The American Guild of Organists – Chicago Chapter, will feature an afternoon of multi cultural organ music at St. Mary of Perpetual Help Church in Chicago.

Recitalists Dr. Thomas Wikman (The Church of the Ascension), Minkyoo Shin (Lutheran Church of the Ascension), Dr. Zvonimir Nagy (St. Michael in Old Town Church), Dr. Carol Ann Ritter (Second Presbyterian Church), Dr. Ricardo Ramirez (Holy Name Cathedral), Dr. Carol Ann Ritter, and Minkyoo Shin played the 1928 four-manual, 56-rank Austin organ, with the five ranks of pipes in the antiphonal section located behind the high altar. Over the last several years, the organ has been cleaned and updated with new relays. In 1993, the old worn Austin console was replaced with an Aeolian-Skinner console. The organ was featured in both the recent National AGO Convention in Chicago and the National Organ Historical Society Convention.

In the concert, I gave a Chicago premiere of a work for pipe organ, Centone by a Croatian composer and my first composition teacher, Marko Ruždjak (b. 1948). Composed in 1989, the work was created as a contribution in honor of the celebration of the order of Paulists in Croatia and the Paulist Hymnal (1644). It calls for a very colorful organ palette whose surface projects the integration of precomposed thematic fragments, a compositional technique often referred to as centone (literally, “patchwork quilt”). The design of the work follows the shape of an antiphon, where two independent musical objects interact with one another, almost in a refrain-verse-refrain manner.

Marko Ruždjak is a Croatian composer, currently on the music faculty at the Academy of Music, University of Zagreb. He is a composer whose highly specific compositional aesthetic gives him a special, distinguished place in Croatian contemporary music. Mr. Ruždjak describes the act of composition as akin to the gradual coming into sight and surfacing of individual islands in an archipelago. A work’s expressive charge is not the composer’s own decision, rather the logical result of attentively listening to the material’s expressive potential and of the very physiology of performance, the real limitations of voices and instruments. Mr. Ruždjak has written solo, chamber, choral, vocal-instrumental and orchestral works.

May 16, 2010 at 3 p.m. St. Mary of Perpetual Help Church, 1039 W. 32nd Street, Chicago, IL 60608