It’s fair to raise the question – what are you getting when you purchase this collection? Is an anthology a collection or just another fancy word that we need to use when we get tired or bored of calling something a collection? The internet told me that an anthology is a collection of a number of authors or artists collected together with one theme – so in this case, anthology is right!
In the world of classical music “marketing”, or at least classical music “putting things together”, collections tend toward a highly scholarly bent, which makes sense since these collections aren’t being put together to sell hot dogs and they aren’t being put together by hot dog vendors. So Janice and Charles Beck, in the early 1970s, went to the Musical Heritage Society with the idea that they were going to go where no organist had gone before – they were going to memorialize the early organ works of the early American citizens.
Organ music is a career for the brave or stupid – the amount of people making their living performing or writing about or teaching organ music could be put in a room in a nice hotel in a medium sized city and locked in and they’d never be heard from again. And it would take a few days for someone to realize what had happened (let’s face it, by Sunday they’d be missed).
These recordings have been out of print for over 40 years, but they represent a truly crazy and wonderful journey. Researching and performing the organ works of the first American composers – some wrote even before we started to call ourselves Americans. While important to us, it’s key to remember that Bach had died before the United States became a country, so organ music wasn’t as young or undeveloped as the USA. But these folks were in a wilderness – and just the act of performing ANY organ music would seem to be a task, before you start to uncover those hardy souls who attempted to write NEW organ music.
I’ll spoil any surprises if you were curious – no, there’s no hidden works here that rival the great organ works that were being written in Europe, and nothing that would make you think someone might have earned a trip to peek over the masters’ shoulder. But – what you hear the glimpses of a new vocabulary. The works here are all short works – no organ symphonies, one sonata, but mostly hymns for the initial audiences – churchgoers of a particularly Puritanical bent. But they were driven by a desire that matched the guys in Philly and Washington and Boston and Saratoga and Fort Ticonderoga who were distracted from making music because they were fighting against the British in a very unfriendly manner. Then after that unpleasantness left, we see a flowering in Volume 2 as composers attempt to set down roots that will tell the world that this new country has its own identity, and it would need to be expressed in musical ideas.
So I’m not certain if this anthology is meant for continuous and background play – almost certainly not, after the initial go through. But as a item to be lingered over, to be thought about and examined, there might not be a more refreshing and helpful series of recordings offered.
