Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott from Op. 26, No. 4 (1963)

Jan Bender (1909–1994)

Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott (A Mighty Fortress Is Our God)

Festival Preludes on Six Chorales, Op. 26, No. 4 (1963)

In my previous recording from Jan Bender’s Festival Preludes on Six Chorales, I described the pairing of his music with a Schlicker organ as a kind of homecoming. Bender, a student of Hugo Distler, belonged to the musical culture that helped shape the twentieth-century revival of chorale-based organ composition. The Schlicker, in turn, embodies many of the tonal ideals associated with that renewal.

With Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, we encounter one of the most recognizable chorales in the Lutheran tradition, but through the ears of a composer writing more than four centuries after Luther.

The chorale carries an extraordinary historical weight. Yet Bender’s treatment belongs unmistakably to his own century. Rather than asking the organ to imitate the grandeur of a nineteenth-century Romantic chorale setting, he approaches the inherited melody through the clarity, independence of voices, and distinctive tonal colors characteristic of the Orgelbewegung.

That distinction is important. The movement was not simply an attempt to reproduce the past. Its composers and organ builders recovered older musical principles and reinterpreted them for their own time.

Here, the Gallery Schlicker provides an especially appropriate voice for that conversation between inheritance and renewal. Its transparent textures allow the musical argument to emerge without relying upon sheer tonal mass.

If the first Bender recording was about discovering what home sounds like, this second installment asks what happens when an old and familiar musical inheritance is made new again.

Organ: Gallery Schlicker, First Congregational Church of Los Angeles
Virtual instrument: Evensong Music