A large number of human activities, such as the one I am now performing, are conducted in partnership with one kind of machine or another. (File for reference among Profound Thoughts of Chairman Greene!) I find it amusing in odd moments to imagine such activities being carried on with the machine invisible or absent. Motorcycle-riding offers a sterling example. Pipe-organ playing is an even better one. But the imaginative faculty reels at the thought identical-twin organists on the (invisible) bench, in a tangle of hands and feet and badly bruised shins!
I should be tempted to disregard the twinship of Gordon and Grady Wilson (both Doctors of Musical Art in Performance, or D.M.A.P.), did not their publicity so strongly insist on it. But, as you may have divined, they wear their musical twinship with a difference. There have been musical twins duetting before the public ere now, in sufficient numbers to make twin piano duos almost commonplace. (Don't ask me for names: I'm a senile old man and my old Musical America annuals have all disappeared.) It was on this track (trained by, among others, the great Emo von Dohnanyi) that the Wilsons set out. But encountering a divergence of roads in the selva oscura, they took the one less traveled by. In fact I'd almost be willing to speculate that the path to professional organ partnership was pretty well virgin, partly because of the essentially solitary nature of organists, and partly because of a lack of available repertory.
On the last score (verbal unintentional!), never underestimate the resourcefulness of twin D.M.A.P.s, however. Drs. Gordon and Grady have discovered that the Dark Wood is really an untended garden ready to yield up all sorts of rare and exotic musical fruit, some of it even nourishing. The present recording, taped from a "live" concert at Ohio State University, offers a sampling of their findings, and perhaps the first compositions you ever heard by Hesse, Merkel, Thayer, and Wesley, Inc.
Samuel Wesley's name may be the most familiar of the lot, if only because he was nephew unto John and son unto Charles (6500 hymns!), the founders of Methodism. He was rated as an even more talented organist than his brother, Charles Jr., and was a mover and shaker in the Bach revival (held under a tent in Sussex). My Methodist readers will be disappointed to hear, however, that he (1) sired an illegitimate son, Samuel Sebastian (who became one of the more considerable English religious composers of the 19th century); (2) converted to Roman Catholicism; and (3) fell into an excavation onto his head, which accident caused him to behave oddly for the rest of his life. His Duet was designed for performance with his (non-twin) brother.
The "Auld Lang Syne" Variations of New England organist Whiteny Eugene Thayer is a period piece of kitsch and is played here for laughs. Thayer is not to be confused with Alexander Wheelock Thayer, Beethoven's biographer, nor with William Armour Thayer, whose parlor-ballad "My Laddie" was recorded by Anna Case, Florence Easton, Alma Gluck, Alice Nielsen, and Margaret Woodrow Wilson, among others. Adolf Hesse was once the pride of Breslau and the object of organized pilgrimages, and was known far and wide for his Variations on "God Save the King." His younger contemporary Gustav Merkel hung out around Dresden until he attained the post of Royal Organist; among his teachers was Robert Schumann, and it shows in his music. His D minor sonata, however, based on Psalm XLII, almost certainly took its inspiration from Julius Reubke's famous "Psalm XCIV" for solo organ.
Possession of this record assures an instant triumph of one-upsmanship.
