Browsing by Author "McCoy, Yuri Hayden"

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    Edgard Varèse's Amériques: A Next-Level Transcription for Organ, Percussion and Assistant
    (2019-04-17) McCoy, Yuri Hayden; Stallmann, Kurt
    The musical world of the 1920’s gave rise to wildly opposing aesthetic views. Composers were, at one extreme pushing forth a modernist ideal indifferent to audience tastes, and at the other extreme, producing historically inspired, tuneful music. Composers such as Edgard Varèse marched boldly forward into the abyss always searching for the new, whereas, following his Russian period, Igor Stravinsky and the neoclassical camp focused their attention rearward, mining proven composition techniques of olden times and creating new versions of them. As it turns out, the world of organ building in the 1920’s was embroiled in a similar debate of wether to push forward with new technology, or return to past models. In the 19th century, symphonic organ builders in England developed new technologies allowing for the storing of memory, and greater means of expression through electric action and multiple swell shades. This allowed the genre of symphonic transcriptions to soar in popularity. Neoclassicism’s parallel movement in organ building was called orgelbewegung (or, organ reform movement) which sought to recreate the mastery of centuries old European schools of organ building. Orgelbewegung came on the footsteps of the huge boom in large symphonic organ installations. With an eye towards tradition, these earlier symphonic organs were altered or dismantled altogether, in order to reflect the ideals of clarity and counterpoint. The transcription of Varèse’s Amériques presented here is inspired directly from the golden age of symphonic organ building, the popular genre of symphonic transcriptions, and the unapologetic modernist aesthetic of the early 1920’s. In recent years, organ transcriptions, and the symphonic instruments they were composed for have experienced a revival of sorts, making Amériques fertile ground for a next-level transcription project.