Next to Stanley’s Trumpet Voluntary, William Walond’s Cornet Voluntary in G major (Op. 1, No. 5) is probably the best-known piece of English organ music to have survived from the eighteenth century. Surprisingly little is known, however, about the composer. The few facts that are known about him are given in Watkins Shaw’s entry in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.1 Walond, described as “of this city,” died in Oxford in 1770, aged 45. This means that he would have been born circa 1725. Described as an organorum pulsator (an “organ beater”), he matriculated to the University of Oxford on June 25, 1757, when his college was recorded as Christ Church. Shortly thereafter he obtained his Bachelor of Music degree, presenting as his musical exercise a setting of Alexander Pope’s Ode on St. Cecilia’s Day. Contrary to what Watkins Shaw says, this does not seem to have been published. Walond did, however, publish two volumes of organ voluntaries, his Opus 1, Six Voluntaries for Organ or Harpsichord (1752), and his Opus 2, Ten Voluntaries for the Organ or Harpsichord (1758). Walond seems to have been highly thought of among his fellow organists, and the subscription list for his first set of published voluntaries includes the names of such eminent musicians as John Stanley. Walond spent most of his career as the assistant of Richard Church, who was the Heather Professor of Music at Oxford and also the organist of both Christ Church and New College, Oxford. It seems that Church mostly looked after the music at Christ Church himself and left his assistant Walond to handle the music program at New College. Walond might have expected to succeed Church in some or all of his preferment, had he not had the misfortune to predecease Church by six years and die at the early age of 45. Walond had three sons, Richard (d. 1831), George, and William Junior (d. 1836), all of whom were connected with church music. William Walond, Jr., was organist of Chichester Cathedral from 1776 to 1801. Richard Walond was a lay clerk at Magdalen College, Oxford, and later a vicar choral at Hereford Cathedral. George Walond was a chorister at Magdalen College, Oxford. That is about all that is known about Walond for certain, but there is confusion even over this. Various Internet sites give Walond’s dates as “1719–1768,” but these dates do not accord with the known facts mentioned above, and the dates “c. 1725–1770”, cited by Shaw, appear to be correct. Part of the problem is that the name Walond (pronounced “Woll-ond”) was very fluid in its spelling, and William, Jr., for example, sometimes used the spelling Walrond. There was indeed an ancient family in the west of England named Walrond. They had estates at Bradfield and Bovey in Devon, and at Ilminster in Somerset, and were prominent Royalists in the English Civil War. It is conceivable that William Walond was an offshoot of this West Country family. It is also just possible that William Walond is to be identified with the William Walland, son of Edward and Elizabeth Walland, who was baptized at St. Botolph-without-Aldgate, London, on August 30, 1724. Since the phrase “of this city”(signifying Oxford) referred to Walond’s residence at the time of his death, there is no particular reason to infer, as some have done, that he was also born in Oxford. He might well have been the pupil of a prominent London organist such as Maurice Greene and then have been recruited to Oxford by Richard Church. Some modern editions have altered the character of Walond’s well-known Voluntary in G (Op. 1, No. 5) by filling out the manual parts and introducing a pedal part. This has occasionally gone along with renaming the piece using titles such as Introduction and Toccata or Toccata for the Flutes. For an authentic performance of Walond’s voluntaries as the composer intended them to be heard, however, we must look elsewhere. There are fortunately some modern editions of Walond’s organ voluntaries that do not stray far from Walond’s original. Gordon Phillips edited the whole of Walond’s Opus 1 and one of the voluntaries from Opus 2 in three volumes of the Hinrichsen Tallis to Wesley series.2 More recently Greg Lewin has produced editions of both Opus 1 and 2, and has also produced a facsimile edition of Opus 1, all under the Hawthorns Music imprint.3 Besides these, a number of individual voluntaries or movements from voluntaries have been published in anthologies edited by C. H. Trevor, Charles Callahan and others. Personally, I particularly like playing from the facsimile edition of Opus 1, notwithstanding that it involves some familiarity with the alto clef, since the music seems to sit more comfortably under the fingers as originally notated by the composer.
Walond’s Six Voluntaries (1752)
The first of Walond’s Six Voluntaries of 1752 is a Voluntary in E minor, consisting of a Largo first movement for “The Diapasons” (the Open and Stopt Diapasons used together), and a second Allegro movement for the Mounted Cornet stop. This is typical of a mid-eighteenth-century “First Voluntary” or organ piece designed to be played during the Anglican services of Morning and Evening Prayer after the Psalms and before the First Lesson.4 The first four bars of the Diapason movement show, as H. Diack Johnstone has pointed out,5 a remarkable similarity with the first four bars of the Diapason movement of John James’s Voluntary in E minor, found in the so-called Southgate Manuscript, and it is possible that Walond knew of and was influenced by James’s work (see Example 1). The Cornet movement has an interesting structure, consisting of an A section, contrasting B and C sections, and a concluding recapitulation of the A section. It is unfortunate that it is rarely played and has never, as far as I am aware, been recorded. By contrast, Walond’s Voluntary in G major (Op. 1, No. 2), another solo Cornet piece, is quite frequently played and recorded, and is probably Walond’s second most popular piece. It is well known mainly because it is the only one of Walond’s voluntaries that C. H. Trevor reproduced in its entirety in his Old English Organ Music for Manuals anthology.6 This may well be because it is the shortest of the Cornet Voluntaries and was thus the one that best suited Trevor’s format of relatively short pieces. Trevor also reproduces the first movement only of the next voluntary, Walond’s Voluntary in D minor (Op. 1, No. 3).7 This is a very fine Siciliana, which once again finds a parallel in another voluntary of the period, the first movement of John Stanley’s Op. 6, No. 1. If one composer knew the work of the other—and Stanley was certainly on the subscription list for Walond’s voluntaries—it is in this instance difficult to know who may have influenced whom, since both voluntaries were published around the same time. The resemblance may as much as anything reflect how English composers of the period approached the crafting of church organ voluntaries in very similar ways (see Example 2). It is again unfortunate that the second movement, once more using the Mounted Cornet stop, is rarely if ever performed and as far as I am aware has never been recorded. It is a voluntary that deserves to be much more widely known. In the early eighteenth century small English organs with a divided keyboard generally had the divide set between c1 and c#1, though after about 1750 a divide between b0 and c1 became more popular. The Voluntary in D minor (Op. 1, No. 3) can be played on a one-manual organ with the divide in the earlier position of c1/c#1. It would be possible to play it on a small organ with the divide in the more usual modern position by temporarily removing or stopping off the middle C pipes of the Cornet stop. The piece that follows, Voluntary in D minor and major (Op. 1, No. 4), is yet another Cornet voluntary, although in this instance each section of the second movement is first played on the Cornet and then repeated on the Flute. The consensus of eighteenth-century scholarship suggests that this would probably have meant a 4-ft. Flute used alone without an 8-ft. stop being drawn. Voluntaries for Cornet and Flute, like this one, were quite popular in the eighteenth century, and in some ways ought perhaps to be considered a separate genre from the basic Cornet voluntary. In this particular one, after the second repeat, the Cornet re-enters at the end for the last three bars. Once again the first, slow, Diapason movement but not the Cornet movement is reprinted in Trevor’s anthology.8 This voluntary is another rather neglected piece, although there is at least one recording of it, performed by Peter Ward Jones on the 1790 John Donaldson organ in the Holywell Music Room in Oxford.9 The fourth voluntary is followed by Walond’s best-known composition, the beautifully crafted Voluntary No. 5 in G major. This is one of the longer Cornet voluntaries, stretching to four pages of the original edition. An interesting feature of the eighteenth-century edition is that in bars 22 and 23 of the Cornet movement Walond has a C# and D in octaves, whereas the rest of the accompaniment is all in single notes. The composer probably did not intend both octaves to be played at once, but rather included them as alternatives. The idea was that if the piece were to be performed on a one-manual instrument with divided keyboard, the lower notes would be played instead of the upper ones. On a two-manual instrument the upper notes would be used. In this way the voluntary could if required be accommodated to a one-manual organ with the divide in either the b0/c1 or c1/c#1 position. The sixth of the first set of voluntaries, the Voluntary No. 6 in D minor, is probably Walond’s finest work. Unlike the other five voluntaries of Opus 1, which are all Cornet voluntaries, Op. 1, No. 6 is an Introduction and Fugue. This means that it is a “Second Voluntary,” the type of organ piece that was generally used at the end of church services. It is a magnificent example of its kind. Written in the Italian concerto style of Arcangelo Corelli, the opening movement uses the Great Organ for the ripieno passages, with the concertante passages being played on the Swell and Choir. In this respect it has some affinities with J. S. Bach’s and J. G. Walther’s arrangements of Italian concerti for the organ. The introduction segues into a majestic double fugue on full organ. This voluntary is also noteworthy for being the first known composition in which markings are used to indicate when the swell box should be opened and closed. Walond uses wedge shapes, similar to the modern “hairpins” except that they are solid rather than open. For an authentic performance this voluntary really requires a G-compass organ since the note AA is several times called for, although it is possible to avoid this by transposing a few notes in the left hand up an octave without too much damage to the texture of the piece. The need for a G-compass organ may unfortunately be one reason why Walond’s tour de force seems to be played and recorded10 so infrequently.
Walond’s Ten Voluntaries (1758)
The second set of Walond’s voluntaries, the Ten Voluntaries for the Organ or Harpsichord of 1758, is much less homogeneous than the first, and contains both some extremely fine pieces and some rather curious anomalies. The first piece, the Voluntary in E major (Op. 2, No. 1), is another fine Cornet voluntary from the same tradition as the first five voluntaries of Opus 1. Like Op. 1, No. 4, it alternates Cornet passages with interludes on the Flute. There is, however, one strange thing about this voluntary, and that is its key of E major. Eighteenth-century English organs were tuned to meantone temperament, and therefore it was not generally considered a good idea to compose music in remote keys. In the key of E major, the third between B and D# would have been particularly unpleasant, and it is puzzling therefore that Walond should have composed a voluntary in this key. There is no evidence, however, that this piece was ever in any key other than E major.11 Furthermore, there is a contemporary precedent for using the key of E major in an organ voluntary by Maurice Greene.12 Indeed, elsewhere Walond was not afraid to modulate into four sharps quite extensively, as for example in his B minor voluntary, Op. 2, No. 2. John Stanley does the same thing in his Op. 7, No. 1, a Cornet Voluntary in A major. It is unclear whether Walond—and for that matter Greene and Stanley—used E major in order to exploit the wolf notes for a particular effect, or whether they intended that the wolf notes should as far as possible be covered over, for example by introducing ornaments where B and D# are sounded together. It would be interesting to hear how Walond’s E major voluntary would actually sound on an eighteenth-century English organ tuned to its original meantone temperament. Op. 2, No. 2 is a Voluntary in B minor, comprising an Andante played on the Swell and accompanied on the Choir Organ, together with an Allegro Moderato, for which Walond rather unusually for the period specifies “the 2 Diapasons, Principal & Fifteenth.” This voluntary was also probably intended as a First Voluntary for use before the First Lesson at Morning or Evening Prayer. It is a pleasant little piece, and is one of the voluntaries that features on Jennifer Bate’s five-CD set From Stanley to Wesley, where it is played on the 1786 John Avery organ at St. Michael’s Mount in Cornwall.13 The third of Walond’s Ten Voluntaries for the Organ or Harpsichord is a very strange beast indeed. It consists of a single movement, an Andante affettuoso, to be played on soft registrations with a Sesquialtera solo in the tenor and bass registers. The Sesquialtera was a tierce mixture found on eighteenth-century English organs. There were generally three ranks though sometimes four or more. A typical example would commence at 17-19-22 in the bass and break back to 12-15-17 around middle C. It is just possible that Walond intended the solo to be played on the Sesquialtera alone, but it seems more likely that he intended other stops such as the Stopt Diapason to be drawn together with it. The movement does not seem to follow the form of any of the usual types of English organ voluntaries, and I am therefore at a loss to suggest the sort of occasion for which it may have been composed. It is nevertheless interesting in being about the closest equivalent we have to a French Tierce en taille in the eighteenth-century English organ repertoire (see Example 3). There is an AA and four GGs in the left hand, so the piece really requires a G-compass organ, although it is once again fairly easy to get around this by playing a few notes an octave higher. On the other hand, whether anyone would really wish to play it, except perhaps as a historical curiosity, is somewhat doubtful. The fourth voluntary in Walond’s Opus 2 is another extremely fine one, a Trumpet Voluntary in D minor and major. Once again this is a fairly typical First Voluntary, made up of two movements: a Grave for the Diapasons, and a Moderato for Trumpet. The Diapason movement is a dignified essay in the style of Corelli. One feature that at first seems strange is that while the rest of bars 1–7 have the left hand moving in octaves, the low C# in bar 4 is omitted, notwithstanding that the diminished seventh chord is the climax of the whole passage. This apparent anomaly, however, is easily explained by the fact that on a “short-octave” G-compass organ, such as Walond’s instrument at New College, Oxford, the low C# was omitted (the low C# key played AA instead), so he simply would not have had the note available. It would probably therefore be desirable to insert the additional low C# on organs that possess this note. I also wonder if a treble D has accidentally been omitted at the end of bar 5, since the passage does not seem to make a lot of sense without it. Nevertheless, bars 4 and 5 are repeated at bars 43 and 44, and the treble D is once again omitted, making it seem less likely that this was a mistake, and the question remains something of an enigma (see Example 4). The Trumpet movement is a very well-crafted one in a slightly archaic style. It has perhaps more in common with orchestral trumpet music from the beginning of the eighteenth century—such as William Croft’s well-known Trumpet Tune—than with mid-eighteenth-century organ voluntaries such as those of Stanley and Greene. Trumpet voluntaries were treated very orchestrally in eighteenth-century England, and generally nothing was demanded of the organ that could not readily be accomplished on the valveless orchestral trumpets of the day. For this reason Trumpet movements were normally written only in the keys of C and D major, and modulations and even accidentals were kept to a minimum. When it was desired to modulate, this would be done on another stop such as the Flute.14 This is precisely what Walond does in his Op. 2, No. 4. The first two pages are played on the Trumpet in D major without the use of a single accidental, and there is then a contrasting one-page Flute passage where variety is provided by modulating into several different keys. Finally the first Trumpet section is repeated. At the end is a ten-bar concluding section in octaves. Although the score does not make this clear, this ten-bar section was probably only intended to be used after the repeat of the Trumpet section. No indication is given in the original that this final section is to played on anything other than the Trumpet, but since there are other eighteenth-century precedents I strongly suspect that Walond intended these final ten bars to be played on full organ.15 Once again, unfortunately, this voluntary contains a few notes that require a G-compass organ, and in this case it is not really possible to move notes up an octave without spoiling the character of the composition. This is a pity as it is one of Walond’s finest works and deserves to be much more widely known (see Example 5). Op. 2, No. 5, Voluntary in C minor, is yet another First Voluntary in two movements, an Andante for the Diapasons and an Allegro ma non troppo that begins on the Swell and then segues into a solo for the Choir Vox Humana or Bassoon. It is another very pleasant little voluntary, as is the one that follows it, Op. 2, No. 6, a single-movement Voluntary in G major. No indication is given of the tempo or registration to be used in the sixth voluntary, and one almost wonders if it was written purely as harpsichord piece, and not as a composition to be played on the organ at all. Or perhaps it was: a minority of churches had a voluntary before the service as well as the usual voluntaries before the First Lesson and at the end of the service. Nobody seems to know quite what these were like, but there is perhaps a certain prelude-like quality to Op. 2, No. 6, and it is therefore conceivable that if this movement was indeed written as an organ voluntary it was intended to be one of these elusive before-the-service pieces. If it were to be played on the organ it ought probably to be played at a Moderato tempo on a mezzo forte registration on the Swell with Choir bass or on the Diapasons and Principal of the Great Organ. The seventh voluntary in Opus 2 is another very strange one. It is a single-movement voluntary consisting of a Fugue in B-flat. Second Voluntaries, for use after the service, did not always have introductory movements, and sometimes consisted solely, like this one, of a fugue. Fugues were usually played on full organ, and though there are again no suggestions for registration in the original, full organ is probably the registration that Walond would have used. Although quite short, it is a rather complicated and academic fugue, with a very tedious subject consisting mostly of the same notes repeated two or three times. It contains quite a few old English beats, printed like inverted mordants but to be played as inverted shakes beginning on the lower auxiliary.16 It seems somewhat archaic in style for a mid-eighteenth-century voluntary. The piece seems hardly to be worth the effort of learning it except, perhaps, for its value as a historical curiosity. Voluntary No. 8 is another fugue, this time in C major, but considerably more accessible and in its way very pleasant. The same may be said of Op. 2, No. 9, the Voluntary in E flat major, although this time there is an introductory Adagio movement as well as the Allegro fugue. Both these movements would normally have been played on full organ. In Voluntary No. 9, however, Walond marks the first movement “Diapasons or Full Organ,” but the reason for him specifying the alternative “Diapasons” registration is by no means clear from the character of the piece. The tenth and final voluntary in the second collection is a two-movement Voluntary in A minor, another First Voluntary. It begins with a slow movement on the Swell and segues into a sprightly Allegro for the Flute stop. This is another of Walond’s finer voluntaries, and like Op. 2, No. 2 it has been recorded by Jennifer Bate in her From Stanley to Wesley set of recordings.17
Conclusion
In conclusion it is perhaps worth stressing that most organists in eighteenth-century England improvised their voluntaries in church, including even fugues, as the leading French organists still do today. Indeed, the word voluntary originally meant an improvisation. Voluntaries were normally only written down as compositions for one of two reasons—either for a special recital such as the dedication of a new organ, or as practice pieces to assist students in learning how to improvise their own voluntaries. As an organist working in the University of Oxford, Walond doubtless had the didactic motive very much in mind in publishing his two sets of voluntaries. There is a case to be made for William Walond having been among the finest composers for the organ in eighteenth-century England but, apart from the two well-known Cornet voluntaries in G, Op. 1, Nos. 2 and 5, until now his works have been sadly neglected. I hope that this article will encourage a wider use of his voluntaries, as well as suggesting some of the rationales that lay behind their original composition and providing some hints about how to perform them in an authentic fashion.
