Transcription Prescription

I was listening www.organlive.com today and heard Thomas Murray's performance of Dvorak's Carnival Overture on the Yale Woolsey Hall Organ (Newberry Memorial Organ) which was just terrific enough for me to go to Amazon.com and buy the single MP3 for 99 cents. While you may or may not be a Dvorak fan, this hauntingly beautiful piece has a special place in my memories from high school days when I listened to an orchestral version over and over. Thomas Murray's registration on the Yale Skinner organ is really quite amazing. It has rather positively changed my opinion of the role of the organ in a convincing orchestral symphonic transcription for organ and has helped me understand the enthusiasm for such instruments which existed near the turn of the last century (1900's). Spec sheet for this organ here.

Speaking of transcriptions for organ, having recently watched the duly troubling DVD Troubled Water, complete with a prominent role for a pipe organist, I am convinced that there is a wide-open opportunity for contemporary pipe organ music that is neither stodgy nor dissonant. Music that, dare it be said, is serious yet modern without being stuffy. Perhaps even based on popular music.

Even if you aren't a friend of Dorothy or the Wizard of Oz, you'll probably like this version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow The subtle buildup towards the end is magical. Just goes to prove that one does not need a theater organ to play accessible music or a lot of pipes to make wonderful sounds (organ has just 8 ranks, 550 pipes only).

A recent pipe organ list mentioned Paul Ayre's Toccata on All You Need is Love (aka Toccata on Amor Satis Est) for organ. I couldn't find any YouTube performances of Ayre's Toccata online but I did find several interesting organ renditions of All You Need is Love. Here are a couple:
All You Need is Love (skip ahead to 01:00 on the time line where the music starts).
or an interesting home version:
All You Need is Love (probably a closer transcription to the original).

My interest picqued, I had to have Ayer's Toccata on All You Need Is Love and have now sight read it through twice. Or should I say stumblingly attempted to sight read it! Great fun and someday I will no doubt make it sound good enough to play in public! Not a transcription really, it can be said to be more or less loosely based on the original Beatles tune. Paul Ayer's Toccata feels a bit more difficult to play than In Dir Ist Freud (my previous major challenge, which by the way, I am relearning nearly from scratch now that I have a teacher to inform me that it is not cool to mix Bach and legato!) Registration looks like it will be key and it definitely needs a good pedal support. Get your own copy http://paulayres.co.uk/catalogue/243:

If you happen to be in Tennessee for the American Guild of Organists' National Convention Friday July 6, 2012, check out Jane Parker-Smith's two performances of Paul's Toccata (the Fab Four meet the symphonic French organ tradition). I heard her play at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco last year and she is terrific, although I got the distinct impression either she or the Ruffati (probably the latter) were having a bad day. Her performance of Paul's Toccata will be at the Brentwood United Methodist Church, Tennessee (presumably in Brentwood).

Past is Prologue

I've been reading the fascinating Memoirs of a San Francisco Organ Builder by Louis Schoenstein. The book provides a very personal, albeit often non-chronological, look into the life of a very long lived bay area organ builder whose father, brother, and sons were also organ builders in a company which continues to bear their name (although not their ownership to the best of my knowledge). Although not a work of high literature, the book is still interesting from more than just an organ point of view. It is not often one is able to read a book published in 1977 which relates first hand recollections of the 1899 Naval celebrations on their return from the Philippines following the Spanish American war. Or recollections of the 1906 fires which ravaged San Francisco following the great earthquake (another due again sometime one must assume). Or of the author's boyhood memories of the tomb of a Unitarian preacher who helped convince civil war era 1860's San Francisco to side with the north. But just as importantly, it gives a no nonsense view of the pipe organ builder's trade.

Schoenstein's memoirs are divided into sections. The first part describes scores of organs which succumbed to the flames in 1906 and is something of a downer. The next deals with the mechanical workings of an orchestrion (a special interest of his father), and the section I am reading now is fascinating mainly in that it describes the many organs of the period that survived at least into the 1960's and possibly into the current day. My next project will be to actually see those organs that survived. More on this later hopefully.