Listening to the Organ in Advent
Our 11:15 a.m. service music in Advent is based on the melody associated with St. Ambrose’s hymn ‘Redeemer of the nations, come’ (‘Veni redemptor gentium’ [55]), also known in Luther’s translation, ‘Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland’, with a simplified version of the chant melody [54]. Our organ preludes at 11:15 (excepting Advent 2, when Lessons & Carols replaces the Eucharist) are all based on this fine tune, which has inspired many composers throughout the centuries.
On Advent 1, we hear two short settings by modern composers. In the first, by Helmut Walcha, the melody is played by the right hand, while a sinuous accompaniment derived from that melody is played by the left hand, in canon at the second (that is, the left hand plays two musical lines which consist of the same material, one line following the other and one note higher throughout). The use of the tremulant (which makes the organ’s wind and thus the pitch waver) contributes to the unsettled atmosphere. In the second prelude, by former UT organ professor Hap Speller, the two hands, each playing a simple flute-like sound from its own keyboard, carry on a dialogue while the feet play the hymn-tune on a foundation sound. While in the first prelude a single repeated note in the pedal propels the music forward, in the second this same ‘home note’ is held throughout the piece, giving it a sense of timelessness; where the use of many close intervals in the first piece contributes to a slightly claustrophobic feeling, the second piece is built almost entirely upon the interval of a fourth, resulting in a more ‘open’, but still unresolved, sound. The musical language of both pieces heralds the start of a new season filled with a sense of the world’s need for healing and our expectation of its arrival in the various advents of Christ.
On Advent 3, the 11:15 prelude consists of two versets (pieces intended for alternation with sung stanzas) by Hieronymus Praetorius, a key figure in North German music around the turn of the seventeenth century. In the first verset, the melody appears in the bass voice, played by the feet on a reed-based combination of sounds (organ reed pipes function like clarinets, but the ‘reed’ and the ‘mouthpiece’ are made of brass; they are especially strong in lower ranges), accompanied by the full chorus of the instrument (several pipes sounding, at multiple pitches, for each key being played: the most characteristic sound of the organ). In the second verset, the melody appears most completely in the highest voice – highly decorated in the manner improvised by singers and instrumentalists at the time – though phrases and motives taken from the melody appear in the other voices as well.
On Advent 4, the prelude consists of several versets by a somewhat later North German composer, Andreas Kneller. Kneller makes use of many of the possibilities inherent in an instrument with two manual keyboards and one pedal keyboard: the minimum complement for organs of his time and place, in which the various keyboards controlled contrasting but more or less balanced and complete divisions of the instrument. The melody is variously ornamented in the highest voice as a solo, with accompaniment in the left hand with or without pedal; played plainly in the right hand but accompanied by a busy left-hand solo; played in the pedal with a free solo line in the right hand and accompaniment in the left; fragmented by arpeggiation or by echo effects. The last verset features pedal solos, a speciality of the North German school, and also calls for two independent musical lines to be played by the two feet, the right foot taking the melody and the left the bass. This kind of majestic, richly textured music – mostly improvised at that time – sees musician, instrument (and bellows-pumpers, before the use of electricity!), and organ builders offering their mental and physical, technical and artistic capabilities to the fullest extent in the service of God and the Church.
Similar ways of using the organ are also heard in the 9 a.m. preludes, based on other hymns sung each week. On Advent 1, the prelude by living Dutch composer Theo Meurs is based on the great hymn ‘Sleepers, wake!’ [61]; the series of simple variations for the hands alone, using patterns of notes and rhythms common to many such pieces, provides many opportunities for the use of small, colorful combinations of the organ’s sounds. On Advent 2, a prelude on ‘O come, O come, Emmanuel’ [56] by 20th century English-American composer Alec Wyton features the string-like sounds of the organ, which often are provided and used in such a way that two pipes sound for each key being played, the two sets of pipes deliberately slightly out of tune so as to produce an ethereal undulating effect (an effect first used by Italian organists in the 17th century at the Elevation of the Host at Mass: a moment of supreme devotional and mystical intensity). Wyton’s work is built on an ostinato, a repeated musical phrase that perhaps portrays, once again, the insistence of our prayer for Christ’s nearer presence.
On Advent 4, the prelude is based on ‘How bright appears the Morning Star’ [497]. This fantasia, probably only a partial survival of a longer work by Georg Leyding (1664–1710), uses the two manual keyboards of the organ in both solo-and-accompaniment and echo roles (the latter a very popular effect in organ music, but in this case derived from the repeated ‘cuckoo’-like motive in the second half of the melody); the pedal at first plays a wide-ranging bass line and later plays the hymn-tune. Extensive use of repeated notes shows the influence of music for stringed instruments, which can easily play such figures.
Our choral anthems at 11:15 also demonstrate different ways in which the organ is used with voices.
On Advent 1 and 3, anthems in the English Romantic style make use of a device that first became popular in England in the 18th century before spreading to other countries in the 19th: the Swell. Because an organ pipe sounds only one pitch, one timbre, and one volume level as established by the organ builder, changes in volume are normally effected by mechanically admitting or closing off wind to various sets of pipes so that more or fewer pipes sound for each note played at the keyboard. The desire among organists in the 18th and 19th centuries to imitate the very gradual or very sudden changes in volume characteristic of the piano and orchestra, which had by then taken over the organ’s and organist’s role at the pinnacle of instrumental music-making, led to the placing of part of the organ’s pipes in an enclosure fronted by louvers operated by means of a pedal. A combination of engaging different sets of pipes and opening and closing these ‘swell shutters’, then, creates changes in volume and timbre either slow and subtle (as in the setting of the Collect for St John the Baptist on Advent 3, following the choir’s long musical lines setting the long prose sentence of the text), or more sudden, dramatic, and wide-ranging (as in the Advent 1 anthem, a setting of stanzas from the Advent evening hymn ‘Creator of the stars of night’ [60], in which the quite orchestral organ part punctuates the choir’s phrases).
At Lessons & Carols on Advent 2, the final anthem, the work of living English composer Parker Ramsay, by contrast features a busy and sparkling organ part completely independent of the choir’s melody which it accompanies, fully satisfying without any changes of volume or timbre at all on account of its inherent rhythmic, intervallic, and textural interest. The clarity and brightness of tone which the piece requires is achieved by the use of a small subset of the organ’s chorus. On Advent 3 and 4, modern pieces written in older styles (the Advent 4 consisting of choral versets on ‘Redeemer of the nations’ alternating with the chant) are accompanied by the organ simply doubling the choir’s parts with a small and unchanging combination of sounds; this kind of accompaniment was standard in 17th-century England (whence the composer of the very rich Advent 3 anthem ‘Stir up thy power’, setting the Collect of the Day, drew his inspiration) and probably common enough elsewhere when other instruments were not also being used.
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