Word: organist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...bring all heaven before mine eyes." Until the 20th century, most music lovers would have agreed. Despite the revival of interest in Baroque music, the organ's role in modern musical life has been marginal. One reason is the declining importance of the church itself. Another is that organists by temperament seem to be among the most staid of musicians. In the past few years, though, a new excitement has been stirred by organ playing and composing, thanks largely to the talent of a brilliant German organist and unorthodox composer named Gerd Zacher...
...come to this: last week a student organist in Phila delphia refused to play a long-honored hymn that most Protestants have never given second thought to: On ward, Christian Soldiers...
...Maestro's account, his birth in Catalonia on Dec. 29, 1876, was not auspicious. "The umbilical cord twisted around my neck," he writes. "My face was black, and I nearly choked to death." At the age of four, he began studying the piano with his father, the church organist in Vendrell. At twelve, he was already a virtuoso cello player and was on his way to revolutionizing cello technique. "There was something very awkward and unnatural in playing with a stiff arm and with one's elbows close to one's sides," he explains...
...beautiful small piece. Bruckner belongs to that unhappy group of composers including Liszt. Schmidt, Reger, Vaughan Williams, and even Schoenberg, whose music is fashionably vilified without benefit of humane audition. The tedious and lamentable caricature of Bruckner most often encountered is of an amateurish, even childishly naive, rural organist who afflicted the world with eleven appallingly identical symphonies which are massive, repetitious, incoherent and only convulsively appealing. If he is given any credit at all, which rarely happens since people prefer summary condemnation to critical acceptance of monumental genius, it is as an influence on Mabler and certain...
Even during his own lifetime, Bach long stood low on the list of important composers. His contemporaries placed both Telemann and Handle above him. They considered him primarily the virtuoso organist. The last days of church concert music left Bach with an often insurmoutable penury of players and singers. He must often have felt the decline of contemporary musicianship as he played the organ, directed the choir, and conducted the orchestra at the same time. To the end, he affirmed his dedication to the sacred music whose reign was then work on a secular fugue to write extremely religious chorale...