Commotio - Organ Works of the Interwar Period

Powerful European organ music from the tumultuous interwar period. 'Never such innocence again', wrote Philip Larkin at the end of M-CMXIV, his haunting poetic commemoration of The Great War from a British perspective. It is natural nowadays to see that conflict not only as an apocalyptic destruction of human life, but also as the sweeping away of an old order. The Great War landed on top of a prior state of unrest. Schoenberg's twelve-note serialism acquired so durable an iconic status, and was emulated by so many, that one is easily misled into an 'all or nothing' overview: either a composer was atonal, or he/she wasn't. This misses the essential truth that tonality is not an 'in or out' club, but a spectrum of subtly differentiated shades.