Kenneth Miller, organ, October 6, 2016

Robert Blocker, Dean

doctor of musical arts recital

Kenneth Miller organ

Dwight Memorial Chapel October 6, 2016 • Thursday at 7:30 pm

Yale School of Music

Kenneth Miller

organ

October 6, 2016 • Dwight Memorial Chapel

Johann Sebastian Bach 1685–1750

The Art of the Fugue, BWV 1080 Contrapunctus I Contrapunctus VIII a 3 Contrapunctus IX a 4 alla Duodecima Contrapunctus X a 4 alla Decima Contrapunctus XI a 4 Fuga a 3 Soggetti

Bach

Vor deinen Thron tret’ ich, BWV 668 intermission

Carl Nielsen 1865–1931

Commotio, Op. 58

As a courtesy to the performers and audience, please silence all electronic devices.

Please do not leave the hall during selections. Photography or recording of any kind is prohibited.

This performance is in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Musical Arts degree.

Doctor of Musical Arts Recital

biography Kenneth Miller is Instructor in Church Music at the School of Theology of the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, and Director of Music in the school’s Chapel of the Apostles, where he conducts multiple choirs and leads music for daily worship.

Before moving to Sewanee, he served as Associate Organist-Choirmaster at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Columbia, South Carolina, and Instructor of Organ at the University of South Carolina. He holds degrees from Lenoir-Rhyne University, where he studied organ with Florence Jowers, and Yale, where he studied with Thomas Murray and Martin Jean. johan sebastian bach The Art of the Fugue, BWV 1080 The Art of the Fugue may well be (with the possible exception of the Mozart Requiem) the most famous piece without an ending.

Johann Sebastian Bach’s grandest contrapuntal conception—fourteen fugues and four canons sharing a common subject— fades away to a lonely tenor line in its final quadruple fugue mere moments before the chief subject was to have joined the previous three.

Just before the abrupt ending, the subject Bach develops is, famously, based on his own name: B-A-C-H (as the German system identifies B-flat, A, C, B-natural). Less often mentioned (regrettably, I think) is what follows: a repeated assertion of the tonic—C-sharp, D, C-sharp, D. The wandering chromatic descents of Bach’s name give way to an intense ascending insistence

upon the home key; Bach does not merely identify himself as the creator of the work by including his own name, he purposefully transforms the disorderly nature of the B-A-C-H motive (a motive that wreaks havoc on other contrapuncti, especially numbers eight and eleven), despite itself, into something stabilizing.

Tonight’s recital begins with the first Contrapunctus, which gives the subject perhaps its most straightforward treatment, followed by the fugues with multiple subjects, which here act as a cyclic symphony of sorts: the energy of the eighth gives way to the flitting scherzo of the ninth; the comparably calm tenth, full of parallel thirds, gives way to the grand eleventh, which inverts the thematic material of the eighth. The unfinished Contrapunctus, entitled “Fuga a 3 soggetti” in the work’s 1751 printing, is, even in its incomplete form, the most imposing fugue Bach ever wrote.

Doctor of Musical Arts Recital

johan sebastian bach Vor deinen Thron tret’ich, BWV 668

carl nielsen Commotio, Op. 58

The chorale Vor deinen Thron, which Bach was revising on his deathbed, and which his son Carl Philipp Emanuel included in the first publication of The Art of the Fugue, seems to me a more fitting conclusion to the unfinished Contrapunctus than attempts at completion of the fugue itself. The chorale’s final stanza reads:

Carl Nielsen’s Commotio, Op. 58, his last major work, was completed in February 1931. Nielsen, known then as now primarily as a symphonist, wrote no other large scale works for the organ, but the growth in the 1920s of the so-called Organ Movement, which sought to curb the supposed excesses of the Romantic organ and return to a Baroque ideal, held particular appeal for Nielsen’s contrapuntal side. Writing to his son-in-law Emil Telmányi, Nielsen confessed, “None of my other works has demanded such great concentration as this: an attempt to reconstitute what is truly the only valid organ style, the polyphonic music that is especially suited to this instrument, which for a long time has been regarded as a kind of orchestra, which it absolutely is not.”

Ein selig Ende mir bescher, am jüngsten Tag erweck mich, Herr, daß ich dich schaue ewiglich, Amen! amen! erhöre mich!

Grant me a blessed death and awaken me, Lord, on Judgment Day that I might behold your face forever.

Amen! amen! hear me!

(Bodo von Hodenberg)

One of the earliest performances of Commotio,

by Nielsen’s student Emilius Bangert at the Marienkirche in Lübeck, was part of the October 1931 Nordic-German Organ Week.

For that performance, Nielsen himself grudgingly wrote the program note (“The Germans, of course, always like to have something,” he says in a letter to Bangert, admitting that his preference was simply for “the bare title”): “In a major work for the mighty instrument called the organ, whose sound is determined by the natural element we call air, the composer must attempt to suppress all personal lyrical feelings. The expression becomes great and rigorous and demands a kind of dryness instead

Doctor of Musical Arts Recital

of emotion, and must be gazed at with the ear rather than embraced by the heart.

The work is borne up by two fugues, to which an introduction, intervening movements, and coda cling like climbing plants to the tree-trunks of the forest; however, the composer thinks that further analysis is superfluous.”

Several days before Bangert’s performance, news reached Lübeck of Nielsen’s death, transforming the recital into a requiem of sorts.

Disobeying Nielsen’s order against superfluity, I have two brief comments on the work. First, it is ill-advised to read too much into Nielsen’s remark that the organ “demands a kind of dryness instead of emotion,” as perhaps the work’s finest moments are its intimate ariettas, even more than its virtuosic fugues. Second, the piece’s alternation between free and fugal forms is an appropriation of the stylus phantasticus, something likely not lost on that particular Lübeck audience, seated as they were in the church where that other great Danish composer, Dieterich Buxtehude, had served as organist for nearly forty years.

–Kenneth Miller

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