Matthew J. Hall, organ “In the art of the organ, he took the works of Bruhns, Reincken, Buxtehude, and several good French organists as models.” So wrote Johann Friedrich Agricola and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach in 1754 in Johann Sebastian Bach’s obituary. C. P. E. Bach reiterated this in 1775 when he wrote to Johann…
Project Synopsis Where does the church music of J. S. Bach belong in today’s world? Originally written to serve as “musical sermons” in the context of Lutheran church services, Bach’s cantatas were intended to provide listeners the opportunity for ethical reflection and inspire them to right action. Might something of that ethical function still be…
Classic French organ music, ca. 1660–1750, occupies a minor place in the modern organ repertory. It developed in the context of the rigid liturgical norms of French Catholicism and the special tonal characteristics of French organs of the period; in the absence of both of these contexts the music can (but need not!) seem meagre.…
There’s tuning and there’s tuning. Sometimes, I will be asked to tune a specific temperament. Though there are official recipes for such things, usually I just tune according to the following method. By simply adjusting the size of the fourths or fifths, I can achieve a gradient of tunings ranging from 1/4-comma meantone to (nearly-)equal…
This is a practical study in the pronunciation and declamation of the metrical French verse of La Motte, perhaps the greatest Classic French poet of the generation after Molière. La Motte was the librettist of André Campra’s L’Europe galante (1697), for instance. The texts were analyzed according to the principles of Bacilly (1668) and other writers who describe françois…