Misleading title – the jury is still out on who wrote Dracula‘s favorite Halloween piece, the Toccata and Fugue in d minor by Johann Sebastian Bach. An amazing amount of research has been done trying to solve the great mystery of its composer.

To sum up the debate:

• The work’s style is … strange. The toccata is very free-form, similar to the earliest immature works of the young master, and nothing at all like his mature works. The fugue is in four voices, but most of the time, only three sound (uncharacteristic of Bach.) It plays more like a violin piece than an organ work.
• The earliest copy of this piece was written around 1740, by an unimportant organist named Ringk. (Most music at this time was copied by hand, so it’s not so strange that a work by Bach would have been hand-copied by another musician.) People have deeply studied Ringk’s handwriting in order to pin down the approximate date of this single copy.
• It would be possible that Bach wrote the piece as a young man, and Ringk copied it when Bach was old, but then the question is, why did he choose this piece to copy? Why not something else, something better?
• Could Bach have copied this piece into his own library, only to have Ringk later copy it from him, falsely attributing the work to the great master?

Whatever the history, and whoever wrote it, this work has become Halloween staple. A gothic organ sound playing its twisted, dark harmony can chill your soul; the opening motif catches your attention immediately. No wonder hearing this piece brings up images of Dracula, or maybe the Phantom of the Opera. Its appeal has helped it overcome its compositional flaws; it has been arranged for all sorts of solo instruments (most famously for piano, but also violin and guitar) and ensembles (most famously for orchestra, but also saxophone choir (because, why not)).

Being involved in Art Music often is an experience that produces an oceanic feeling – a sense that we are connected to the past, present, and future, to people around the world, to the entire universe, perhaps. Music has to be experienced in order for it to be music and not just noise. It’s the old “if a tree falls in the woods and nobody is there to hear it” game. Whether the music is performed live, recorded, or in the imagination of a person’s brain, it is the human experience that makes it music and not merely vibrating air molecules (or imagined vibrating air molecules).

So every time you hear a piece by a dead composer, you’re still hearing the present, even if you sense a window to the past. And when you hear a new piece by a living composer, you might envision future audiences being moved by the same strains long after you’re gone. Still, you’re in the present, and the music is in the present.

It is part of the human experience to acknowledge that we are finite. Maybe music is one of the things we turn to because we want something to be infinite; we want a piece of our life experience to exist after we have departed from the world. And that’s when the oceanic feelings come sweeping into the heart.

This week I heard a brand new piece for organ and timpani by Kurt Knecht. The title – Toccata, Adagio, & Fugue – reminds us of a famous piece from the past by the same name by Johann Sebastian Bach. So even though I heard no Bach, in a sense, I still experienced Bach’s legacy. But despite the traditional title and forms, the piece has a harmonic and rhythmic edge – something fresh and exciting – that was emphasized by the untraditional instrumentation: organ and percussion. In the present, I was sitting by the composer himself, and next to one of Philadelphia’s most famous composers, as we heard music organized in a way never heard before (well, except in the composer’s head). In the future – who can really say? The musical ideas are recorded on paper and the piece has a chance at immortality. Even so, the notes on the paper are just dots – and the music itself must be somehow be in the present to become real.

What a thrill to be a part of a continuous, living, evolving, history of music!

Kurt is also a co-founder of MusicSpoke, a music publisher which is nothing short of revolutionary.

As an organist, people often say to me, “wow, how do you play with your hands and feet at the same time?” Honestly, it’s not so hard. The feet are just like having two extra fingers – clunky, long fingers – but really it’s just a matter of an extra iota of coordination.

However, as an accordionist, I am truly blown away by this performer. He’s taking what I do with ten fingers and two feet, and doing it without the feet, while providing his own air supply. He makes it look easy, but let me assure you, this guy is one in a billion (literally … this is some seriously virtuoso accordioning; there can’t be more than 7 in the world who can play like this.)

this is good, but even more impressive is his rendition of Messiaen’s “Dieu parmi nous“