Music for Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

Today’s voluntaries highlight a corner of repertory to which I have devoted a significant portion of academic research, having a geographic and cultural connection to this history from my early life. Around the 1860s, a group of organists from New England became interested in performance of bespoke solo repertory for the organ, inspired by the larger instruments that were being produced by American builders on the heels of the Second Industrial Revolution. They travelled to Munich, Leipzig, and the U.K. to study at Europe’s finest institutions, returning home to fill concert halls and churches with an eager public that had never heard the organ works of Bach, transcriptions of favourite operatic overtures, and original compositions – not to mention an organist who was capable of playing them!

The generation of students that followed was coined the “Second New England School,” students of the first pioneers of solo organ playing. Chadwick and Dunham taught at New England Conservatory (Charles Ives and Florence Price numbered among their many students), Chadwick teaching theory and composition and Dunham organ performance. Dunham was particularly critical of his own work, only daring to start writing a sonata after being dared by his roommate on the way home from the pub to write six measures that evening. It took him seven years to draft a score he was confident enough to share with a mentor. Nevertheless, Chadwick and Dunham both demonstrate a thorough understanding of the older classical forms of Mendelssohn while pushing the aesthetic and technical boundaries of late-romanticism.

Harry Rowe Shelley (composer of the music during communion) was a career church organist, working at Boston’s Anglo-Catholic Church of the Advent and well-regarded for his service-playing, choral conducting, and church compositions.

Abraham Ross

Solemn Mass takes place at St. James’ Anglican Church, Vancouver at 10:30 am every Sunday.