Praetorius’ Ear for Organ and Electronics

Duration: 17:00
Completed: 2012
Instrumentation: Organ and Electronics

Program Notes

It started when he found the ear, he told me– it was a relic– and immediately knew that it was what he had been missing. He said that of course just as it had been impossible to really hear Johann Sebastian Bach on a modern piano and hearing Sweelinck in equal temperament had made him want to crush his cochlea, the bodily impediments prevented authentic hearing of Praetorius’ music– they corrupted it– now that instruments were being constructed correctly and tuned correctly it was like a breath of fresh air but still, he said, something was missing, and when he saw the mummified ear and skull portion, when he saw the organs preserved, he knew! When I met him he said that now he knew the secrets to Praetorius’s compositional method, now that he had replaced his useless ear with his find, now that he had replaced his ear with Praetorius’ ear! His passionate argument was as forceful as a detonation as the early music expert held forth on the merits of using ears that were period-appropriate (or ear as was the case!), anyone would have been stunned, but especially me, a mere student, as I– my back to the wall– stared at the details of his swollen face, crisscrossed with brilliant red veins, from inches away, spit launching from his puffy lips. No one has ever really heard this music at all, he shouted, if anyone is to listen to Praetorius, they too must undergo the ear-graft operation! The early music expert said that, although his wished that he had been able to replace both ears, his two ears– the authentic ear and the impediment, he called them– left him in the unique position of being able to translate Praetorius for my corrupted ears. So, at the alternately at the equal tempered modern piano and the mean-tone organ that he asserted that Sweelinck used (as well as covering and uncovering the appropriate ear), he played what seemed to me to be notated in Praetorius’ music at the piano and music that had no apparent relation to the notated music at Sweelinck’s organ. Shocked, I simply left my tape recorder rolling and later photocopied what the expert had notated for me to take with me. Later, after the music expert’s untimely death, I played back the tape and used some of the expert’s playing, as well as the notated music, as the basis for a new composition for Randall Harlow.