Easy listening

A new season of DOMS concerts has begun. Today I went to listen to an organ and saxophone duet, an unusual combination. The saxophone sounds quite like an extension to the organ, an extra, on-stage pipe. Ludovik Lesage-Hinse from Trois-Rivieres played both a soprano and an alto saxophone during his performance, with Jocelyn Lafond, also from the Trois-Rivieres Conservatoire de musique, at the organ.

The composer featured in this concert was another French-Canadian, Denis Bédard, of my generation, born 1950. Half way through the concert I realised what it reminded me of, the easy-to-listen-to harmonies, rhythms and melodies of John Rutter.

At the beginning we heard a piece by Bédard for organ alone, variations on the tune of a hymn we used to sing long ago, known as The Old Hundredth:

All people that on earth do dwell,
Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice.
Him serve with mirth, His praise forth tell,
Come ye before Him and rejoice.

At least, that is what I learned then. In modern hymn books (such as the ones kept in the pews at Southminster Church), it reads like this ...

All people that on earth do dwell
Sing out your faith with cheerful voice.
Delight in God whose praise you tell,
Whose presence calls you to rejoice.

What a comedown! For one thing, to that tune, it puts the stresses on the wrong syllables (DE-light in in God ... WHOSE presence calls you TO rejoice.) What was wrong with the older version? To serve "with mirth" admittedly sounds odd nowadays (in the 16th century it meant "joyfully") but I don't recall that this used to bother me; I liked the funny-sounding old words and could follow their meaning perfectly well. Then I bet the language committee censored "the Lord ... His praise" and "... before Him ..." because it's now considered sexist to give God a masculine identity. And they probably thought that the retention of words like "ye" would deter modern youth from entering a church. That sort of nonsense irritates me immensely.

Such thoughts interfered with my concentration on the music today, a series of variations on the chorale-like melody of this hymn. When I was listening, I was feeling critical of the music too: interesting ideas but unoriginal chords, tempo too fast. The variations didn't altogether fit with the hymn's solemnity, but fair enough, they are supposed to be variations. At one point the organist added vibrato effects, as with the old fairground or cinema organs. (Where I grew up there used to be a swimming pool organ, even. Wandering thoughts, again!) I liked the variation that presented the tune on the foot pedals, with swooping downward arpeggios above it. That one had some substance.

There followed an arrangement of another Protestant chorale (Befiehl du deine Wege) by a composer I'd never heard of, Gotthilf Friedrich Ebhardt of the 18th / 19th century, played here on the trumpet-like soprano saxophone, with organ accompaniment. This composer didn't write music in the style of his day either, sounding more late-Baroque than early-Romantic.

Back to Bédard for the rest of the programme. The saxophonist played seven Vocalises originally intended to be performed by a mezzo soprano. "They're really beautiful!" he told us. The first was wistful, as was the fourth. Other movements had a more folksy quality. The 2nd vocalise I found rather Swiss, where the organ kept echoing the saxophone (voice) part. I almost expected yodellers to chime in. The last movement was clearly inspired by French-Canadian folksongs.

The soprano instrument was then put away. The last item on the programme was Bédard's Sonata No.1 for alto saxophone and organ. Apparently there are two more such sonatas, to be set aside for a later concert in the series! Again, the music sounded sweetly derivative, pleasant enough to listen to, but lacking depth, I felt. Most of the audience was enchanted by it. The faster movement at the end, the Humoresque, seemed to have more character, a bouncy piece that would also have come across well on a clarinet.

They gave us"one more", perhaps a movement from one of the other sonatas, I didn't catch. The composer's signature style seems to be a long drawn out, emotional melody line with a steady beat in a low register on the accompanying instrument.

So why am I so snobbishly critical of light, crowd-pleasing music? It goes back to my upbringing and further back yet. In his impoverished youth, my father was given free, private music lessons by a retired Oxford don, a long story. One of the things this "Great Man" impressed upon him was that there are standards to be met in music, as in life. He taught him, for example, that a dominant seventh in compositions was a cliché to be used only sparingly, and that sentimentality made musical compositions mediocre. When I in turn became my father's music student, such attitudes rubbed off onto me, and (more than ninety years later) still stick.