XXIX Academia de Órgano
Fray Joseph de Echevarría

At the dawn of the modern organ: Correa de Arauxo and his time

Within the vast Italian organ repertoire, three great composers were active between the first three decades of the XVII century: Trabaci, Frescobaldi, and Rossi. They show affinities with the music of Correa de Arauxo in terms of expressive and rhetorical exploration, achieved through styles that are at times similar or markedly different. The music of Giovanni Maria Trabaci, organist to the Spanish Viceroy in Naples, is characterized by a cantabile contrapuntal style, rich in intense dissonances. Girolamo Frescobaldi, active in Rome at the time Baroque was emerging, reveals in his Toccatas a conception of extraordinary stylistic innovation and a new approach to performance. In his contrapuntal works, he combined Renaissance refinement with Baroque rhetorical intent. Michelangelo Rossi, active in Rome as violinist, organist and Opera composer, displays in his Toccatas a quite theatrical taste for surprise and wonder.

The organworks of J. S. Bach: an ongoing challenge and inspiration

Johann Sebastian Bach is generally considered as the most important composer in musical history. The diversity of his organworks is an ongoing inspiration and a challenge for organists of all generations. Influenced as a young genius by composers as Pachelbel, Buxtehude and Boehm, Bach studied fellow composers during his whole life. It led to a remarkable development of organ pieces strongly connected to his positions as organist, capellmeister and cantor.

The interpretation of Bach,s music underwent many changes but his music never ceased to interest and inspire composers and musicians!

Krzysztof Urbaniak offers us a clear and elegant overview of Sweelinck and his music, as well as the later North German organ school, showing how one tradition gives way to another and ultimately shapes the world of the Baroque organ. Although Dutch, Sweelinck became the principal teacher of a whole generation of German organists who travelled to Amsterdam to study with him. His influence was pedagogical, stylistic and technical. Renaissance polyphonic discipline mixed with emerging Baroque expressiveness; a virtuosic and transparent organ language; the technique of variation or contrapuntal thinking that anticipates the mature Baroque fugue are some of the fundamental contributions of the Dutch composer. His students took this style to northern Germany, forming the first generation of the organ school in this region. Heinrich Scheidemann, Gottfried Scheidt, Jacob Praetorius II and Melchior Schildt established an organ tradition centred on the chorale alongside a language intended for the great North German organs.