Organ and choral music are often, and historically, intertwined, and the organ, being the instrument most capable of playing multiple musical lines or voices, has continued certain techniques characteristic of medieval and Renaissance composition, in which vocal parts were conceived entirely as individual and equal lines rather than a series of chords or melody-and-accompaniment. Various forms of imitation – the repetition of a musical phrase in one voice shortly after its appearance in another voice, used extensively in those earlier periods – are thus commonly used in organ music to this day. Canon is an imitative device whereby a melody is begun in one voice, and then begun by another before the first has finished, requiring the melody to harmonize with itself. ‘Row, row, row your boat’ is a simple and well-known example. In a fugue, a subject or theme appears successively in the various voices, usually alternating its entries on the tonic (home note) and dominant (the note five notes about the tonic). Another technique common in organ music is fore-imitation, in which accompanimental voices ‘preview’ part or all of a phrase of a tune that will then be played, often in longer note-values, with ornamentation, and/or on a more prominent sound combination. In practice these devices may be combined or approximated in various ways.
2 Epiphany
Martin Luther’s Catechism hymn on the Sacrament of Baptism, ‘Christ unser Herr zum Jordan kam’ [Hymn 139, in Bland Tucker’s excellent English version], forms the basis of the 11:15 am Offertory anthem as well as the prelude. The latter comes from a North German manuscript written in the mid-seventeenth century and is a typical work of that time and place: the left hand and pedal play slower-moving voices not unlike the vocal parts of a Renaissance motet, while the right hand, playing on a different keyboard and thus a different sound from the left, plays the hymn-tune with many ‘diminutions’, that is, quick-moving figures that fill in between the melody notes, which continue to fall on the main beats. This particular piece is somewhat unusual in that the introductory passage includes some diminutions, while the right hand’s first phrase contains none, saving them for the second phrase, in which the first phrase of the hymn-tune is repeated. It is also remarkable, though not unique, in that much of the pedal line also consists of (unadorned) phrases of the hymn-tune, played or or less in canon with the right hand (the middle voices also participate in canonic fore-imitation to some degree). The high-pitched pedal stops common on North German organs of the time, approximated on our instrument, allow this pedal line to function simultaneously as a bass line and as a dialogue partner with the treble, at the same pitch level as the right-hand part.
Because ‘Christ unser Herr’ will not be sung at 9:00, two short preludes on another hymn-tune for the day will serve as the prelude. The Scottish psalm-tune ‘Caithness’ serves in our Hymnal for another hymn for the Baptism of Our Lord: an original text by the same Bland Tucker, ‘Christ, when for us you were baptized’ [121]. C. Hylton Stewart, writing in England in the early twentieth century, alternates phrases of the hymn set mostly in ordinary four-part harmony with passages that begin with the melody in shorter note-values (one could perhaps call this simple fore-imitation, though it is not taken up in other voices) and continue with downward-floating figures that somewhat blur the triple meter. The two kinds of writing are also played on two different keyboards and thus on mildly contrasting, simple, foundational, sounds. The first phrase of the hymn-tune is, like those in the setting of ‘Christ unser Herr’, also treated canonically, the bass following the treble at a time-interval of one measure.
3 Epiphany
A paraphrase of the Maundy Thursday chant ‘Ubi caritas et amor’ is found at Hymn 581, ‘Where charity and love prevail’, which is set to another old British psalm-tune, ‘Cheshire’. A prelude on this tune by twentieth-century English composer Gordon Slater does not use imitative techniques as such, but does set the melody in a two- and three-way dialogue between the bass (played in the pedal), tenor, and treble. Slater rotates among rather static harmonies, a countermelody in a high register played on a single flute-like sound, and more linear writing with some hints of imitation in this atmospheric, perhaps slightly improvisatory, setting.
4 Epiphany
J.S. Bach wrote several short settings of ‘Liebster Jesu, wir sind hier’ (‘Blessed Jesus, at thy word’ [440]), two of which come from a collection called the Orgelbüchlein (‘Little Organ Book’). Both of these set the melody in canon between the soprano and alto voices – but rather than being in the same key, the second canonic voice begins five notes away from the first other. These two voices are indicated to be played on a separate keyboard from the two accompanimental voices played by the left hand; in one of the two settings, these are (unusually for Bach’s time) marked forte and piano, or loud and soft.
The Presentation of Our Lord Jesus Christ
Several hymns in the Hymnal 1982 are set to melodies from the Genevan Psalter, the collection of 150 psalms set in rhyming syllabic meter that were the only music sung in Calvinist churches for a long while after the Reformation. These sturdy tunes, like the British psalm-tunes, Lutheran chorales, chant melodies, and many folk tunes from the same period, have a timeless quality that has ensured their continued use in congregational song and in the organ and choral music often based on it. In our Hymnal, Reginald Heber’s hymn ‘Virgin-born, we bow before thee’ [258] is set to the Genevan melody used for Psalms 77 and 86, which is the basis of two organ settings by living Dutch composer Jaco van Leeuwen. In the first of these, the melody is treated in canon between the tenor and treble voices, while the alto moves in shorter note-values. Van Leeuwen does not indicate that the left hand (the leader of the canon) should play on a separate keyboard from the right, but the notation suggests that it might. The second setting is written in the harmonically rich idiom typical of early-to-mid-twentieth-century French music; the melody is treated freely in both soloed-out passages in the treble and in various other parts of the texture. In both cases the music, whether conceived linearly or chordally, is satisfying enough that only very simple sounds are indicated and required to realize the music at the organ.
5 Epiphany
Canadian composer David Cameron wrote a set of variations on the Hebrew tune ‘Leoni’ in 1970. In the first, the melody appears, stated simply, in the treble voice, though snippets of it appear in other parts as well. The second features only two accompanying voices which move in shorter note-values and larger intervals, and calls for a brighter combination of sounds to clarify and fill out the more leaner and more active texture. In the third variation, the treble melody is highly ornamented and is played on a particular combination of sounds in which, for each key being played, five pipes at different pitches sound together. These pitches actually form a major chord, but are so much higher than the fundamental pitch that they simply form a composite timbre rather than being heard as individual notes or as a chord. Fore-imitation is applied very loosely. The fourth variation is a fugue based on an ascending motive that is prominent in the hymn-tune, played on the organ’s main chorus; this leads into a setting for the full organ, in which the melody begins in the treble but is taken up by the pedals in the second half.
Last Sunday after the Epiphany
Living American organist-composer Christa Rakich has written a number of sets of hymn-tune variations making use of techniques common in Germany in the late seventeenth to mid-eighteenth centuries, found, broadly speaking, in music of composers such as Pachelbel, Böhm, and Walther. Such variations using standard patterns to elaborate what are, ‘under the hood’, simple harmonizations of the melody, must have been improvised by the hundreds or thousands. The hymn-tune we know as ‘Salzburg’ [135], originally setting the text ‘Alle Menschen müßen sterben’, is in fact the subject of sets of variations attributed to Pachelbel and Walther. Notable among Rakich’s variations are one using chromatic lines (‘creeping’ up and down both white and black keys of the keyboard), one with the melody played by the pedals in the tenor voice, a jig-like setting, and the final variation, which features fugal fore-imitation of each phrase in dotted rhythms, the full melody then played in long notes in the bass.
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