upcoming events: Signup for my new OLLI
course, "Amadeus: Myth and Reality" at
the Osher U Pitt website. The course
runs Thursday afternoons, 1-2:50 at
Third Presbyterian Church, Shadyside,
from Oct. 18 - November 15th
Registration is still open until Oct
18th!Invite all your
Mozart-loving friends!
October 20 -- I'm running in the
Baltimore Marathon! This is not a
concert, but wish me luck anyway. You
should most definitely not tell
me to break a leg!
November 18th at 3pm
(Sunday) -- organ recital at Heinz
Chapel, Pittsburgh PA "Featuring the
French" -- one dramatic sonata, an
otherworldly choral-prelude, a majestic
offertoire, and moeaurx! (sorry)*
*that's supposed
to be French for "more" in case you were
wondering.
Persons from points elsewhere may not have
heard, but in Pittsburgh this year the
seasons are on the Julian calendar. It
snowed through the middle of April, and on
Tuesday we had a high of 86F.
It seems wrong to complain about such warm
weather, though if you and I have not gotten
acquainted, jawing about the calendrical
wrongness of the weather is one way to do
it. You don't have to email; you can just
imagine us agreeing with each other for as
long as you want to forestall doing
something useful.
Mozart called it the king of
instruments. It is certainly the most elaborate. A Pipe organ can consist
of hundreds, if not thousands, of pipes and millions of small parts. The console
alone may have from two to six keyboards, not including the row of foot pedals.
There are often at least a hundred buttons to push, stops to pull out, or toe
studs to kick which will activate huge banks of pipes, one pipe for each note.
Those pipes are found in one or more pipe rooms which are largely hidden away,
but may be the size of your living room.
Last week I finally made a trip to the library
to do some research into the problem of the 8
Little preludes and fugues and to find out why
there is a debate over their authorship. Before
I did that, I examined why many of us don't want
to do our own research or consider the positions
of those professionals who spend appreciable
portions of their lives tracking down sources
and considering styles when those positions
conflict with what we think we already know.
Being challenged does not go down easily in the
human psychology, particularly when one's tools
are unchanging certainty and little sense of how
someone else even came to a different conclusion
in the first place--in other words, lacking an
understanding of research methods and a thorough
acquaintance with musical styles of the time, it
is not easy for the average music maker to get
his or her head around the idea that some
composer they've never heard of might have
written pieces they love instead of a composer
they so revere.
Of course, this doesn't automatically mean that
the experts are always right, either.
Bless me, readers, for I keep sinning. In addition to being a church organist,
caretaker of a tradition most people ignore, aficionado of music for which few
people care, I compound my recklessness by being a scholar. Sort of.
Actually, I really just dabble in the stuff. When my advisor asked whether I
might consider a PhD in musicology I was nearly finished with the DMA and wasn't
particularly interested in starting another terminal degree, particularly when I
was getting old enough that it might reallybeterminal.
So I am still a rank amateur. But I have the effrontery to consider that knowing
things about the notes on the page before you besides what the score by itself
can tell you is not a bad thing. Horrors!
The piece is a chorale prelude called "Auf
meinen lieben Gott" and the reason it is odd is
that it is written in the form of a dance suite.
There are five parts, and the first is an
allemande, the second a double, the third a
sarabande, the fourth a courante, and the last a
gigue. It is a clever way of writing five
variations on a tune, but if you know something
about attitudes in church music several
centuries ago (and even today) there is one big
disconnect here.
