Saturday 24 July 2010
Glorious Moments and Missed Opportunities: a history of composing for the organ
The world's leading Bach experts reconsider the young Bach - the festival symposium offers a rare opportunity to hear Christoph Wolff and Peter Williams in debate. What can we learn from recent studies and discoveries about Johann Sebastian Bach, about his development as a composer and organist?
On a wider scale, the symposium focuses on the circumstances under which organ music was - and is - composed and performed. In the long but chequered history of organ composition, Glorious Moments seem to lend welcome relief to many Missed Opportunities. Why is it that Purcell, organist of Westminster Abbey for sixteen years, appears to have written no more than five little pieces for the organ? What is the historical basis of our concept of a 'composition'? Can we be sure that our favourite organ music was performed at all?
Nearer home, there were already recitals in St Bavo's in the Middle Ages. What was on the programme? In the Golden Age, Sweelinck's duties were to play in the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam…but not during services. What did he play?
Nearer today, in the mid-twentieth-century neo-Baroque instruments like the Bavo organ inspired a generation of Dutch organ composers - a little-known chapter for our foreign guests.
The festival symposium aims to provoke thought on familiar and less familiar aspects of our instrument, its composers and its players.
Click here for the symposium programme.
Click here to send an application to the office of the Organfestival.
