NagyMusic

ChicAGO Members Recital

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 will play the 1928 four-manual Austin Organ has 56 ranks including a seven-rank string organ and a harp stop. The organ has 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 this concert, I will give a Chicago premiere of a work for pipe organ, Centone, composed in 1989 as a contribution in honor of the celebration of the order of Paulists in Croatia and the Paulist Hymnal (1644). The work 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 (b. 1948) 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

… of the lake II

As a sequel to an earlier piano piece, …of the lake, the submitted work continues to explore the concept of an étude from the perspective of both performance and composition. The pianistic technique and compositional design of … of the lake II is structured around the notion of a constantly changing appearance of musical harmony, rhythm, texture, and piano resonance. It resembles the surface of a lake or sea that gradually transforms itself by arriving to the shore. As the morphing of the water’s waves embraces a physical constraint imposed by the shore, sand, and stone, the music of this piano work finds meaning in a gradual transformation of wave-like musical gestures and melodic fragments within a clearly predefined tonal and metric palette.

Music cognition, research on emotion in music, and the relationship between musical works and listeners are major influences on contemporary music culture, and all of these impact my continuing formation as a composer and performer. As a composer, I seek to deepen the understanding of the psychological dimensions of music. The fascination with the perceptual qualities of tone and durational systems, together with their theoretical hierarchies within Western musical culture, has been a principal influence on musical discourse in my recent compositions. In both vocal and instrumental works, I often draw inspiration from the philosophy of sound perception and its relation to performance practice, spirituality, and the notion of inner self.

In … of the lake II, I consider the empirical claim that listeners across cultures and with different degrees of musical training hear pitches and durations as relatively close or distant from a particular tonic or important metric position within a piece of music. Taking the concept of tonal pitch and meter space as a primary mode of musical syntax and discourse, I created a number of interdependent processes that create patterns of musical tension and relaxation. While composing the piece, I was interested in capturing the wave-like perceptual attractions between different pitches, causing the listener to establish very clear melodic and metric expectations and grouping schemas. The result is an emotional plethora of evolving melodic lines and more or less fulfilled anticipations of their growth and decay.

The work is dedicated to a dear friend and colleague of mine, the pianist David Kalhous, who will premiere it at Texas Tech University School of Music, Lubbock, TX, in a concert of the 20th and 21st French music, with an emphasis on spectralism. During the event, you’ll be able to listen to the performance live on the internet on the university website.

Tour d’orgues

During my recent visit to Croatia, I had an opportunity to visit a few important and rather historic pipe organs in the area. Hosted in some of the most beautiful churches in Europe, these pipe organs and their organists were a great inspiration to me; they certainly explain why I continue to regard the pipe organ as truly magnificent and celestial instrument! Some of these pipe organs were the first ones I had a privilege to hear and play when growing up.

The Cathedral of Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Zagreb
Walcker Organ Company, Ludwigsburg, Germany. 3 manuals, 53 ranks (1855)

Cathedral of St. Peter and Paul, Djakovo
Franc Jenko organ builder, Ljubljana, Slovenia. 3 manuals (1936)

The Assumption Cathedral, Dubrovnik

St. Joseph the Worker Church, Osijek (my first Parish, … and my first pipe organ!)