The Organ Concerto and the Living Tradition: Advocacy, Recovery, and Reinvention
Updated: Sep 24
The organ is an instrument deeply associated with tradition. Its repertoire stretches across centuries, its construction preserves historical technologies alongside modern innovations, and its professional culture often places great value on the preservation of established repertoire. Yet preservation alone does not keep an artistic tradition alive. A living tradition must also produce new ideas, new repertoire, and new ways of understanding the past.
The organ concerto offers an especially interesting lens through which to consider this relationship between preservation and reinvention. From its historical roots to contemporary works, the genre places the organ outside its most familiar environment and brings it into dialogue with other instruments, ensembles, audiences, and cultural traditions. The organ concerto can therefore function as more than a display of virtuosity. It can become a vehicle for advocacy, recovery, cultural identity, and artistic reinvention.
The Canon Is Created, Not Simply Inherited
Musical canons can sometimes appear inevitable: Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, and other frequently performed composers seem to occupy their positions because history naturally selected the greatest works. Yet musicologist Marcia J. Citron has demonstrated that canon formation is far more complicated. Institutions—including performers, universities, publishers, critics, orchestras, and recording industries—help determine which music remains visible and which music disappears from regular circulation. Her study Gender and the Musical Canon particularly examines how these processes contributed to the marginalization of music by women.[1]
Marcia J. Citron’s Gender and the Musical Canon examines how institutions, performance practices, publishing, criticism, and other cultural forces have helped determine which composers and works become part of the established repertory.
This distinction matters because a musical canon is not merely a list of historical masterpieces. It is also a record of repeated choices. Every performance reinforces some repertoire. Every commission adds something new. Every edition, recording, lecture, recital, competition, and research project has the potential to alter what musicians encounter in the future. The question, then, is not whether the organ tradition should retain its past. The more interesting question is whether that tradition remains capable of creating a future.
The Organ Concerto as a Form of Advocacy
The concerto is particularly suited to this process because it places the organ in conversation with a larger musical world.
The solo instrument must negotiate with an orchestra rather than exist within the acoustical and liturgical environment for which so much organ repertoire was written. Composers must reconsider balance, registration, orchestration, space, and the relationship between soloist and ensemble. Even the physical circumstances of performance can require experimentation.
That difficulty can become creatively productive.
An organ concerto can recover an older musical language, represent a cultural tradition, introduce listeners to an unfamiliar composer, or give the instrument an entirely different identity. Advocacy in this context does not need to mean attaching an ideological statement to an otherwise conventional piece. The musical work itself can perform the advocacy by changing whose music is remembered, what sounds are considered part of the tradition, and what the organ is permitted to become.
Recovery: Expanding the Repertoire We Remember
Recovery is one part of that process.
If important music falls out of performance, scholarship alone cannot fully restore it to musical life. Scores must ultimately be heard. Performers, conductors, institutions, and audiences participate in deciding whether recovered music becomes part of an active repertoire or simply another historical document.
That principle applies especially strongly to composers whose work has been excluded or underrepresented because of gender, race, geography, institutional access, or changing aesthetic fashions. Citron's work reminds us that repertories do not become canonical entirely through intrinsic musical value; systems of publication, performance, education, and reception help create that status.[1]
Recovery therefore should not mean replacing one rigid canon with another. It means widening the field in which artistic judgment takes place.
A living tradition gives musicians more music from which to choose.
Snow Walker: Competition as a Generator of Repertoire
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Michael Colgrass’s Snow Walker provides a particularly revealing example of the organ concerto functioning as both new creation and institutional catalyst. Commissioned for the inaugural Calgary International Organ Festival and Competition in 1990, the five-movement concerto draws upon legends, myths, songs, and rituals associated with Inuit culture. The competition organizers explicitly regarded the commissioning of new works for organ and orchestra as part of the festival’s larger purpose, taking advantage of the Carthy Organ in Jack Singer Concert Hall and the availability of the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra.
The score was sent to the eight competitors approximately two months before the festival. Jonathan Biggers (United States), Kevin Bowyer (Great Britain), Matthew Dirst (United States), Heidi Emmert (Germany), Martin Jean (United States), Susan Randall Klotzbach (United States), Mikael Wahlin (Sweden), and Christopher Wrench (Australia) each performed Snow Walker with the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra under Mario Bernardi during the festival. Each competitor received a forty-five-minute rehearsal with the orchestra while Colgrass was present and subsequently offered suggestions to the individual performers. The results further demonstrate the competition’s unusual structure. Kevin Bowyer received the Gold Medal, Matthew Dirst the Silver Medal, and Heidi Emmert the Bronze Medal, while Jonathan Biggers received the separate Concerto Prize. Biggers subsequently appeared with the Calgary Philharmonic and Bernardi in the festival-closing performance of Snow Walker, identified in contemporary documentation as the work’s premiere. [2]
Eight years later, Snow Walker returned for the concerto round of the 1998 Calgary International Organ Competition. A new concerto had originally been commissioned for that competition, but it was not completed following the death of composer William Albright, and Colgrass’ work was used instead. [3] Finalists once again performed Snow Walker with the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, giving a work created through the 1990 competition a second institutional life eight years later. [3][4]
The circumstances of that return are significant. The 1998 performance was not simply a planned commemoration of the earlier competition; it arose partly from practical necessity. Yet that necessity illustrates the value of having commissioned substantial new repertoire in the first place. Because Calgary had already helped bring Snow Walker into existence and professional performance, the institution possessed a contemporary concerto capable of returning to the competition repertoire.
This is significant beyond the history of one competition.
A competition did not merely test performers against established repertoire. It helped generate repertoire and then sustain it. A work commissioned in connection with the institution in 1990 returned eight years later as required repertoire for another generation of international competitors.
This represents an especially valuable model for a living musical tradition. Competitions and professional organizations need not function solely as mechanisms for determining which performer plays inherited repertoire most successfully. They can commission substantial new works, introduce those compositions to multiple performers, place them before audiences, and create circumstances in which contemporary repertoire develops a continuing performance history.
In that sense, Snow Walker demonstrates a larger possibility: institutions that preserve the organ tradition can simultaneously participate in creating its future.
Brian Raphael Nabors and the Organ's Expanding Cultural Identity
Brian Raphael Nabors' Hammond Concerto (2022) demonstrates another possibility.
Commissioned by the Alabama Symphony Orchestra and its Sound Investment program, the approximately twenty-nine-minute concerto places the Hammond organ rather than the pipe organ at the center of the orchestra. Nabors describes the work as drawing upon the Hammond organ's history across the Black church, jazz, and rock, and incorporates musical references including Amazing Grace, the spiritual Oh Freedom, improvisation, and a gospel-influenced final movement. [5]
The importance of this work extends beyond instrumentation.
The Hammond organ belongs to a history of organ playing that can remain surprisingly separated from discussions of the classical pipe-organ canon. Yet both instruments participate in overlapping histories of improvisation, virtuosity, sacred music, popular culture, technology, and communal musical practice.
Nabors' concerto therefore raises a productive question: What counts as organ tradition? If the answer is defined too narrowly by instrument, institution, repertoire, or performance venue, enormous portions of the organ's cultural history disappear. Nabors instead allows the concerto form itself to become a meeting point between orchestral music and traditions rooted in African American musical experience.
Reinvention does not destroy tradition here. It reveals that the tradition was larger than we had allowed ourselves to see.
My Own Concerto: Advocacy Through Composition
These questions also shaped my own Feminist Advocacy Through the Liturgy: A Liturgical Organ Concerto, completed in 2025 as my Doctor of Musical Arts composition dissertation at Texas Christian University (TCU). The work received its premiere at TCU on April 10, 2025, as part of my final doctoral recital—the university’s final student organ recital before the pipe organs were removed from Ed Landreth Hall.
The thirty-minute concerto, written for solo organ and string orchestra, consists of six movements corresponding to texts from the Ordinary of the Mass: Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei. Each movement engages with the music or legacy of a historically significant woman composer: Hildegard von Bingen, Maddalena Casulana, Isabella Leonarda, Elisabetta de Gambarini, Clara Schumann, and Jeanne Demessieux. [6]
My intention was not simply to compose a concerto and subsequently describe it as an act of advocacy. Rather, advocacy is embedded within the work’s compositional architecture. Historical music by women becomes generative material for a new large-scale composition, allowing the past not merely to be remembered but to participate actively in the creation of something new. Instead of treating these composers exclusively as historical figures to be recovered through lectures, biographies, recordings, or commemorative programs, the concerto places their musical legacies within an ongoing creative process.
In this sense, the work attempts to move from recovery to continuation.
That distinction has become increasingly important to my understanding of musical advocacy. Recovery asks us to remember that a composer existed, to locate her music, and to restore her presence within historical narratives and contemporary performance. Continuation asks a further question: What might happen next because we remembered? Once a musical voice has been recovered, can it become a source of new performance traditions, new scholarship, and new composition? Can historical advocacy generate artistic consequences in the present rather than ending with the act of rediscovery itself?
The first movement of the concerto later appeared on my Dallas Chapter of the American Guild of Organists Spotlight on Women Composers program on February 7, 2026, within a program encompassing music and influences associated with Hildegard von Bingen, Francesca Caccini, Clara Schumann, Augusta Holmès, Jeanne Demessieux, Anne Strickland, Brenda Portman, Maureen Howell, Evelyn Larter, Amy Beach, Hania Rani, Emma Lou Diemer, and, and my own work. [7] In that context, composition, historical recovery, performance, and curatorial programming became interconnected forms of the same advocacy practice. Rather than separating the recovery of historical repertoire from the creation of new music, the project suggested that the two activities can sustain one another: recovery can provide material for continuation, while new composition can give recovered musical histories an active place within the living repertoire.[7]
Preservation Is Not Enough
The organ world has extraordinary historical resources. Few instrumental traditions possess such a direct relationship with centuries of repertoire, architecture, technology, liturgy, improvisation, and performance practice.
That inheritance is worth protecting.
But an artistic tradition cannot survive indefinitely by protecting inheritance alone.
There is an important difference between preserving a tradition and keeping it alive.
Preservation asks:
How can we ensure that this music survives?
A living tradition also asks:
What are we creating now that musicians a century from now will want to preserve?
That second question changes the role of the contemporary musician. Organists cease to be merely custodians of an inherited repertoire. They become participants in determining what the repertoire will become.
Composers have a role in that process. So do performers, teachers, churches, universities, competitions, professional organizations, publishers, donors, and audiences. The history of Snow Walker demonstrates what can happen when an institution commissions substantial new repertoire and places it directly into professional performance. Nabors' Hammond Concerto shows how the genre can embrace cultural histories that complicate traditional definitions of organ music. My own Liturgical Organ Concerto represents one attempt to use new composition to extend the work of historical women composers into contemporary musical life.
These works are very different from one another.
That is precisely the point.
A living tradition should not produce a single approved model of innovation. It should create space in which many artistic possibilities can coexist.
The Living Tradition
Perhaps the most important form of advocacy for the organ is therefore not simply arguing that the instrument remains relevant.
It is creating the music that makes the argument unnecessary.
New compositions, rediscovered repertoire, commissions, recordings, competitions, interdisciplinary projects, culturally expanded definitions of the instrument, and adventurous programming demonstrate that the organ is not merely an artifact inherited from another age.
Tradition and innovation are sometimes presented as opposites. I increasingly believe the opposite is true.
Tradition survives because successive generations change it.
The most meaningful question for the future of the organ may therefore be neither how faithfully we can reproduce the musical culture of the past nor how completely we can abandon it.
It may instead be:
How can we understand the tradition deeply enough to create what comes next?
That is where preservation becomes advocacy.
That is where recovery becomes reinvention.
And that is where the organ concerto can become part of a genuinely living tradition.
Notes
Marcia J. Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
Karen McFarlane, Russell Saunders, and Patricia Fitzsimmons, “Calgary International Organ Festival,” The American Organist (March 1991), 52–53. This contemporary report identifies the eight competitors as Jonathan Biggers, Kevin Bowyer, Matthew Dirst, Heidi Emmert, Martin Jean, Susan Randall Klotzbach, Mikael Wahlin, and Christopher Wrench; states that each performed Colgrass’s Snow Walker with the Calgary Philharmonic under Mario Bernardi; records Bowyer, Dirst, and Emmert as Gold, Silver, and Bronze medalists and Biggers as Concerto Prize winner; and identifies Biggers’s October 19 festival-finale performance as the public world premiere.
“1998 Royal Bank Calgary International Organ Festival and Competition,” The Diapason 89, no. 12. December 1998.
“The Calgary International Competition 1998 (II),” Pipedreams, program no. 9910, March 8, 1999.
Brian Raphael Nabors, Hammond Concerto (2022), commissioned by the Alabama Symphony Orchestra through Sound Investment.
Felicity Constance Mazur-Park, “Feminist Advocacy Through the Liturgy: A Liturgical Organ Concerto,” D.M.A. dissertation, Texas Christian University, 2025.
Felicity Mazur-Park, Spotlight on Women Composers, Dallas Chapter of the American Guild of Organists, King of Glory Lutheran Church, Dallas, Texas, February 7, 2026.
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