A Woven Tapestry - Organ

A Woven Tapestry
 

Equally comfortable as solo recitalist, church musician and collaborative accompanist, André Lash brings to performances a wealth of knowledge gleaned from all three worlds. After receiving his early education in Montgomery and Labette counties in Kansas, Dr. Lash received a Bachelor’s degree in Music Education from Pittsburg (Kansas) State University, followed by the degree Master of Music in Church Music from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and the Doctor of Musical Arts in Organ Performance from the Eastman School of Music of the University of Rochester, where his organ instructor was Russell Saunders; his doctoral dissertation “The Facultad Orgánica of Francisco Correa de Arauxo: Certain Aspects of Theory and Performance” was the first complete translation into English of the extensive preface of Correa’s document, yielding significant information on the interpretation of early 17^th-century Spanish organ music. He also received a Regional Artists Grant from the Arts Council of Charlotte/Mecklenburg (NC) for a four-month sabbatical to study Baroque Spanish organs and organ music under José-Luis Gonzalez Uriol in Zaragoza, Spain. He has continued to lecture on this repertoire and to include it not only in recitals but also in appropriate places in services of Christian worship.

Besides his interest in organ music of the Iberian peninsula, Dr. Lash is conversant with much of the Baroque repertoire of all of Western Europe, and also with much repertoire of the late 19^th century, particularly the music of the French Symphonic school of organ composition. His CD “Gallic in Greensboro” features both French Symphonic and French Classic music played on the Fisk organ, Op.82, at Christ United Methodist Church in Greensboro, North Carolina, where he was organist from 2005 until his retirement from that position in 2017. Besides his work as a church musician in Georgia, Oklahoma and North Carolina, he taught at the university level in all three states, having fully retired from this aspect of his career in December of 2019 after 10 years as adjunct instructor at all levels in the School of Music of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Besides his degreed academic work, Dr. Lash also studied privately for two years with the late Arthur Poister, and in workshops and masterclasses under Anton Heiller and Marie-Claire Alain. He is a Fellow of the American Guild of Organists (FAGO) and has been active throughout his career at the chapter and regional levels. He currently resides in Lake County, Florida with his wife Sheryl Lash.

Organ Recital
Thursday, September 8 at 7:30 AM
Martha-Ellen Tye Recital Hall (Simon Estes Music Hall Room 140)

PROGRAM NOTES

I
Pablo Bruna, a native of the small town of Daroca southwest of Zaragoza, Spain, spent his entire life in his native town, eventually becoming well-known as Organist of the Church of Santa Maria. Although blind he became a prolific composer for organ in the mid-17th century.

The tiento, a genre having its roots in the preceding century’s music for vihuela, was the most common genre of organ composition from the late 1500s through much of the Baroque period. In the organ literature it typically began with contrapuntal imitation of the opening statement, followed by increasingly free writing, often virtuosic, as a movement unfolds. The music of Bruna played this evening features two distinct sub-types of the genre: the tiento de medio registro de tiple in which the right hand has one or more solo voices on a separate sound (made possible by the division of the keyboard of Spanish organs into bass and treble with separate stops for each hand), and the tiento de falsas which features exquisitely beautiful dissonances and resolutions played on a quiet registration throughout the piece.

The religious orientation of much organ music of deeply Catholic Spain is borne out by written documentation of the period: tientos de falsas were used during Mass, either at the Elevation of the Host or during distribution of the elements to people at the altar; and the “Letanía de la Virgen” on which tonight’s opening piece is based was a tune in Spanish use (and still known in some locales), to which was sung Marian litanies on Feast Days of the Virgin.

II
Tomás de Santa María and Juan Bermudo were two of the earliest keyboard composers in Spain; both left important documentation of the keyboard pedagogy of that era. Their pieces played this evening are very short: “de modo de teclado corcheas” roughly translates “how to play corcheas (eighth-notes)”, and the “Pange lingua” melody on which is based Bermudo’s setting is not the Gregorian melody used throughout the world, but a uniquely Spanish one which was used ONLY in Spain and Spanish colonies during the era in question.

Aguilera de Heredia was the first important Aragonese organ composer, having been born in Zaragoza and eventually serving as Cathedral Musician there. The term “Dos vajos” is in modern Spanish “dos bajos”—“two basses”. It is actually a tiento de medio registro de baxón: a tiento with the solo in the left hand, in this case a duet for two solo bass parts.

III
The Facultad Orgánica of Correa de Arauxo was the largest 17th-century collection of organ music to come from Spain. Published in 1626, it contained 63 tientos plus a few additional works based on preexisting secular melodies well-known across Europe. The tientos of Correa de Arauxo spanned the gamut of possibilities for the genre: a vast number of tientos de medio registro for both right hand and left hand solos, many tientos llenos (some quite virtuosic) in which both hands played on the same sound throughout the entire work or major portions of the work, and even the first known keyboard examples of division of the beat into seven smaller values (septuplets). The tientos played this evening are contrasting: Tiento XI features virtuosic passages at the beginning and end but with a calmer, more placid middle section with alternating linear progressions between hands, foreshadowing harmonies of Debussy almost

300 years later (!). Tiento XXVIII, more introspective, contains a middle section with a gentle dance-like rhythm in triple meter before returning to a quiet, more pensive ending. Tiento LXIII begins with a very broad motive, imitated in inversion then elaborated by the right hand solo line. It then proceeds through many iterations with new thematic material and rhythmic variants until the final section, marked a modo de batalla—“in the style of a battle piece”, a genre becoming popular at the time as a musical-pictorial imitation of battle.

IV
Very little is known of the life of Sebastián Durón except that he was born in central Spain and in the early years of his career was highly respected as a musician, serving as organist or chapel master in a number of important posts in Cuenca, Zaragoza and Palencia. Following the War of the Spanish Succession Durón moved across the border to France, where he spent the rest of his life and became most well-known for his music for theatre. Despite his work as a church musician and extant sacred choral works, we know none of his organ music except the Gaitilla played this evening. As a genre, a gaitilla is an imitation of a bagpipe, humorous and raucous in sound; it was customary for some form of percussion to accompany such pieces.

Juan Cabanilles, as he is known in Castilian Spanish (the name given at his baptism in Valencia was actually Catalan: Joan Bautista Josep Cabanilles) was easily the most prolific Spanish composer of the 150 years of Iberian music celebrated this evening. Although he left a small quantity of well-written choral works, by far his greatest output was for organ. Over 200 of his organ works were long present in manuscripts available in the Library of Catalunya in Barcelona, but recently discovered manuscripts in the city of Felanitx on the island of Majorca have added hundreds of additional works to his credit. Besides many tientos of all types, he wrote variation settings and various miscellaneous works. Included in these are six tocatas, which while not designated as such, were obviously intended as pedagogical works, each challenging a particular aspect of organ technique: trills, left hand virtuoso passages, etc. This evening’s tocata is a brief exercise in repeated notes. The Pasacalles which follows is not, as is sometimes stated, a Passacaglia, though the two genres have a similarity beyond the etymology of their names: a Spanish Passacalles tends to be built around a recurring harmonic structure though not nearly as strict or relentless as the recurring ground bass of a Passacaglia in the rest of Europe. Rather, the word Passacalles relates to the idea of “passing through the streets”—in other words, a sort of musical picture of the casual but intentional walking through the streets of a community during the evening time when cooler temperatures are more inviting, ending with a casual but spontaneous gathering in the city plaza or other central location.

The final piece this evening was composed by an Aragonese composer whose corpus of works was not particularly large but which shows highly refined architectural structure and contrapuntal discipline. His two extant batallas are among the most concise and well-formed of that genre. A Spanish batalla or battle-piece typically begins with a distant call to arms followed by a nearer trumpet call of troops to actual battle. This then leads to an increasingly chaotic musical depiction of military conflict, after which is portrayed the casual takeover of a conquered city, played on flutes or on a small, nasal or snarling reed stop. The conclusion is a victorious march or other triumphant declaration, which after the middle of the 17th century was customarily played on en chamade horizontal trumpets, a uniquely Spanish feature.      ~ André Lash

Organ Workshop: Iberian organ music of the 16th through 18th centuries
Friday, September 9 at 2:00 PM
Martha-Ellen Tye Recital Hall (Simon Estes Music Hall Room 140)

From Central Spain and Aragón:

Antonio de Cabezón (1510-1566): Diferencias sobre el “Canto del Caballero”; Tiento del Sexto tono con Primera y segunda parte
Sebastián Aguilera de Heredia (1561-1627): Ensalada
Francisco Correa de Arauxo (1584-1654): Tiento XXVIII (de medio registro de tiple); Tiento XLIII (de medio registro de baxón de 6⁰ tono)
Pablo Bruna (1611-1679): Tiento de falsas 2 tono; Tiento de mano derecha y al medio a dos tiples
Antonio Scarlatti (1660-1725): Sonata in D for Chamber Organ, K.288

From Catalán-speaking regions:

Juan Cabanilles (1644-1712): Tiento de falsas de 4⁰ tono; Pasacalles de primer tono, WSC 47; Paseos 6⁰ tono

From Portugal:

Manuel Rodrigues Coelho (c.1555-1635): Terceiro Tento do Primeiro tom 

ADDITIONAL CATEGORY: 

Batallas:
Pedro de Araujo (c.1640-1705; possibly 1610-1684): Batalha del Sexto tom [Portuguese]
José Jiménez (1601-1672): Batalla del Sexto tono [Spanish (Aragonese)]
Diogo de Conceição (1549-1597): Batalha del Quinto tono [Portuguese]