Justin Murphy-Mancini: Organ Music in New England: Cultivating a Living Tradition
Acis

With Organ Music in New England, Justin Murphy-Mancini surveys American organ music from early times to the present day from a New England vantage point. The seventy-four-minute collection is both a fascinating musical and scholarly document that extends from pieces composed in the 1700s and 1800s to ones of a more recent vintage; in a nice touch, the release even includes a work by Murphy-Mancini created expressly for the album. Armed with degrees from Oberlin Conservatory of Music and a doctorate from UC San Diego, he's currently professor of organ at Pacific Lutheran University but was previously Director of Church Music at First Religious Society, Unitarian Universalist, of Newburyport, Massachusetts. Its organ, built in 1834 by Joseph Alley and reconstructed several times since, is the one Murphy-Mancini plays on this, his first solo album for Acis. Though its material was recorded in April 2024, the album's producer Geoffrey Silver is correct in calling it a time machine for the way it transports us back to colonial times and brings us, track by track, to the present day.

Enhancing the engaging musical content is a thirty-six-page booklet containing photographs and text that provides extensive detail about the set's fourteen pieces (two of them multi-part) and their creators. Murphy-Mancini cites two crucial inspirations behind the project: the musicologist Barbara Owen (1933-2024) and the “living tradition” of Unitarian Universalism. In his view, she reverberates throughout the album through her writings (her first book was, in fact, titled The Organ in New England), the experiences she generously shared with Murphy-Mancini, and her enthusiastic support for the project. Through her research, she identified key Unitarian Universalist musicians from the last two centuries, many of whose works appear on the release.

From one of Edward Little White's late publications, Organ without a Master (1851), “Washington's March” initiates the recording on a bright and regal note and also showcases the broad colour palette of which the organ's capable. Thought to have been published in Boston in 1791 as part of Apollo and the Muses, William Selby's “A Fuge [sic.] or Voluntary” follows White's overture-styled piece with an equally endearing expression. Settings by William Wood (“Voluntary No. 1 ‘Duetto'”), Christian Henrich Rinck (“Soft Organ Voluntary,” with additions by Manuel Emilio), and Rayner Taylor (the glorious “Variations on ‘Adeste Fideles'”) perpetuate the serenading tone of the opening two pieces.

Most of the pieces on the album are two to three minutes at a time, with only three in the five- to six-minute range and the longest, Dudley Buck's “The Last Rose of Summer, Varied for the Organ” (1877), weighing in at a comparatively epic thirteen. The latter never feels overlong, however, when the listener is thoroughly beguiled by Buck's florid variations on the Irish popular song. Written during his student days in Germany, John Knowles Paine's “Double Fugue on ‘God Save the Queen' for the Full Organ” also inserts a more-than-familiar tune into the proceedings. From Henry Morton Dunham's 1903-published Three Chorale Preludes comes a dulcet, Bach-inspired treatment of “Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele”; rather more exuberant and celebratory is Edith Lang's “Prelude for a Festive Occasion (in the style of Mozart).” Published in 1990, Daniel Pinkham's mystery-laden “In the Isles of the Sea” takes its title from Isaiah 24:15, “Wherefore glorify ye the Lord in the fires, even the name of the Lord God of Israel in the isles of the sea.” Intended to be part of a larger work based on the hymn tune “Wondrous Love,” the inclusion of Murphy-Mancini's own starry-eyed “I'll sing on” personalizes the recording all the more (even if it could pass for an early Terry Riley piece).

With respect to the multi-movement works, Everett Titcomb's Suite in E major (1955) progresses through four parts, from a serene “Prelude” and radiant “Scherzo” to melancholy “Cantilène” and stately “Recessional.” The set concludes strongly with David Hurd's Partita on “Detroit,” an eleven-part work written in 1984 and based on a tune from the A Supplement to Kentucky Harmony shape-note book (1820). Bookended by declamatory delineations of the hymn, nine expressive variations refract it in every which way, some smooth and soothing, others cheeky and playful.

July 2025