Word: organizers
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...Organ music, wrote John Milton in the 1630s, "could dissolve me into ecstasies and 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...
From Zacher's organ at the Folkwang Academy in Essen come some of the most adventurous and innovative sounds heard in a time beset by strange noises. Playing music by such avant-garde composers as Mauricio Kagel, Georgy Ligeti, Olivier Messiaen, Ernst Krenek and, naturally, John Cage, Zacher treats the organ as though it were a giant musical synthesizer, capable of taking sound back to its primeval sources and building music anew. That is exactly how Zacher feels about...
...tattered state of tonality at the start of the 20th century, Arnold Schoenberg sought a new direction through the tight formations of serialism. Later on, other composers began an exploration of the resources of raw sound. Gerd Zacher is still doing just that. In normal practice, each organ pipe receives a steady and unchangeable supply of wind from the bellows and each produces only one single tone. What Zacher worked out was a way to vary the flow of air and thereby produce a family of tones from a single pipe, in much the same way that different sounds...
Zacher's new technique is not confined to the keyboard. His most dramatic trick is to turn the organ blower off while playing. How this sounds can be heard in Kagel's Improvisation Ajoutée, a chilling evocation of chaos included in a Zacher LP just released in the U.S. on the new Heliodor/Wergo label. At the climax of the work, as the supply of air begins to deplete, a cascade of falling pitches and fading sounds engulfs the listener in a musical-mystical doomsday. "It sounds," says Kagel, "as if the organ were exhaling her soul...
Zacher's offbeat passion for the organ comes naturally. All the way back to the great-uncle who lost a church job at the turn of the century for playing the then revolutionary Max Reger, Zacher's family tree has been heavy with organists. His reputation as both an avant-garde and a classical player was established during twelve years as chief organist at red brick Wellingsbütte Church near Hamburg. He moved to his new and prestigious Essen post only two months ago. In recent years he has performed at nearly every one of Europe...