The Role of The Organ in French Liturgy

by Dr. Lenora McCroskey

The French “Classic” organ contains some of the most colorful sounds in all of organ history.  Full of singing flutes, warm principals, and commanding reeds, these stops can be combined for all sorts of effects from elegant solo and accompaniment to dance music to grand ceremonial processional music.  The Robert and Shirley Ottman French Classic organ at UNT, built by Gene Bedient, enables us to experience these marvelous sounds.  The Bach Society program allows us to hear them in their context.

Organ music in France was almost all liturgical from the earliest times to the beginning of the nineteenth-century.  Organists were directed to insert short pieces in sections of the mass and offices (vespers, most commonly), replacing the text on days when the service was sung.  Most of this music was improvised and was probably based on the prescribed melodies of the liturgy.  The sections of the mass that were replaced were those that were sung or said at every mass, known as the Ordinary.  The Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, and the Magnificat at Vespers were treated this way.  In late seventeenth and eighteenth-century France, on the highest holy days, the most important mass or vespers of the day was sung in polyphony, often with instruments.  During the secondary masses or vespers, the organ was used to replace sections of the text, and in special masses, such as the one in our program, the use of the organ was flexible.  Charpentier, in this memorial mass, specifically instructs the organist to play various sections, or to play if the instrumental symphony is not sufficient.  

Church officials, not the musicians, stipulated the pieces to be played and the registrations to be used.  For example, the first Kyrie was always to be played on a specific registration, the plein jeu.  Indeed, most of the titles of the pieces give the registrations:  cornet, plein jeu, grand jeu, tierce en taille.  Collections of pieces were published for organists who could not improvise, or as examples of pieces to be improvised, or as examples of a composer’s art—something like the vanity publications of today.  Very rarely does one find organ pieces and vocal pieces in the same publication.  Organists, if they used written music, were expected to choose correct pieces.  Charpentier, who wrote vast amounts of both sacred and secular vocal music, did not write one single piece of organ music.