French Organ Music from the Revolution to Franck and Widor

French Organ Music from the Revolution to Franck and Widor
Ed. by Lawrence Archbold & William J Peterson.
pp. xiii+323. 'Eastman Studies in Music', v.
(University of Rochester Press, NY, 1996. $79 ISBN 1-878822-55-1)



Review: [untitled]
William J. Gatens
Music & Letters, Vol. 78, No. 2 (May, 1997), pp. 296-298
Published by: Oxford University Press

laptop 737411.pdf

here are some review fragments that are intrestesting to me ...

...

not a comprehensive, connected history of the
period but, rather, an ordered collection of eleven
essays, some of them on highly selective topics.
The only composers whose works are discussed at
any length are Boely, Franck, Guilmant and
Widor, and even here the approach is selective.
Apart from the works of Franck, the emphasis is
on organ works based on plainchant: Boely's
organ Masses, Guilmant's liturgical pieces and
Widor's Symphonie romane. The other exception is
a discussion of Boely's set of fourteen preludes
Op. 15 (1847) on noels by the sixteenth-century
poet Nicolas Denizot.

...

Benjamin Van Wye's
'Organ Music in the Mass of the Parisian Rite to 1850 with
Emphasis on the Contributions of Boely'
is a revision of an article that first appeared in L'Orgue
(Nos. 229 & 230 (1994)).
The author begins by explaining that
French churches had their own form of the
liturgy, and that this Neo-Gallican tradition persisted
until it was replaced by the uniform Roman
liturgy about 1850, the result of the ultramontane
movement. Van Wye begins by collating the Mass
Ordinary chants of the Parish Gradual (1738) with
their Roman equivalents. Later he lists and
discusses organ Mass publications from Michel Corrette (1756)
to Alexandre-Charles Fessy (1845).
Special attention is devoted to the Mass
composition of Alexandre-Pierre-Francois Boely
(1785-1858), dating from between 1834 and 1848.
Boely stands apart for his cultivation of the classic
French style and for his interest in the works of
J S Bach at a time when they were otherwise
neglected in France. The following essay,
'Boely's Quatorze Preludes usr des cantiques de Denizot, op.15,
and the Creation of a French "Christmas" Orgelbuchlein'
by Craig Cramer, examines the chief instance of
Boely's emulation of Bach.

...

The next two essays--
'"Why Should we not Do the Same with our Catholic Melodies?":
Guilmant's L'Organiste Liturgiste, Op. 65'
by Edward Zimmerman and Lawrence Archbold, and
'Widor's Symphonie romane'
by Lawrence Archbold--
are concerned with the use of plainsong in organ music,
and especially with the stylistic changes what followed
from the reforms of Solesmes. Each essay is concerned with
a relatively small portion of its composer's output, and,
since a good deal of the prose consists of descriptive
analysis of the music, readers will want to have scores handy.

...