Organ Music for Sunday, September 10, 2023
This Sunday’s organ selections have an element in common – they are all in the key of G major!
The prelude is a personal favorite of mine, the beautiful “Song of Peace” by the twentieth-century French composer Jean Langlais (with whom Judy Snyder in FBG’s Sanctuary Choir studied). Part of a collection entitled Neuf Pièces (Nine Pieces), published in the late 1940’s, Chant de Paix has been very popular with organists around the world since its publication. It features an accompaniment of slow-moving, beautiful, Debussy-like harmonies – played on the warm, strings-like Voix Celeste – with equally slow-moving and rather wide-ranging melodic lines played as contrast on flute stops in both the hands and the pedal. All of these elements together create an atmosphere of deep calm and repose.
For the offertory, we will hear the eighteenth-century English composer William Walond’s Voluntary in G. Voluntaries were a favored type of organ composition in England during this period and were written for the keyboards only with no pedal part (since English organs at this time did not have pedalboards). They consisted of either two or four short movements, with the tempo arrangement slow-fast (two movements) or slow-fast-slow-fast (four movements). Walond’s G major Voluntary utilizes the two-movement format, with a sustained, lyric first movement – played on 8’ Principal and Flute stops – followed by a quicker, lively second movement. The second movements of these voluntaries typically featured as a solo voice either the Cornet (a compound stop of five pitches, 8’, 4’, 2 2/3’, 2’, and 1 3/5’, with a rather reed-like quality) or the Trumpet; the work heard this Sunday is a Cornet Voluntary.
This Sunday’s postlude is the Fugue of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in G major, BWV 541 (the Prelude was heard for the postlude two Sundays ago). A lively, vivacious work, this Fugue’s main melody (or subject) is characterized especially by its many repeated notes, which help to generate a virtually perpetual motion texture. Near the end of the Fugue, there is a sudden pause on a very striking chord (for you music theory fans, it’s a vii07/V chord sounding against scale degree 5 of G major in the pedal); scholars have suggested that pauses such as this near the end of a fugue, which happen in several other Bach organ fugues as well, might have signaled a point at which the performer was to improvise a cadenza.
– Charles