Timothy Blinko was Bliss composition scholar at the Royal College of Music. He became Head of Composition and Musicianship Studies at the Royal College of Music Junior Department in 1994 and he also taught as a Senior Lecturer at Birkbeck College, University of London before joining the Music Department at the University of Hertfordshire as Associate Head of Music. In January 2006 he was appointed Head of Music at the University of Hertfordshire and in October 2006 he was made Professor of Music.

Composer’s note:

Sculpture was written in response to a request from publisher Kevin Mayhew in 2002. It is a sister work to a three movement piece for saxophone quartet written in 1989 called Sculptures, which has been performed by all the leading quartets in the world. Sculpture uses the interesting numeric potential of 8:8 time within a colourful post-minimalist sound world, qualities it shares with its older sister. Though like most sisters, it is also quite different.          

Suite in G                                                                                                                            Arnold Cooke (1906-2005)

Arnold Cooke was a Professor of Composition at Trinity College of Music, London from 1947 to 1978. He studied at Cambridge and with Paul Hindemith in Berlin. His works include two operas, six symphonies, a ballet score, several concertos and much chamber and vocal music, with a number of pieces for organ. The first performance of Suite in G was given by Robert Crowley at a recital in King’s College, Cambridge in February 1990.                          

Composer’s note:           

I have just finished a fair copy of the organ piece which I completed recently. I call it a Suite; it’s in four movements. The first is a Chaconne in moderate tempo. The second is a rather quick movement in duple time; the third is an Andante in 3/4 and the last is a Jig in 6/8. I hope it will sound well and be effective. I call it a Suite because it is more like this than a Sonata, with a Chaconne at the beginning and a Jig at the end.                                                                                                                                  

Petit hommage à Gabriel Fauré                                                                                              Peter Aston (b 1938)

Peter Aston has combined a career in music education with work as a composer, conductor and musicologist.  He has held senior academic posts at the University of York and the University of East Anglia, where he was Professor and Head of Music for twenty four years and is now Professor Emeritus. Peter Aston’s compositions include chamber music, choral and orchestral works and a children’s opera, but he is best known as a composer of church music.

Composer’s note:

This brief musical tribute to Fauré was composed in 2003 for a choral workshop in Long Melford, Suffolk. The main work was the Fauré Requiem, preceded in the closing concert by music from earlier and later periods. I wanted to include a short organ piece before the Requiem to balance a chorale prelude by Bach played earlier in the programme. In the absence of such a piece by Fauré himself, I decided to compose something for the occasion. The piece I produced quotes a passage from Fauré’s song Lydia, a setting of a gently erotic love poem by Leconte de Lisle. My Petit hommage is an attempt to combine in the simplest way features of Fauré’s melodic and harmonic language with aspects of my own.

De Morte et Resurrectione                                                                                                                     Peter Aston

Composer’s note:

De Morte et Resurrectione was commissioned by Robert Crowley, who gave the first performance in 2007. In it I returned to a theme I had explored more than 35 years earlier in my Easter cantata Haec Dies, commissioned for the 1971 Harrogate Festival. It therefore seemed appropriate to draw material from that cantata. Two of the movements (the second and the fourth) are re-workings of the organ sonatas in Haec Dies. The other movements are new, but contain some thematic cross-references.

As in Haec Dies, the music is based on a scale of alternating semitones and tones. This octatonic scale has been used by Skryabin, Ravel, Stravinsky, Britten and others, but is associated particularly with Messiaen who identified it as his second mode of limited transposition. The mode is not always strictly adhered to, and gives way to a different artificial mode in the hymn-like tranquillo section of the third movement, but its principal characteristics and harmonic possibilities are clearly recognisable. Despite the presence of identifiable tonal centres (of which the most important is G), the music has a degree of tonal and harmonic ambiguity arising from the prominence given to the tritone and the simultaneous use of added seventh chords with different roots. My aim in exploiting these characteristics of the mode was to find a musical equivalent to the theological ideas which underpin the work. 

Legend Op 79                                                                                                                     Francis Jackson (b 1917)

Francis Jackson is Organist Emeritus of York Minster, having been a chorister there and Organist from 1946 until 1982. His organ recital tours have taken him all over the world, with numerous recordings and broadcasts. A prolific composer for the Church, his output includes many service settings and anthems, hymn tunes, two monodramas, a symphony and solo songs, in addition to music for organ.

Composer’s note:

Legend was composed in July 1989 at the request of Robert Crowley, for a recital in St Paul’s Cathedral, London. It is a reposeful piece, in aria form: it is also somewhat chromatic in its harmony, and embraces the name of the dedicatee in a triplet figure, first heard in the seventh bar.

Concert Piece Op 116                                                                                                           Alan Bush (1900-1995)

Composer, conductor and concert pianist, Alan Bush was a Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music from 1925 to 1978, having been a student there.  A significant musical force on the international stage, Alan Bush composed more than one hundred orchestral, instrumental and vocal works, including four operas and four symphonies, frequently influenced by his political views. He composed three organ works as a result of commissions from Robert Crowley, beginning with Concert Piece Op 116 in 1987 and continuing with Suite for Organ Op 117 and Sonata for Organ Op 118.     

Composer’s note:

The title of the work, Concert Piece for Organ, was chosen by its composer for a special reason. The composer’s intent was to provide an item of organ music which could receive performance in a town-hall, a private house of a church, anywhere in fact wherein there happened to have been built an organ. The composer has striven to introduce sonata form in a modal idiom which is consistently English in its harmonic vocabulary and in its harmonic and rhythmic structure. Its four movements are linked together without breaks.                                                                                                                                                     

Suite Bretonne (Le Tombeau de Jean-Claude Jegat)                                            Alan Ridout (1934-1996)

In his prolific career, Alan Ridout composed a total of fifteen operas, eight symphonies, twenty five concertos for various instruments, eight string quartets and numerous shorter orchestral, choral and instrumental pieces. Alan Ridout was a Professor of Composition at the Royal College of Music from 1960 to 1984. Much of his organ music was written for performance at Canterbury Cathedral.

Composer’s note:

This little suite is based on Breton melodies I noted down in the early nineteen-seventies after hearing a recital given by Jean-Claude Jegat, a master of a French folk-instrument called a Bombarde. It is a double-reed instrument akin to the chanter of a bagpipe. In transferring the melodies to the organ I have featured the reeds, and incorporated the sort of ornamentation employed by the player on that occasion.

17 Haiku                                                                                                                                                         Alan Ridout

Composer’s note:

Each Haiku, like the Japanese poetic form, comprises seventeen ‘syllables’, divided 5, 7, 5. The same arrangement persists through the larger structure: thus Haiku 1 to 5 form the first group, 6 to 12 the second, 13 to 17 the last. There should be no break between sections.

Toccata alla Passacaglia Op 31                                                                             Humphrey Searle (1915-82)

Humphrey Searle studied at the Royal College of Music and with Anton Webern in Vienna. One of the pioneers of serialism in this country, his output includes three operas, five symphonies, two piano concertos, much orchestral and chamber music and three ballet scores. A Professor of Composition at the Royal College of Music, Humphrey Searle was also a leading authority on the music of Liszt. Toccata alla Passacaglia, which dates from 1956, is one of three pieces for organ. 

Robert Crowley is currently Director of Music at St Helen’s School, Northwood. He received his early musical training as a chorister at St Margaret’s Church, Westminster and he studied at the Royal Academy of Music, where he was awarded the Recital Diploma and the Henry Richards and Frederick Keene Organ Prizes. He was made an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music in 2003 and completed the MSc in Music Composition and Technology at the University of Hertfordshire in 2008. Death and Resurrection is his seventh CD of recent British organ music.    

The following pieces on this CD were commissioned by Robert Crowley:

Arnold Cooke – Suite in G

Peter Aston – De Morte et Resurrectione

Francis Jackson – Legend Op 79

Alan Bush – Concert Piece Op 116

Alan Ridout – Suite Bretonne

Petit hommage à Gabriel Fauré and De Morte et Resurrectione by Peter Aston were recorded in the presence of the composer

The pieces on the CD are all first recordings, except Alan Ridout’s Suite Bretonne and Francis Jackson’sLegend

Recording sponsored by Robert Scott and the Fitzmaurice Charitable Trust, Norwich