May 2022

As I contemplated writing this article about the new pipe organ for Saint Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Fort Pierce, Florida, many things came to mind, several of them cathartic and all of them personally important. Fort Pierce is a location where, as they say, I have “roots.” I was born in the Fort Pierce area in 1967, and was baptized at the First United Methodist Church. In the ensuing years, my family would continue to come back to this community to visit, to rest, and for recreation.

“The governing idea of the work . . . was an exploration in depth of the contrapuntal possibilities inherent in a single musical subject.”¹ So says Bach scholar Christoph Wolff of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge, BWV 1080. Comprising fourteen fugues and four canons, we have inherited the work in an incomplete state; soon after Bach introduces his own musical signature as Contrapunctus XIV’s third subject and combines it with two previous themes, the music abruptly stops.

Introduction

What’s important?

Foes find friendship: Händel vs. Scarlatti

Händel vs. Scarlatti, Cristiano Gaudio, harpsichord. L’Encelade, ECL 2003. Available from encelade.net.

Joyce Jones