West Vancouver United Church
Artist: Alexander Weimann, organ
Run time: 60 minutes
“A PRAYER FOR PEACE” is the title of Alexander Weimann’s solo improvised organ recital. The concert re-imagines the so-called Organ Mass, a tradition of religious music ever since organs were first introduced into the Church. This practice flowered during the French Baroque and which lives on in France to this day. Suzie LeBlanc, soprano, will be singing the chants of the Missa Cunctipotens genitor Deus on which Alex will improvise.
Improvisation no longer plays a big role in the classical music world, although it’s still a central part of the education, idiom and professional practice for church organists. It’s an important factor in ‘early music’ and the art of improvisation is of the essence in making music in the world of jazz.
“Improvising is one of my strongest musical passions. As a child practicing the piano, I had a hard time focusing on sheet music. I’d start off with good intentions, but after a few bars I’d often veer off the scripted path and wander into an unplanned period of oblivious improvising. Since then, I’ve studied church music and organ, also jazz piano, and after decades of making music of all kinds my fascination for improvisation has only grown. It’s a pleasure to perform this programme on the wonderful organ at West Vancouver United Church where I performed a Bach concert (The Well-Tempered Organ) this past July for EMV. I look forward to exploring more of its multiple possibilities for registration and sound.” – Alexander Weimann
To learn more about Alexander Weimann’s upcoming CD release of the same programme, click here!
This concert is generously sponsored by The RPC Family Foundation
PROGRAMME NOTES
Although its written repertoire extends back further than that of practically any other European instrument, the organ has for most of its history been above all an instrument of improvisation. Today, organists are often among the only classical musicians to receive systematic training in making up music on the spot, and we can be sure that improvised music on the instrument predates the earliest notated music for it by many centuries.
Before the days of industrial production and modern machinery, the organ was likely to be the most sophisticated device a person would ever encounter; before electronic sound amplification and communications media, the organ was perhaps unique in its ability to allow an individual player (with the help of bellows operators) to define the whole sonic character of a space and shape the common experience of the people occupying it. Organ music was a meeting of imagination and technology that must have seemed almost miraculous, so perhaps it is not so surprising that over the first centuries of the second millennium CE the organ became practically synonymous with the sacred. Organs are mentioned in connection with churches in sources dating from the tenth century and beyond, but only around the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries do we begin to see evidence of how they were used in the liturgy.
Manuscripts from the early fifteenth century contain organ pieces intended to substitute for specific parts of the prescribed texts for the celebration of the Mass, the first records of an older improvisatory tradition. This practice was rooted in the ancient principle of alternatim performance: a priest or cantor would sing certain chants in alternation with the choir. With the development of polyphony and rhythmic notation, the choral responses likely became more elaborate, and with the introduction of the organ into the church the instrument itself might take over the choral role. The organist’s duty would be to play what came to be called “versets” in the proper mode and character (and possibly incorporating appropriate plainchant melodies) between passages of chant.
This was the origin of the “Organ Mass,” an essentially improvisatory tradition that nevertheless attracted the attention of composers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and continues to thrive to this day. The Organ Mass was especially popular in baroque France, where it was cultivated by composers like Guillaume-Gabriel Nivers, Nicolas-Antoine Lebègue, Nicolas de Grigny, and François Couperin, whose two Masses are the pinnacle of the genre. (Later French composers such as Camille Saint-Säens also drew on the Organ Mass tradition.) Their Masses include versets (or “couplets,” as they were often called in French) for parts of the standard texts of the Mass—the Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei—as well as preludes and postludes and, often, elaborate pieces for Offertory and Elevation. (Interestingly, the organ was not permitted to interfere in the recitation of the creed, or Credo; its doctrinal affirmations were perhaps judged too important to risk the possible distraction of an organist’s flights of fancy.)
In today’s improvisation, Alex is taking inspiration from this Organ Mass tradition. For the Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei movements, he plans to incorporate plainchant passages from the Missa Cunctipotens Genitor Deus, the same Mass employed by Couperin in his Messe pour les Paroisses (“Mass for parish churches”) and prescribed by the French ecclesiastical authorities for use with organ in the seventeenth century. Two free movements will not be based on chant: first, a meditation on change or conversion (what the Greeks called μετάνοια, or “metanoia”) will follow the Gloria, and, second, an homage to the Elevation toccata will follow the Sanctus. Such toccatas—intended for the solemn moment when the consecrated host is lifted into the air—are well represented in Girolamo Frescobaldi’s Fiori musicali (1635), which exhibits the kind of sublimely intense and expressive music that was considered suitable for this celebration of transformation and remembrance.
Alex has called the last line of the Agnus Dei the “cornerstone of the whole improvisation.” Here, the petition “Miserere nobis” (“Have mercy on us”) becomes instead “Dona nobis pacem”: “Give us peace.” The conclusion of this musical prayer will be based on a seventeenth-century Lutheran hymn by the poet Samuel Rodigast and the cantor Severus Gastorius. It is entitled “Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan”: “What God ordains is always good.”
One of Alex’s own compositions, written about thirty-five years ago, will open the improvisation and introduce us to his musical world. The two Latin words of the title, “Color & Talia,” refer to techniques of musical construction from the Middle Ages, the early days of composing for rhythmically coordinated voices. They both mean a kind of repetition: “color” usually applies to the melodic repetition of a series of notes; “talea,” which means “cutting,” refers to the technique of dividing a tenor line into repeating rhythmic patterns. Alex has drawn a connection across centuries between these methods of early polyphony and the emphasis on repetition and gradual change of contemporary minimalists like Steve Reich and Philip Glass.
The central idea of minimalism is the development of a minimum of musical material: a single rhythmic figure, melodic gesture, or harmonic progression, for instance. In the context of this performance, it brings to mind a time when improvisation was not as far from composition as it is commonly considered today. The elaboration of plainchant (the Church’s ancient repertoire of liturgical texts and melodies) with improvised discants and harmonies provided the very foundation of Europe’s art music tradition, and succeeding generations were trained to clothe these sacred materials—and later repertoires like the Lutheran chorales—in new musical form, whether in written notation or in the moment of performance. That tradition is alive today, and it remains capable of speaking to us in new and profound ways.
- Connor Page
Alexander Weimann, organ
The internationally renowned keyboard artist Alexander Weimann has spent his life enveloped by the therapeutic power and beauty of making music. Alex grew up in Munich. At age three he became fascinated by the intense magic of the church organ. He started piano at six, formal organ lessons at 12 and harpsichord at university (along with theatre theory, medieval Latin and jazz piano.) He is in huge demand as a director, soloist and chamber player, traveling the world with leading North American and European ensembles. He is Artistic Director of the Pacific Baroque Orchestra in Vancouver and teaches at the University of British Columbia where he directs the Baroque Orchestra Mentorship Programme.
Alex has appeared on more than 100 recordings, including the Juno-award-winning album “Prima Donna” with Karina Gauvin and Arion Baroque orchestra. His latest album series “The Art of Improvisation” (Volume 1: A Prayer for Peace; Volume 2: Ad libitum; and Volume 3: Caravan Variations, released on Redshift, 2024) unites his passions for both baroque music and improvisation on organ, harpsichord, and piano.
