writing, the soprano soloist effortlessly floats a soaring obbligato line. The juxtaposition of contrasting sonorities, textures, and moods, such as exists in the three verses of Lully, Lulla, Thou Little Tiny Child, is a hallmark of Leighton’s style.

Works of the 1960s

The anthem Give Me the Wings of Faith (1962) is a setting of the All Saints’ Day hymn text of the same title by Isaac Watts. The performing forces are typical of much of the church music the composer wrote in the 1960s: soprano and baritone soloists, SATB choir, and organ. Overall, the anthem is written in a lean, prickly, non-functional harmonic language in which there tend to be many transient dissonances.

There is a mental struggle in Give Me the Wings of Faith, and the mood is complex. At the start, the tone is one of uncertainty and anxiety. Leighton seems to have found disturbing the notions of the human soul rising above into heaven and seeing the saints, who had, like us in our time, wrestled with sins, doubts, and fears. This is depicted in the soprano solo “Give me the wings of faith,” in which the organ accompaniment slithers snake-like in small chromatic intervals. However, the depressing mood, while never completely dispelled in the work, gradually gives way to a more optimistic tone as the saints find their eternal rest through Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross. The somewhat triumphant final section, which is perhaps best described as being “on” D major, rather than in that key (even though the D major key signature is used), is launched by the baritone soloist singing “They marked the footsteps that he trod” to a bold, wide-ranged melody. This theme is developed at length chorally, and the choir closes with a triumphant chordal setting of “Our glorious Leader claims our praise.” However, the full organ alone has the last word, blazing out majestically, yet with a trace of nervous uncertainty, on a B minor chord with an added C sharp.

A hallmark of Leighton’s style is idiomatic writing for voice, and this is certainly true in Give Me the Wings of Faith. The same could be said of the organ, whose role is to contribute to the singers’ word painting, and provide a continuous web of sound that links up the choral sections. A fondness is evident for flowing manual lines that have chains of parallel perfect fourths and fifths, supported by slower moving pedal parts.

His only arrangements of preexistent church music are O Leave Your Sheep (1962) and Wassail All Over the Town (1964).8 O Leave Your Sheep is a setting of the four-strophe French traditional carol text of the same title, and the tune with which it is usually associated, Quittez Pasteurs. For SATB choir and organ, the work is uncharacteristic of Leighton’s mature style in its tonal idiom, and the scaled-down technical demands. As such, it is accessible to the amateur choir and organist. The preexistent melody undergoes a limited amount of variation after the first verse, and is easily recognizable throughout. Verse one, in F major, is sung by a soprano soloist or by all the sopranos, with a light and transparent organ accompaniment that is almost entirely in the treble clef. In verse two, which is in D major, the melody is treated to four-voice imitation, with sustained organ chords in the bass register. The D minor, a cappella third verse is much more ruminative, almost improvisatory, and the preexistent melody is treated more freely. After this section of relative repose, an energetic mood is introduced by the staccato, highly rhythmic organ introduction to the last verse, and this is followed by imitative entries of the voices. The chordal vocal writing gradually increases in excitement and becomes exultant, while the organ accompaniment adds further to the joyous sound with long flowing chains of parallel thirds in the manuals over sustained bass notes in the pedals. O Leave Your Sheep ends ecstatically with a più largo block chord phrase and perfect cadence in D major alla Handel for choir and organ.

The ten-minute setting of the matins canticle Te Deum Laudamus (1964) for soprano and baritone soli, SATB chorus, and organ, is arguably one of Leighton’s first great liturgical masterpieces. It marked a major confluence in the development of the composer, where, at last, his creative inspiration was matched by his mastery of the tools of his profession.

Most of the hallmarks of his style are present in the work. Among these elements is the taste for soloists, with the traditional Church of England SATB choir and organ. Other aspects of his style, already noted in previous works, that are also found here include a freely dissonant, non-functional harmonic idiom; plainsong-like melismatic vocal embellishments; masterly imitative counterpoint and abundant word painting.

The opening is a good example of the style. Over a series of held, close-position cluster chords on the organ, each of which begins with a Scotch snap articulation, the soprano soloist declaims the words “We praise thee” over and over again, “praise” being embellished more elaborately with each repetition, much along the lines of settings of joyous words in Gregorian chant. One by one the choir sections enter and rise in excited acclamation as they surge forward to the first loud grand climax, a moment endowed with a sense of glorious revelation, at the word “everlasting” on an F major chord.

There is a lull in the rejoicing at the words “When thou tookest upon thee to deliver man: thou didst not abhor the Virgin’s womb,” which are set in a polymetric,9 syllabic style reminiscent of ancient chant.

The counterpoint is frequently linear and imitative, supported by a foundation of rhythmic figuration in the organ accompaniment. This may be seen, for example, in the setting of “When thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death” (bars 83-91). Cruelly painful cut-and-thrust imitative counterpoint, in which simultaneous seconds create flashes of hard sharp dissonance, are heard over a backdrop of vaguely menacing syncopated, rhythmic detached chords in the organ manuals, and a more sustained pedal line. (Example 2)

The ancestry of such musical pathos might be traced to the choral settings of similar texts by late Renaissance and early Baroque English composers, such as Tallis, Byrd, and Weelkes. In passing, one might also mention the two-part polyphony in Example 2: sopranos and tenors singing the same line in octaves, altos and basses singing the other line in octaves. This was a type of doubling of pairs of voices at the octave that Vaughan Williams had utilized in contrapuntal passages in, for example, his Te Deum in G (1928), O How Amiable (1934), and the Benedicite (1939).10 Britten also wrote passages like this in such works as Antiphon (1956), a setting of sacred words by George Herbert for choir (with optional soloists) and organ. The Te Deum appears to be the first work in which Leighton used this texture. He was to use it many times in his subsequent church music, partly, one might suspect, because it sounds effective, but also because two parts are easier to sing than four parts, and this offers relief from singing in four real parts.

The bustle of the setting of “When thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death” ends dramatically with fortissimo cluster chords on the organ that create a cacophony of sound, followed by general pause. After the silence, a volcanic blast of sound erupts as choir and organ present the words “We believe that thou shalt come to be our Judge.” Leighton obviously is struck with grave misgivings, possibly fear, at the thought of the Last Judgment, and the music of this short, highly dissonant passage, marked Lento sostenuto and fortississimo, is pervaded with a sense of bewildering awe mingled with anxiety. The emotionally distraught mood is initiated by a loud, low pedal point on the organ pedals, and twisting, snake-like chromatic counterpoint in the manuals. Then the voices enter in a five-part stretto-like point of imitation. (Example 3)

An element of prayerful hopefulness ensues at the start of the last section of the work, as the baritone soloist sings softly and with contrition in a plainsong-like chanting style “We therefore pray thee help thy servants.” The setting of “Day by day we worship thy Name: ever world without end” is bright and joyful, but this is halted abruptly by a sense of dread and fear in an acridly dissonant chord at the word “sin” in the phrase “Vouchsafe, O Lord, to keep us this day without sin.” With reminiscences of the organ music with its Scotch snap rhythms that had been heard at the opening of the composition, the choir then presents “O Lord, have mercy upon us” with very expressive, pianissimo, ethereal phrases. Finally, after the choir’s last, prayerful entreaty, “O Lord, in thee have I trusted, let me never be confounded,” the organ ends the work with a whispered F-sharp major chord.

Less than a year after the Te Deum Laudamus, Leighton wrote an anthem on George Herbert’s hymn text Let All the World in Every Corner Sing (1965) for SATB choir and organ. Since both the Te Deum and Let All the World texts are joyous, and the pieces were composed close to each other, it is hardly surprising to note similarities between them. For example, at the start of the anthem he uses the two-voice canonic imitative style between the altos and basses singing the same line in octaves simultaneously, and the paired sopranos and tenors in octaves simultaneously, that was noted in the Te Deum. Such two-voice canonic imitation appears several times in the anthem, and there are also several passages in which, in like fashion, the four voice parts divide into pairs singing in octaves, though not in imitation.

In the first section, the organ has staccato, fragmented phrases against which the voices joust. As in the Te Deum, there is a departure from conventional, rhythmically square, metric writing. This occurs in the short polymetric setting of the words “The heavens are not too high, His praises may thither fly,” where the music slips quickly from 3/4+3/8 to 4/4, 7/8, 4/4, and 7/8, before settling in 4/4. (Example 4)

In the concluding passage of the anthem, the words and a variation of the music of the opening return in the manner of a recapitulation. However, here there is a much greater sense of excitement, of breathtaking denouement. Contributing to this sense of rousing celebration is the thickening choral texture to five parts, with the sopranos dividing into two parts, and all the voices being called upon to sing in their upper ranges. The organ also adds to the drive to climax. Far more flamboyant and bombastic than at the opening of the anthem, the instrument’s assertive role is to provide rhythmic excitement with short motivic groupings of ejaculatory cluster chords, punctuated by short general rests. In addition, the organ has numerous short joyous rushing ascending scales that are reminiscent, possibly, of one of Leighton’s musical heroes, Howells, who was fond of these embellishing figures as an expression of joy in his church music organ parts. After so much astringent dissonance, the organ brings down the curtain on the anthem with an appropriately shrill, dissonant chord: C-sharp and D major chords played simultaneously--in effect the simultaneous sounding of tonic and dominant harmony, a tonally ambiguous ending.

First Masses

In the 1960s Leighton composed his first Masses: Missae Sancti Thomae, Op. 40 (1962), Mass, Op. 44 (1964), Communion Service in D, Op. 45 (1965), and Missa Brevis, Op. 50 (1967).

The twenty-six-minute Mass, Op. 44, for double mixed chorus, is arguably a masterpiece. The first of only two Latin Masses by the composer,11 it is a cappella, except the Credo, which calls for organ, and is in the Palestrina style, as seen through a 20th-century prism. Among the innumerable remarkable passages in the Mass is the opening of the Kyrie Eleison, which starts with a solo voice singing in the minor mode, and surges irresistibly to an immense, fortississimo climax for double chorus at bar 17. The passage’s penitential, bittersweet opening that quickly changes to a great paean of confident optimism is so characteristic of Leighton’s mercurial nature. (Example 5)

An Easter Sequence, Op. 55 (1968) is a fourteen-minute piece in five movements, for boys’ or female voices and organ with optional trumpet. Considering the crème de la crème choir for which the work was written,12 one might have expected a more technically demanding, showy composition. In fact, the vocal writing is tonal; the melodic contours conventional, and there are no gallery-pleasing virtuosic fast melismatic lines. Nor is the organ part especially difficult. In the absence of a trumpeter, the solo trumpet part may be played on a trumpet stop, if one is available on the organ being used.

An Easter Sequence is not a sequence in one of the traditional music history or theory meanings of the word. It is a homogeneous series of pieces,13 setting in English of four Roman Catholic liturgical texts and Psalm 23.14 If the five movements are performed at Mass, they are to be sung as the Introit, Gradual, Offertory, Communion, and Sortie. The work may also be sung on the concert platform.

One may notice similarities between An Easter Sequence and Britten’s Missa Brevis in D (1959) for three-part boys voices and organ, written for the boys of Westminster Cathedral Choir. As in Britten’s composition, there is much three-part writing for the voices, though single- and two-part music is more common. Several passages of canon-like imitation, and a number of ostinatos in the organ accompaniment in Leighton’s work are also Brittenesque.15 In addition, like Britten, the Yorkshireman is especially adept at word painting. For example, he captures the mostly joyous Introit text, “Alleluia. Rejoice in God our helper: Sing aloud to the God of Jacob,” with buoyant, dancing vocal lines that leap lightly, and with staccato articulation. See also the setting of Jesus’ words “Peace be with you” in the Gradual. This music is ethereal, and consists of a soft, glossy, heavenly halo of sustained four-part chords--the only four-part phrase in the composition. The pastoral imagery of Psalm 23 is captured immediately in the opening gentle, reflective organ solo. The melody, in the organist’s right hand, is a chromatic, sinuous, rhythmically complex line oscillating within a narrow pitch range. The left hand accompaniment consists of a close-position cluster-chord that undergoes slight alterations over a pedal point.

In the Sortie, the organ part is much heavier and dominant than in the earlier movements, and it shines forth in a most thrilling manner. This is illustrated in the instrument’s slow improvisatory introductory solo section, with its chromatic, serpentine lines. Then the main section of the movement begins, in the style of a very fast fanfare for voices, organ, and trumpet. Against a backdrop of brightly registered, rhythmic, often stabbing organ chords, the choir, in unison throughout, declaims in brief snappy phrases “God is ascended in jubilee,” and short trumpet obbligato phrases rasp out as the choir sings “and the Lord in the sound of the trumpet” in short, motivic, rhythmic fanfares.

This material is heard again in the coda of the Sortie. First, a greatly transformed variant of the chromatic organ introduction to the movement is presented over a pedal C. Then, the choir sings the stirring vocal fanfare-like phrases “God is ascended, and the Lord in the sound of the trumpet” that were heard early in the movement, while the organ pursues its own path of syncopated, rhythmic, stabbing, highly dissonant manual chords. As so often happens with Leighton, the organ (with trumpet) has the last words: an emotionally gripping tonic C major chord combined with the dominant chord.        

This article will be continued.

Larry Palmer

Larry Palmer is harpsichord editor of THE DIAPASON.

Each one of us surely has an individual concept of sin, generally from direct personal experience: I sometimes describe it as “anything that is more fun for the doer than for someone else!” Defining commission might be slightly more difficult. For the purpose of this narrative, I choose to define the term as “the solicitation of a new musical composition, whether or not money is involved.” In my nearly half-century of commissioning new music, much of the time I have been the recipient of extraordinary generosity: most of my composers have donated their music, while others have asked for only modest fees.

Calvin Hampton

The first time I solicited a composer to write something specifically for me was in 1957, when I asked my Oberlin classmate and fellow organ major Calvin Hampton if he would provide an offertory for a summer service at First Presbyterian Church, Canton, Ohio--my first major (if only month-long) church “gig.” His response came in the form of a lovely three-minute aria, titled Consonance. While not a major work by this important composer, it does illustrate the advantage of choosing the right friends; namely, ones who go on to become well-known, thereby considerably increasing the value of their manuscripts. Equally useful, subsequently such friendships may provide one with material for articles about “what they were like before they became well-known”--a perfectly good academic topic indeed, if one includes the proper footnotes.

Neely Bruce

In the fall of 1960 I moved to Rochester, New York to begin graduate study. There I met the next of my composer friends. On my second day at the Eastman School, as I waited in the fourth floor corridor to meet with my advisor Dr. M. Alfred Bichsel, head of the newly established Church Music Department, a striking younger student walked up to me and asked, with lilting southern inflection, if I could tell him where to find Dr. Bitch-el. I was captivated by Neely Bruce, a freshman who had come to audition for the Polyphonic Choir, a new choral ensemble established for this sacred music area. As Dr. Bichsel’s rehearsal assistant, I saw young Bruce regularly. We became friends, and Neely, a precociously talented pianist and composer, eventually supplied the concluding piece for my 1961 master’s recital Organ Compositions Based on the Kyrie fons bonitatis.

When he left Eastman after that single year to attend the University of Alabama, I was devastated. I wrote sad poems (a la Edna St. Vincent Millay and Dame Edith Sitwell)--filled with lines such as:

Our night for love designed, speeds silent on and on,

And time, which only breathless seconds since had seemed so kind,

Is gone.

Neely didn’t answer letters or write poetry. He did, however, write music, and some months later I received the penciled score of his first work for harpsichord--Nine Variations on an Original Theme. The piece held such emotional intensity for me that it was not until 1979 that I copied it out while on my first sabbatical leave, prepared it for performance, and then gave the premiere the following year. Whatever one may think now of such a youthful endeavor, the work certainly is well-crafted for harpsichord--one result of Neely’s frequent opportunities for experimenting with the instrument’s textures at the small two-manual Sperrhake harpsichord, shoehorned into the third-floor dormer room I rented at one of Rochester’s “organ student houses,” 20 Sibley Place.

During my seven years of teaching in Virginia I played a fair amount of 20th-century harpsichord music: Ned Rorem’s Lovers, the Falla Concerto, the Martinu Sonate. But there I was primarily a choral conductor and organist (and enjoyed premiering several new works written for choir or organ by St. Paul’s College colleague Walter Skolnik and New York composer Robin Escovado). My only harpsichord “commission” of this period went to the builder William Dowd, along with almost half a year’s salary, for my first truly first-rate harpsichord, one of his early Blanchet-inspired instruments, delivered to Norfolk in January 1969.

Rudy Shackelford

Shortly after moving to Dallas in 1970, an unanticipated package reached me at Southern Methodist University. This contained Virginia composer Rudy Shackelford’s piece Le Tombeau de Stravinsky. Since my SMU colleague Robert Anderson was a devoted exponent of wild and wooly new organ music, it seemed fitting for me to take on Rudy’s serialism. I also liked the work, and included it on my first Musical Heritage Society disc, The Harpsichord Now and Then, released in 1975.

Ross Lee Finney

Another challenging work, more thorny than I usually care to learn, is Ross Lee Finney’s unique essay for the instrument, Hexachord for Harpsichord. In four movements (Aria, Stomp, Ornaments, Fantasy), the 12-minute work was commissioned for me to play at a Hartt School of Music contemporary keyboard music festival scheduled for June 1984. Drawing few registrants, the event was cancelled, so I gave the first performance that fall in Dallas, not playing it in the composer’s presence until a concert in Hartford the following year.

Working with Finney was quite daunting. A most distinguished and individual composer, he basically disregarded my several suggestions as to texture, and provided me with a nearly-illegible score, the successful realization of which absolutely required a damper pedal, unfortunately not available on most harpsichords. I struggled to read his chicken scratches and tried to parlay his ideas into something that made sense on a plucked instrument. Eventually I wrote him a detailed letter filled with questions and suggestions for possible improvements, not knowing if I would be ignored, despised, or possibly even removed from the project.

Instead, this generous and intelligent man wrote back that it was all very helpful--reminding him of the careful editing his Piano Sonata had received years earlier from its first performer, John Kirkpatrick. For Hexachord’s last movement, the most unplayable of the four, he promised a revision, although current work on his opera left him little time. When the promised revision arrived, it was accompanied by this note: 

I don’t know whether this is better or worse. I’ve spent the vacation week on it and now am so loaded with commitments that it’s the best I can hope for. . . . I tied my right leg to the piano stool so I hope I didn’t think in terms of pedal. . .

Responding to a tape of the first performance, Finney wrote,

I like immensely your performance . . . It seems to me that you have done a wonderful job of projecting the music and it sounds better to me than I feared it would. I like all of your revisions, particularly the ending of the last movement, and I will see that your corrections get in the copy with Peters so that when it is published, they will be included. . .

Unfortunately, this was not to be the case. The printed score from Peters does not present the preferred ending, but rather a more-protracted, rather anemic one.

Herbert Howells

A major commission from the 1970s was Herbert Howells’ Dallas Canticles, the unique Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis composed for St. Luke’s Church, where I was organist and choirmaster from 1971 until 1980. This lovely work was first performed there in 1975. The dedication and copyright of the work, basically a gift from the generous English composer, led to some early adventures in music publishing and the nurturing of  professional and personal connections with the American composer, church musician, and publisher Gerald Near.

Gerald Near

Undoubtedly the most ambitious of my commissions thus far is Near’s three-movement Concerto for Harpsichord, composed for performance at the 1980 national convention of the American Guild of Organists in Minneapolis. Gerald, a Minnesota resident at that time, had not been included in the group of composers invited to provide new works for the gathering, so I asked him to write a concerted work for my program in Orchestra Hall. He took on the project, and, most generously, accepted no fee for this major work.

The performance was carefully prepared, with the composer conducting a superb string ensemble comprising players from the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. The work was greeted with warm applause and considerable affection by the large crowd of attendees. And why not? The piece is very appealing, with memorable melodies, lush harmonies, and an appropriately balanced scoring. Critic Byron Belt, writing in The American Organist for August 1980, concentrated his remarks on the plethora of new scores heard during the convention. Of the Near he commented “ . . . its obvious popular appeal was instantly audible in a splendid performance by Larry Palmer (to whom it is dedicated) and the orchestra under the composer.” In The Diapason (August 1980), Marilou Kratzenstein opined, “The Distler [Allegro Spirituoso e Scherzando] and Near works are both very idiomatic to the medium. By skillful orchestration, the harpsichord part comes through clearly even when accompanied by a 22-piece string orchestra. Both of these attractive works were given clean, crisp performances. It was a pleasure to be present at the premiere of the Gerald Near concerto, which will likely become a favorite with harpsichordists in the near-future.” A future “for the Near” has taken considerably longer than anticipated, but, at last, Gerald’s lovely work had its second performance in October 2004, this time with the SMU Meadows Symphony under Paul Phillips.

Ever peripatetic, Near lived in Dallas for a time, where he held several church positions. When I needed a piece to conclude a program given in conjunction with the Dallas Museum of Art’s major show of El Greco paintings I turned again to Gerald. He spent some time at my house trying various ideas on the harpsichord. The resulting Triptych, completed in 1982, was first played in public at the Museum in January 1983. It certainly achieved its requisite Spanish flavor in the concluding movement, a brilliant neo-Scarlattian romp. Before that Final there are two lovely miniatures--an impressionistic Carillon, and the lyrically Italianate Siciliano (inspired by the composer’s love interest at the time). All three movements are idiomatically conceived for the instrument.

Vincent Persichetti

Dear Vincent Persichetti responded to questions concerning his then-unpublished 1951 Harpsichord Sonata by sending a copy of the manuscript. I loved the work immediately, and still find this first essay for harpsichord to be Vincent’s most arresting and accessible work for the instrument! By the time I was engaged to play a harpsichord recital for the Philadelphia gathering of the International Congress of Organists in 1977, his Sonata was available in printed form. The concert was scheduled to be played in historic St. George’s Methodist Church in the central city, so Persichetti, who lived in Philadelphia, planned to attend, but heavy rain that afternoon delayed him. (It also knocked out power to many venues, causing consternation, and cancellation, for some concurrent organ recitals.) The composer arrived at the church just as my program ended, so I offered to play his Sonata for him after the audience departed. I did so, he made cogent comments (some of them concerned keeping steady tempi and he advised playing the work exactly as he had notated it), and he autographed my printed score (“Thanks to Larry Palmer for a meaningful Benjamin Franklin performance in my own city.” [The reference to Franklin refers to the bridge bearing his name. St. George’s is adjacent to the bridge access road, allowing considerable noise every few minutes from public transit vehicles.]). Then he drove me back to the hotel.

Thus began an acquaintance, nurtured by a Sonata commission from me, occasional piquant notes, or the random, unexpected telephone call from the composer. When he published an incorrect wording of the dedication in my commissioned Sonata VI (crediting Southern Methodist University with payment of the commission fee, an error that I feared might cause problems with some of my academic colleagues), Vincent assured me that he would think of some way to make it up to me. A year or so later, he telephoned with the news that his latest piece, Serenade Number 15, would bear the inscription “Commissioned by Larry Palmer.” “To make it official,” he said, “send me a check for one dollar.” Because this was a time of high inflation, I sent him a check for two dollars, eliciting the response, “How wonderful--this is the first time I’ve ever had a commission doubled!”

It was even more gratifying for me, since I gained two works from a significant composer for a total fee of $502.

Persichetti’s concise Serenade consists of five short movements: the moody Prelude, marked desolato; a quicker Episode; the even faster Bagatelle; a gentle, cantabile Arioso; and the closing Capriccio--made up of a delicato single line, in the texture of a Bach composition for solo stringed instrument. The seven-minute work reminds that, while Persichetti was a distinguished academic, whose mind espoused complicated serial techniques, his soul remained true to the song-inspired expressivity of his Italian heritage.

Rudy Davenport

The 1990s saw a veritable spate of harpsichord writing by Texas-based composer Rudy Davenport. First introduced to me in 1992 through Fr. Tom Goodwin, a harpsichord-playing Catholic padre on Padre Island, Rudy provided me with nine unique works for solo harpsichord or small ensemble with harpsichord. His first national exposure came at the combined 1998 Southeastern and Midwestern Historical Keyboard Societies’ meeting in Texas, where a program devoted to Davenport’s harpsichord writing concluded with the haunting Songs of the Bride, the composer’s settings of texts from The Song of Solomon for solo soprano, oboe, and harpsichord. (Six of these works comprise the program for the compact disc Music of Rudy Davenport, issued by Limited Editions Recordings in 2003.)

Some of my most enjoyable concert experiences have been those involving making music with others, and none has offered more delight than performing music for multiple harpsichords (usually two prove difficult enough to nudge into some semblance of compatible tunings). A Davenport work of exceptional charm, but one not graced with a completely written-out score, is his At Play with Giles Farnaby, a set of seven variations and a fugal finale on Farnaby’s For Two Virginals (Number 55 in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book). Rudy heard this short piece when it was performed by colleague Barbara Baird and me during our 1994 summer harpsichord workshop in New Mexico. His jaunty take on it, as well as the delightful and crafty contrapuntal ending have been an audience favorite on the two occasions we played together. This duo harpsichord work was an especially intensive collaboration, in its creation as well as its performance. Since the divergence of our ways after 1999, I have missed such exuberant music making, as well as the active involvement in fine polishing and editing Rudy’s engaging works.

Glenn Spring

But that void has been filled by the reintroduction into my artistic life of the Denver-based composer Glenn Spring, first encountered at the 1990 Alienor Harpsichord Composition competition finals in Augusta, Georgia. There his William Dowd: His Bleu was one of the winning works. Eventually Spring’s composition was published in The Diapason’s February 1992 tribute to the eminent harpsichord maker. A short while later Glenn’s son Brian moved to Dallas, giving us yet another reason to “stay in touch.” After Brian’s departure from this part of Texas there were years of diminishing communication, a situation suddenly reversed by Brian’s “out-of-the-blue” early morning call from Korea, where he was employed as an English teacher. He must have told his father about this call, for shortly thereafter I received a copy of a 1999 keyboard work, Glenn’s seven-movement charmer Trifles (now a prize winner in the most recent Alienor Competition, 2004). I liked it, learned it, and began playing it in recitals here and there.

A special confluence of friends occurred when Charles and Susan Mize, having contracted for Richard Kingston’s opus 300 Millennium harpsichord, a spectacular nine-foot Franco-Flemish instrument with contemporary brushed steel stand and computer-compatible music desk, asked me to play the Washington, D.C. dedication concert on the instrument. I thought it desirable that Charles should play on his new instrument at that event, so I commissioned Glenn Spring to write a work for two players at one instrument. The pleasing result was Suite 3-D, comprising Denver Rocket, Big D[allas] Blues, and D C Steamroller (honoring the three D’s of our home cities), interspersed with two quiet, lyrical movements (Romance, Night Thoughts). For a second performance on my home concert series (Limited Editions), long-time colleague Charles Brown brought both his musical and histrionic skills to the work, serving as collaborative harpsichordist as well as creator and reader of witty verses before each movement.

The most recent sins of commission, from the year 2004, have included another ensemble work by Spring, Images from Wallace Stevens for Violin and Harpsichord, first performed February 13 in celebration of the 20th season of house concerts (program number 60). Meeting Glenn’s wife, violinist Kathleen Spring, at the Mize harpsichord dedication program, I invited her to join me in this anniversary season, and inquired about possible violin and harpsichord pieces from her husband’s catalog. He responded by offering to compose something for us. Consisting of seven movements, the Images are inspired by short bits of Stevens’ poetry, so much of which evokes musical connections.

Tim Broege

Tim Broege’s score Songs Without Words Set Number Seven, composed for the SMU Wind Ensemble’s conductor Jack Delaney and me, had its first performance by the group and mezzo-soprano Virginia Dupuy on April 16, 2004. The most notable and prominent part for harpsichord is Broege’s reworking of the famous Lachrimae Pavan by John Dowland as each section is presented by the solo harpsichord, then reprised by the full ensemble, heard as the fifth of the work’s nine movements. (This setting may be extracted and played as a solo harpsichord composition).

Simon Sargon

My 35th annual faculty recital at SMU in September 2004 featured the first public hearing of composition professor Simon Sargon’s harpsichord reworking  of Dos Prados (“From the Meadows”), another lovely pavan, originally conceived for the single-manual 1762 Iberian organ in SMU’s Meadows Museum, and now, with a few changes of texture and tessitura, effectively adapted for solo harpsichord.

Involving composers in our performing lives is one of the most rewarding actions we can take. For us it provides the excitement of adding new pieces to our repertoire; for them, it is an affirmation of their necessary contributions to the ongoing vitality of our art; and perhaps not least, this is one pleasure that is neither life-threatening nor fattening! I urge each of you to join me in committing some sins of commission in the near future.

Sources

Calvin Hampton: Consonance remains unpublished; however an increasing number of his organ works are available from  Wayne Leupold Editions (available through ECS Publishing).

Neely Bruce: Nine Variations is available from <[email protected]> (or 212/875-7011).

Rudy Shackelford: Tombeau de Stravinsky is published by Joseph Boonin (B.319).

Recording: The Harpsichord Now and Then (Larry Palmer, harpsichord), MHS LP 3222.

Ross Lee Finney: Hexachord for Harpsichord is published by Edition Peters (67034).

Herbert Howells: Dallas Canticles, Aureole Editions (available from MorningStar Music).

For additional information about the commissioning of this work, see my article “Herbert Howells and the Dallas Canticles” in The American Organist, October 1992, pp. 60-62.

Gerald Near: Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings 1980 (Aureole Editions 149; performance materials on rental only) and Triptych for Harpsichord (Aureole Editions 02) are both available from MorningStar Music.

Recording (Triptych): 20th Century Harpsichord Music, vol. 2 (Barbara Harbach, harpsichord), Gasparo GSCD-266.

Vincent Persichetti: his nine Harpsichord Sonatas and Serenade 15, are published by Elkan-Vogel.

For additional information see my article “Vincent Persichetti: A Love for the harpsichord (Some Words to Mark his 70th Birthday)” in The Diapason, June 1985, p. 8.

Rudy Davenport: Scores are available from the composer at <www.RudyDavenport. com>.

For additional information, see my article “Rudy Davenport’s Harpsichord Music of the 1990s” in The Diapason, April 2004, p. 18.

Recording: Music of Rudy Davenport (Patti Spain, soprano; Stewart Williams, oboe; Larry Palmer, harpsichord), Limited Editions Recordings LER 9904.

Glenn Spring: Scores are available from the composer at <[email protected]>.

Tim Broege: Scores are available from the composer at <[email protected]>.

Simon Sargon: Scores are available from the composer at <[email protected]>.