Introduction
The 1930s was a creative era in organ composition, both in Europe and the United States. Frenchman Louis Vierne composed his tonally adventuresome, cyclic Sixième Symphonie in 1930. Fellow compatriot Marcel Dupré's Le Chemin de la Croix (1931) portrayed musically Christ's crucifixion. The innovative Olivier Messiaen used his modes of limited transposition to form the harmonic vocabulary of L'Ascension in 1933-34. German Sigfrid Karg-Elert composed his lengthy and tonally-taxing Passacaglia und Fuge an B-A-C-H in 1932. American Leo Sowerby composed his Symphony in G Major in 1930, which has remained a landmark of American organ composition to the present day.
Many other organ works written by American composers during the 1930s have largely disappeared from the known organ repertory. Leroy Robertson's three organ works--Organ Sonata in B Minor, Fantasia in F Minor, and Intermezzo--join the ranks of those works that never enjoyed wide acclaim. This unpopularity does not prove that Robertson's music is not well written. Like the aforementioned compositions, Robertson's music also employs new ideas. His Organ Sonata was one of few composed during the first part of the twentieth century.1 He also incorporated a Native American melody into the Organ Sonata. This was a revolutionary idea for organ composition during the first part of the twentieth century, showing Robertson's interest in the varied styles of earlier compositions.
The famous French organist and composer Marcel Dupré came into contact with Robertson's organ music on a recital tour in 1939. Dupré wrote to Robertson, "It is a pleasure for me to tell you that I have been very interested by your organ compositions . . . They are very musical and well written for the instrument. I wish to you the success that you deserve with them."2 The success never came, and Robertson's Organ Sonata and Fantasia have never been published,3 while the Intermezzo has been published in a book containing other works by American composers.4 The ignominious state of Robertson's organ music is unfortunate, since his compositional ability and idiomatic writing for the organ have produced solid, musical organ works that deserve wider circulation and recognition.
Biographical Sketch
Leroy J. Robertson (1896-1971) was born and raised in Fountain Green, Utah, a small community about 100 miles south of Salt Lake City. He received his first formal musical training on the violin from E. G. Edmunds.5 Ben Williams, his second violin teacher, was a railroad worker who taught himself how to play the violin from a Sears Roebuck catalogue.6 Robertson attended high school in Pleasant Grove and Provo, Utah, where he played in the orchestra and took courses in music theory. He was allowed to take classes in harmony, music history, and solfeggio at Brigham Young University during his last two years of high school. He also played in the university orchestra and studied violin privately with a Brigham Young University faculty member. Robertson helped support himself in high school by giving violin lessons.
Upon graduation from high school, Robertson met George Fitzroy, a private music teacher in Provo. Fitzroy had just graduated from the New England Conservatory of Music, where he had studied composition with George Chadwick, an acclaimed composer and teacher of the time. Fitzroy gave young Robertson training in analysis and counterpoint and lent him the first orchestral scores that he had ever seen: Mendelssohn's Overture to a Midsummer Night's Dream and the Dvorák New World Symphony.7 Fitzroy eventually persuaded Robertson to go to the New England Conservatory and study composition with Chadwick. Robertson went on to earn diplomas in violin, piano, composition, and public school music from the New England Conservatory in 1923. He then returned to Utah and taught high school music for two years. He began teaching at Brigham Young University in September 1925, where he conducted the university orchestra and taught music theory and violin.
In 1925 Robertson learned that the famous Swiss composer Ernest Bloch was coming to San Francisco to head the San Francisco Conservatory. Five years later, Robertson obtained a leave of absence from his university teaching and studied privately with Bloch in San Francisco from March to June 1930. Robertson also studied privately with Bloch in Switzerland from June to September 1932, soon after receiving his BA and MA degrees from Brigham Young University. Robertson and Bloch developed a close friendship that lasted many years.
After his studies with Bloch, Robertson traveled to Leipzig and Berlin. In Berlin he studied the music of Renaissance composers with the famous musicologist Hugo Leichtentritt from October 1932 to the spring of 1933. Robertson began receiving prizes and awards for his compositions after this period of European study. His Quintet in A Minor for Piano and Strings (1933) received First Prize from among two hundred other submitted manuscripts in a competition sponsored by the Society for the Publication of American Music in 1936.
Robertson began work on his doctorate at the University of Southern California in the summer of 1936, studying first with Arnold Schoenberg and later with Ernest Toch. Robertson continued to build up the music program at Brigham Young University by expanding the theory program and the symphony orchestra. He was catapulted to international fame in 1947 when his Symphony No. 2, subtitled Trilogy, won the Symphony of the Americas Contest sponsored by Henry H. Reichhold in Detroit. Robertson was awarded $25,000 and a premiere of his symphony by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra on 11 December 1947. More than four hundred musicians from seventeen countries entered this contest, including major composers from North and South America.
Robertson became the head of the Music Department of the University of Utah in 1948. He continued working on his doctorate during the summer months, finally receiving the degree in 1953. Robertson's accomplishments as a music department chair included "adapt[ing] the curriculum of study [in the music department] so as to meet national standards."8 He also introduced the bachelor's and master's degrees in music to the university's curriculum. In addition, the University of Utah became the first university in the area to offer the Ph.D. in music. Robertson taught at the University of Utah until 1962, when he retired and served as composer-in-residence until July 1965.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints asked Robertson to head its Church General Music Committee in the spring of 1962, three months before he retired from the University of Utah. He had served as a member of this committee since 1938 and was involved in the compilation and editing of the church's 1948 hymnal. He headed the music committee until 1969. Robertson died of heart failure, a complication of diabetes, on 25 July 1971. Other compositions for which Robertson was well known include: String Quartet No. 1 (1940), Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra (1944), American Serenade (String Quartet No. 2) (1944), Overture to Punch and Judy (1945), Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (1948), Oratorio from the Book of Mormon (1953), Passacaglia for Orchestra (1955), Concerto for Violoncello and Orchestra (1956), and Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1966).
Leroy Robertson and the Organ
Leroy Robertson's preparation for writing organ music began several years before its actual composition. Around 1926-27, Robertson met a young teenager, J. J. Keeler, a Provo, Utah native who was just beginning organ lessons. Robertson knew of Keeler's interest in the organ and always encouraged him in his organ studies. During Keeler's student years in Provo, Robertson had Keeler play many well-known organ works for him.9 These experiences no doubt allowed Robertson to examine how to write effectively for the organ.
Robertson and Keeler traveled to Europe together in 1932 as Robertson was preparing to study with Ernest Bloch in Switzerland. Keeler went to the Leipzig Conservatory in Germany to study with the famous organist Karl Straube, one of Germany's foremost organ virtuosi of the time who premiered many of Max Reger's organ works. Straube was also the organist at the famous Thomaskirche, where Johann Sebastian Bach had served previously. After Robertson's studies with Bloch, he traveled to Leipzig to see how Keeler was faring.
Robertson stayed in Leipzig for about six weeks, visiting frequently the large churches in Leipzig, the Thomaskirche being his favorite. It was here that Robertson heard Karl Straube, assistant organist Günther Ramin, and Straube's students play the organ works of the great German masters. The church's acoustics, its heroic 1889 Wilhelm Sauer organ, and Keeler's interest in organ music inspired Robertson to compose organ music of his own. He sketched his first organ works, Organ Sonata in B Minor and Fantasia in F Minor, in Leipzig in 1932.10 These works were later completed in Berlin and Provo, Utah during the years 1933-1934.11 The registration indications for Robertson's organ music were prepared with J. J. Keeler's assistance on the 1907 Austin organ in the Provo Tabernacle.12
Organ Sonata in B Minor
The Organ Sonata is composed in three movements entitled Prelude, Scherzo, and Ricercare. Robertson dedicated this work to his wife Naomi. J. J. Keeler premiered the Prelude and Ricercare movements of the Organ Sonata on 1 February 1943 in the Provo Tabernacle.13 The Brigham Young University student newspaper, The Y News, wrote that "one of the most delightful numbers [of the concert] was a[n organ] sonata composed by Professor Robertson, which, according to critics, is virile with energy of the new west."14 Alexander Schreiner, Salt Lake Tabernacle Organist and faculty member at the University of California at Los Angeles, later played the complete Organ Sonata on his fifty-first noon organ recital, which took place on 3 May 1935, in Royce Hall at UCLA.15
Robertson entered the Organ Sonata in B Minor in the Helen Sheets Composition Contest sponsored by the McCune School of Music and Art in Salt Lake City. The work won a prize of $50 and was hailed as the best composition by a Utah composer. The judge for the contest, a prominent California musician, wrote that Robertson's Organ Sonata "was far superior to any other entered . . . and that Mr. Robertson is a serious, splendid musician . . . who should by all means have the prize."16
At Arthur Shepherd's special request, Robertson orchestrated the Organ Sonata in B Minor for strings, woodwinds, percussion, brass, and organ and retitled the work Prelude, Scherzo, and Ricercare on Two Themes.17 This work was first performed for the convention of the Music Teachers National Association held in 1941 at Minneapolis. The Utah Symphony, conducted by Maurice Abravanel, recorded this work in 1948.18 Abravanel thought that this transcription was particularly successful, especially since it was not like other "very popular organ transcriptions of the day that were always very thick and loud, the Robertson score was like chamber music, very delicate and lean."19 Leopold Stokowski, conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, was also interested in having his orchestra perform the Prelude, Scherzo, and Ricercare on Two Themes, but was never able to program it.20
Robertson wrote that the first movement of the Organ Sonata is "in the style of the choral prelude announc[ing] the two chief themes at the outset--the first alone in the pedal and the second in a higher register with a simple alto supplying an obligato [sic]."21 He composed this first melody in B harmonic minor, imbuing it with a brooding, melancholy air (see Example 1).
The second theme is based on a Ute Indian melody in the Phrygian mode.22 Robertson thought very highly of the Native American people and traveled to the Ute and Ouray Indian Reservation several times in the late 1920s and early 1930s. This reservation covers a large area of land next to the Colorado border in eastern Utah. During these visits Robertson transcribed some of their melodies, most of which were associated with the Bear Dance. Robertson had to obtain permission to transcribe these melodies, since the bears and the melodies associated with them were sacred to the Native Americans (see Example 2).23
Robertson's inclusion of indigenous or folk melodies was a common practice among composers in the first half of the twentieth century. Aaron Copland used Mexican folksong in his orchestral work El Salón Mexico (1936), and cowboy songs in his ballets Billy the Kid (1938) and Rodeo (1942), all of which were composed within ten years of Robertson's Organ Sonata.24 Roy Harris, another American composer who was active at this time, used modal melodies to "impart a sense of expansiveness reminiscent of the American West."25 Since Robertson was raised in a small Utah community, it is very probable that his inclusion of the Native American melody was a reflection on his youthful days in Fountain Green, Utah.
Robertson composed the Scherzo in a standard three-section form typical of works in this genre. He opens the movement with an embellished version of the Ute Indian melody accompanied by chords sounding on the offbeat. This theme, combined with the offbeat accompanimental pattern, gives a swing, freedom, and expansiveness of the western United States that Robertson knew from his youth (see Example 3). Robertson presents three additional embellished statements of the Ute Indian melody in the remaining part of the Scherzo's first section.
Robertson presents a major-mode version of the Prelude's first theme in canon at the third between the right hand and pedal at the beginning of the Scherzo's second section. A busy eighth-note accompaniment that begins incessantly on the offbeat is a recurrent motive in this section. Robertson states this theme two other times before reintroducing the Ute Indian melody in the pedal. The third section, marked scherzando, hearkens back to the beginning, with the embellished Ute Indian melody presented in canon.
Robertson's desire to compose a ricercare reflects the neoclassical trend that permeated American music in the first half of the twentieth century. Composers became more interested in musical forms and other elements of composition from the eighteenth century and earlier. Robertson had also studied the music of Renaissance composers during his time in Berlin with Hugo Leichtentritt, and he copied many works of Renaissance composers by hand. The ricercare, an early precursor of the fugue, consisted of several themes that were developed imitatively one by one. The ricercare was used in Renaissance music, so it is likely that Robertson would have studied the ricercares of Renaissance composers as he copied and studied their music in Berlin.
Robertson employs the opening pedal theme from the Prelude and the Ute Indian melody imitatively during the first part of the Ricercare. He proceeds to introduce three thematic ideas successively. Robertson alternates these themes between various voices and often combines one of them with the opening pedal theme from the Prelude or the Ute Indian melody. He concludes the Ricercare with a short Epilogue. He uses the opening theme from the Prelude and the Ute Indian melody as the thematic material for this section.
Fantasia in F Minor
The Fantasia in F Minor was the second of Robertson's organ works to be heard by the public. J. J. Keeler, to whom the Fantasia is dedicated, gave the premiere on 26 November 1934 in the Provo Tabernacle. Robert Cundick, who was later to become an organist at the Salt Lake Tabernacle, recorded the Fantasia in 1955.
Robertson employs a broad tempo, thick chords and flourishes in the first half of the Fantasia that show Max Reger's influence.26 Robertson most certainly heard much of Reger's organ music played while he was in Leipzig, and this could explain why he chose to write in this style (see Example 4).27 After this commanding introduction, Robertson introduces a fugato section containing a four-voice exposition employing real answers (mm. 21-32). This demonstrates his ability to infuse counterpoint with neo-romantic harmonic language. Robertson also states the fugue subject in inversion (m. 34), as well as in the original form. He builds up the fugato to a coda (beginning in m. 53) employing dramatic harmonies. Robertson brings the coda to a tremendous climax that resolves triumphantly on an F-major chord.
Intermezzo
Robertson composed the Intermezzo, his third and final organ work in 1934, dedicating it to Salt Lake Tabernacle organist Alexander Schreiner. The date, venue, and performing artist of the Intermezzo's first performance remain uncertain.28 This work employs a lyrical melody, is composed in a three-part form, and contains a rich harmonic vocabulary. These aspects could lead one to view Robertson's Intermezzo as a small-scale version of the other keyboard intermezzi such as those composed by Johannes Brahms. Robertson draws the Intermezzo to a close in a short coda. Concerning this work's ending, Robertson mused, "all my life I've abhorred the conventional ending."29 He avoids a "conventional ending" by cleverly employing chromaticism to good effect (see Example 5).
Conclusion
Leroy Robertson's three organ works--Organ Sonata in B Minor, Fantasia in F Minor, and Intermezzo--have never enjoyed even limited circulation among organists. This is partly because most of his works have never been published, while some might attribute their lack of renown to the fact that Utah was quite isolated from main American music scene in the 1930s. Whatever the reason, Robertson has composed three fine works for organ that deserve to be better known. His exposure to great organs and organ music in Germany moved him to write serious concert organ music that has enriched the organ repertory.
Robertson was unfortunately not able to write more of this high-caliber organ music. The pressures of university teaching, other commissions, his responsibilities as a father and husband, and his ever-increasing interests in orchestral music provide possible explanations why Robertson did not have time to compose other solo organ works, but the real answer remains unknown.30 It is the author's hope that this study of Robertson's organ music will inspire others to study, perform, research, and write more about it, so that his music will one day merit the acclaim and popularity that it rightly deserves.
Notes
1. Other American composers who wrote organ sonatas during the first part of the twentieth century include James Rogers, Horatio Parker, Felix Borowski, and Philip James.
2. Marian Robertson Wilson, "Leroy Robertson: Music Giant from the Rockies," TMS (photocopy), 251, footnote 17, Special Collections, Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah.
3. The original manuscripts of Robertson's organ works are located in the Manuscript Division of Special Collections, Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah. It is the author's hope to have Robertson's organ music published and recorded in the near future.
4. Leroy Robertson, "Intermezzo" in Lyric Pieces by American Composers, ed. Darwin Wolford (Delaware Gap, Pennsylvania: Harold Flammer), 1982.
5. Marian Robertson Wilson, Leroy Robertson, Music Giant from the Rockies (Salt Lake City: Freethinker Press, 1996), 23.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., 35.
8. Ibid., 169.
9. J. J. Keeler, interview by author, 21 February 1996, Payson, Utah.
10. Robertson Wilson, Music Giant, 98.
11. Ibid., 103. See also Kenneth Udy, Alexander Schreiner, The California Years (Warren, Michigan: Harmonie Park Press, 1999), 173, footnote 151 for the Organ Sonata's revision date, and J. J. Keeler's verbal program notes (contained on a cassette in possession of the author) 7 September 1988, Salt Lake City, Utah for the Fantasia in F Minor's revision date.
12. Marian Robertson Wilson, phone conversation with the author, February 2001. In determining the registration for a section, Robertson would have Keeler play it with several different registrations. Robertson would choose which registration he wanted. All of the stop names listed in Robertson's organ works are stops found on the 1907 Austin organ in the Provo Tabernacle. For a specification of this organ as it appeared when Robertson's organ works were premiered, please see Appendix 1.
13. Leroy Robertson, program notes from 1 February 1934 concert. Special Collections, Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah. The program notes from the concert simply state, "due to the very recent completion of the Scherzo it has been deemed advisable to defer its performance to a later date."
14. The Y News (Brigham Young University), 8 February 1934.
15. Alexander Schreiner, program from 3 May 1935 concert. Special Collections, Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah.
16. Tracy Y. Cannon, Salt Lake City, to Leroy Robertson, Provo, 10 January 1936, Special Collections, Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah.
17. Robertson Wilson, Music Giant, 135.
18. Leroy Robertson, Prelude, Scherzo, and Ricercare on Two Themes, recorded by the Utah Symphony on 20 November 1948. This recording was never released commercially. A copy of this recording is found in the Special Collections, Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah.
19. Robertson Wilson, Music Giant, 195.
20. Ibid., 209.
21. Leroy Robertson, Program notes, 1 February 1936.
22. Marian Robertson Wilson, phone conversation with the author, February 2001.
23. Ibid.
24. Donald Jay Grout and Claude V. Palisca, A History of Western Music, 5th ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 778.
25. Ibid.
26. Leroy Robertson, Fantasia in F Minor, verbal program notes given by J. J. Keeler, September 1988, cassette in possession of author.
27. Ibid.
28. Marian Robertson Wilson feels that Alexander Schreiner played the first performance, while Robert Cundick feels that J. J. Keeler did. Keeler worked out the registration of the Intermezzo with Robertson and later played it on recitals, but documentation is lacking as to whether he played the first performance.
29. The Y News (6 November 1936).
30. Marian Robertson Wilson, phone conversation with the author, July 2001.
