French Organ Music: From the Revolution to Franck and Widor by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Musicology, Organ Music, France
ISBN: 9781580460712
Amazon: 1580460712
Publisher: BOYE6
Published: 1995-10-01T22:00:00+00:00

Compositions of the 1860s

The earliest pieces in L’Organiste liturgiste are the two versets and amen on a chant which serves a variety of texts including Gallicæ custos (for vespers for the Feast of St. Geneviève) and Sæpi dum Christi (hymn for vespers for the Common of a Confessor) from 1865 and the two versets on Christe, sanctorum decus Angelorum (for vespers for the Feast of St. Gabriel) from 1866. These works are the collection’s only music from the 1860s and are the earliest examples of Guilmant’s chant-based music organ which can be reliably dated. The first verset of Gallicæ custos proudly presents its chant tune, conceived in a firmly metrical guise, in a canonic layout; a hint of modal harmony at the close of its chant tune clouds an otherwise tonal context. The second verset begins as a trio with the chant theme in the bass and whiffs of canonic imitation in the accompanimental voices. But the commitment to trio texture is indecisive and the verset concludes, after more than its share of awkward moments, with a cadence in five voices. While it begins with harmonies, voice leading, and dissonance treatment typical of the Baroque, these traits eventually give way to a cloying chromaticism which lies outside those norms. The first verset of Christe, sanctorum decus Angelorum is another trio setting, this time one with a Baroque-like walking bass line, and the second verset a fugue with a dense concluding stretto. Both versets share with Gallicæ custos the prominent presentation of chant tunes in obvious, strongly metrical patterns, within an essentially tonal framework.

What are probably additional chant-based works from the 1860s — all alternatim versets for hymns and psalm antiphons — survive in the first series of Pièces d’orgue dans différents styles, ops. 15–20. While all of the contents which are dated in this series were composed from 1861 to 1865, it is precisely the four works which are based on chant (and the one set of modal amens) which are undated. Indeed, the earliest published organ works of Guilmant which are dated are from 1861, and more are found in this collection than anywhere else. While this first series of Pièces d’orgue dans différents styles shows that Guilmant was actively engaged in writing various genre pieces such as meditations, marches, and pastorales as early as that year, the chant settings of L’Organiste liturgiste demonstrate that he was writing chant-based works at least by the middle of the 1860s. There seems, then, no reason not to believe that the chant-based works in this first series of the Pièces d’orgue dans différents styles date from the same period as the other items in the collection.439 That these undated pieces might be even earlier, perhaps from a time before which Guilmant began systematically to date his music, can only be conjectured.

The liturgical pieces in the first series of Pièces d’orgue dans différents styles, hymn versets for Crudelis Herodes (for vespers for Epiphany), Iste Confessor (two versets, each on a different chant tune,

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