Music and Worship: Strictly Voluntary

The organ pieces before and after many church services are known as voluntaries. One explanation is that they’re voluntary not compulsory – the organist needn’t play them, and the congregation needn’t listen!

But the word voluntary, first used in the sixteenth century, seems to have meant originally a piece that was freely composed – that is, not based on a plainsong melody. The earliest organ music (from the middle ages) had been chiefly founded on plainsong, the most widely used church music at that time.

Most organ music since the sixteenth century has been freely composed, but some composers, especially in Germany, have written pieces based on hymn tunes. These pieces are usually known as organ chorales or chorale preludes (a chorale, pronounced ‘korAHL’, is a German hymn). J. S. Bach (1685–1750) is still the best known (and best) writer of such pieces. One of these is based on the so-called Passion chorale, the tune still sung in Holy Week for ‘O sacred head’. You can hear the melody clearly in the treble, despite the addition of a few ornamental notes.

Another composer who deserves special mention at this time [2007], because it’s exactly 300 years since his death, is Dieterich Buxtehude (born c. 1637). He was organist for many years at Lübeck in North Germany. (A condition of appointment was that he married his predecessor’s daughter – a common thing in Germany at the time, and, where the daughter was less than attractive, a possible reason for local difficulties with recruitment!) Buxtehude must have been a busy man, as he was church secretary, treasurer and business manager as well as organist.

Buxtehude’s music was much admired by Bach, who travelled 200 miles or more to hear him (on foot, it’s thought). Quite a few of Buxtehude’s chorale preludes are heard at St Boniface before a service – typically the hymn melody is played in the right hand and is so much ornamented that even if you did know the original tune you’d find it quite hard to identify.
Buxtehude wrote also some larger-scale and more showy pieces, not based on chorales. These include toccatas and preludes, both of which include passages in fugue style. Bach was the most important composer of fugues, and it’s not uncommon to hear one of these at the end of a service.

A fugue is based on a ‘subject’ played at the beginning on its own, as a single string of notes without accompaniment. The musical texture then builds as the subject enters in one part (layer) of the music after another. The subject continues to appear from time to time throughout the piece, often with a big climactic presentation near the end. One of the best-known organ fugues is Bach’s ‘St Anne’, so called because, by chance, the subject resembles the English tune ‘St Anne’ (sung to ‘O God, our help in ages past’). There are better grounds for an alternative name – the ‘Trinity’ fugue – because the piece is literally three-in-one (three distinct fugue sections making up one piece).

Fugues are sometimes thought of as serious, learned, academic – and therefore boring. Some are not easy listening, but perhaps they don’t need to be. Music is wonderfully able to stimulate the senses, the body (as in dancing) and the soul (in worship), but maybe occasionally it can offer a little exercise for the brain as well.