events:
You can still see the
organ recital from Friday,
Oct 11, 7:30 pm
@Third Presbyterian
Church, Pittsburgh
watch on Twitch! https://www.twitch.tv/thirdchurch
picture at right from the
piano recital (with friends)
on September 29
I'm writing this on a
night when the weather is most fowl,
dark, and Novemberish, with more
than a hint of gloom; wet, and cold.
Fit for contemplation from a
distance.
Fit for tales from
the beyond.
Here's one I like to
bring out for Halloween--a musical
tale. It was written by someone long
dead, and unidentified, intended to
be played on the organ, that
thunderous instrument that inspires
terror in so many who dare not
approach any building in which it
may be housed, awe in those who do.
Be prepared for the former reaction.
If you live in the
temperate zone of the Northern
Hemisphere, the world is getting
colder, the days are getting shorter,
the trees will soon be nude and
scraggly looking, and all manner of
scary things that might happen will
begin to seem more likely to happen.
Maybe they were just waiting for the
darkness to happen in.
What was that?!?
The sound behind
you. Didn�t you hear it?
Ok, well, I heard
it. You might want to be prepared. It
sounded a little creepy. Just saying.
Anyway, where was I?
�.there it is again.
Well, with whatever
time you�ve got left, let�s share a
story about some great composers and
their not-so-great demises. The way
they died. That�s what this season of
fear is all about, isn�t it? All
things horrible and �possibly fatal.
Today we get
to watch a musicologist in action;
that is, we shall read his comments
and ourselves comment upon them. This
is taken from page 558 of Peter
Williams' "The Organ Music of J. S.
Bach." Commenting upon the prelude and
fugue in G minor, he writes of the
prelude:
"Only on paper
could evidence be found for regarding
this movement as an "Italian Courante'
(Dietrich, 1931); neither the form (A
B A B) nor the figuration (one harmony
per bar, decorated) is typical of any
courante. Clearly the conventional
cadence formulae have been well learnt
(bb 16, 22, 36) and the last might
easily have been a phrygian half-close
had it been conventional for prelude
to en in this way. As elsewhere in the
Eight, simple one-bar sequences above
a basso continuo are so prominent as
almost to suggest that their composer
was consciously creating a series of
samples."
I've recently made
a recording of Bach's Toccata and
Fugue in D Minor, which you can hear
by clicking the blue title at the end
of this article. You'll recognize the
opening: it's one of the handful of
classical pieces that everybody knows,
or rather, that they know the first
ten seconds of, anyway. It will
probably also remind you of something
right away, too. I'm thinking of a
certain autumnal holiday this week.
This isn't because Bach wrote the
piece with that in mind, it is because
somebody in Hollywood thought the
piece sounded scary and decided to get
some yardage out of it. It's been
making the rounds of the scary movies
ever since, and poor Bach doesn't get
any royalties.
Then again, there are some people who
don't think he even wrote the thing in
the first place, so why should he?
Now, when I first played the piece as
a teenager I assumed what I was
supposed to assume. The piece was
Bach's and that's that. I was also
introduced to a group of little
preludes and fugues that it turns out
Bach didn't write either and now that
I am older and know something about
Bach's music and have a more developed
sense of musical quality I can
certainly see why people have their
doubts because the pieces aren't
really that good. The pieces are
pretty slight anyway, so what does it
really matter?
But to cast doubt on the Toccata? Now
that's shattering.