Organ Music II

Desmond Maley is the music librarian at the J.W. Tate Library,
Huntington College, Laurentian University, and the editor of Newsletter
of the Canadian Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and
Documentation Centres.

Organists seeking to include more Canadian music in their concert
programs or church services will find a smorgasbord of delights in this
19th volume of the CHMS series. Hugh McLean, professor emeritus of music
at the University of Western Ontario, has brought together 46 pieces
spanning the era 1900–45. He also contributes an incisive, elegantly
written introduction, critical notes, and a bibliography. The
Society’s Gilles Leclerc is credited for the computerized music
engraving that makes the book easy to read for performance purposes.

The collection includes chorale preludes, preludes and fugues, sonatas,
dances, variations, toccatas, marches, grand choeur, concert pieces, and
pastorales. The most distinctively Canadian piece is John Weinzweig’s
“Improvisation on an Indian Tune” (1942); based on a song of the
Dogrib tribe, the Improvisation is a notable early example of
Weinzweig’s serial technique. In terms of sheer quality, however,
Healey Willan is the class of the field; his five pieces, which include
“Epilogue” (1909) and “Prelude in A Minor” (1918), show how
fully conversant he was with the organ’s expressive and dramatic
possibilities.

Other notable pieces include Vancouver composer Frederick Chubb’s
previously unpublished “Sonata in C Minor” (1938–39), a densely
chromatic but nonetheless arresting and powerful work (unfortunately,
space permitted inclusion of only the first movement); the finale of
Amédée Tremblay’s “Suite de quatre piиces” (1924), a brilliant
toccata; the fugue from Ernest Moore’s “Prelude and Fugue in D
Minor,” which is very finely realized; and Clarence Lucas’s
sprightly “Canadian Wedding March,” a welcome addition to the
processional repertoire.

One of the pleasures of this book is that McLean does not hesitate to
share his judgments of the music or to explain why some material was not
chosen. However, access to the pieces would have been improved by
arranging them either alphabetically by composer surname or by musical
form with subdivisions by surname, instead of chronologically by the
composers’ birth dates. McLean does provide a classification of works
by type in his introduction.