Daniel Gottlob Turk on the Role of the Organist in Worship (1787) (review)

Daniel Gottlob Türk on the Role of the Organist in Worship (1787). Translated and edited by Margot Ann Greenlimb Woolard. Studies in Liturgical Musicology, 9. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2000. [xxv, 171 p. ISBN 0-8108-3704-8. $59.50.]

Daniel Gottlob Türk's treatise On the Role of the Organist was published in Halle, where Türk was organist and director of music at the university. As Robin Leaver points out in his preface to this translation, there is some irony in this: as a locus of both Pietism and rationalism, Halle was a city in which Lutheran church music had declined considerably during the eighteenth century. In such an environment, Türk set forth the skills and knowledge necessary to discharge the duties of an organist.

Türk divides his discussion into four sections. "Chorales," the first and by far the most extensive, concerns both the simple accompaniment of hymns and more advanced topics such as variations and interludes; it also includes basic instruction in church modes and the appropriate marriage of text and tune. The following sections, "Preludes," "Accompaniment," and "Organ Construction and Maintenance," are progressively shorter. Türk writes, as he announces in his foreword, for "beginning organists and village schoolteachers" as well as for "church colleagues, clergymen, etc."; he intends not only to offer practical instruction to would-be organists, but also to suggest "how the musical portion of the service might encourage devotion" (p. xxiii). In his first three sections, he addresses an audience with enough musical ability to comprehend music notation, harmonize melodies, and improvise at a basic level. Even the fourth, his basic introduction to the mysteries of the organ's mechanism and maintenance, might be understood by a clavier player or nonmusician who is not already familiar with the organ.

Like any translation, this one deserves scrutiny on two grounds: the quality of the translation itself and the value of what is translated. On the first, Margot Ann Greenlimb Woolard's work stands up well. The translation is readable and consistent in tone. Woolard's copious notes document and corroborate nearly every aspect of Türk's remarks, situating them in the musical culture in which he lived and wrote. This documentation comes at the cost of the reader's occasionally finding two or even three endnotes cued by a single name (often with another note later in the same sentence), but apart from that irritation, the notes provide worthwhile amplification of the text, helping the modern reader come a bit closer to understanding Türk's advice as his own audience might have.

In regard to the second criterion, the contemporary value of the work translated, I am less enthusiastic. This treatise provides an interesting glimpse into at least one corner of the world of German church music a generation or so after the time of Johann Sebastian Bach. But for whom? Those with a scholarly interest in Türk's time and subject have unmediated access to Türk himself, through Bernhard Billeter's facsimile edition of the work (Hilversum: Frits Knuf, 1966); for this scholarly audience, neither Woolard's translation nor her notes fill any pressing need. Still, this is the audience that will have the greatest use for this book. Those without such a specialty, but with a more general concern for the organ and church music, will surely find enough in modern-day writings to confirm what they will learn from Türk--namely, that many of the professional concerns of today are not new, but merely reflect another whirl in the cyclical path of church music. And the instructions and examples offered by modern writers will be of considerably more utility to the modern-day beginning organist or the schoolteacher pressed into service at the organ than those Türk offers. The concerns, the styles, the idioms, and the very instruments of ecclesiastical music have changed...