Berlinski — Sinfonia No. 3: Trumpets

Herman Berlinski’s "Sinfonia No. 3: Sounds and Motions for Organ" stands at a remarkable intersection of postwar expressionism, Jewish musical inheritance, and the grand American symphonic organ tradition. Written in six contrasting movements — Trumpets, Motion and Silence, Contemplation, Light Motion, Pulsation, and Polymodal Sounds and Motions — the work explores sound not merely as music, but as physical and psychological experience: proclamation, interruption, memory, prayer, pulse, and motion unfolding across a vast sonic landscape.

Although Berlinski described the work as secular, the music remains deeply shaped by the cantorial traditions and historical consciousness from which he emerged. Ancient-sounding intervals, ritualized gestures, and moments of profound stillness coexist with modernist dissonance, orchestral registration, and highly charged rhythmic processes. The result is a language that feels simultaneously liturgical and expressionistic: historically grounded, yet intensely personal.

This recording project approaches the work through the tonal and acoustical world for which Berlinski wrote. The organ used here is the Northrop organ sample set by Evensong Music, whose large American symphonic resources closely mirror the orchestral sonorities associated with the organs Berlinski knew. Rather than placing the music within vast cathedral reverberation, the acoustic has been kept comparatively restrained, allowing the work’s dense contrapuntal writing, registrational color, rhythmic architecture, and psychologically important silences to remain clearly perceptible.

This recording project was informed in part by Ann Williams Frohbieter’s 2001 Rice University dissertation, The early organ sinfonias of Herman Berlinski.
https://hdl.handle.net/1911/17964