Concerto for Organ and Orchestra is where I decided to end my compositional "career."  I began to realize that, in order to have any hope of hearing my works come to life, I had a very difficult and hard road ahead of me that I just simply wasn't willing to continue down.  The piece was written as my Masters Thesis and explored everything I was capable of at the time.  I decided to write for this instrumentation for a number of reasons - chiefly because it is such an often-overlooked medium; likely due to the fact that most composers have no clue how to write for the instrument, and because it is still largely viewed as a "church" rather than "concert" instrument.

I wanted each movement to be strikingly different from one another - not necessarily thematically linked in any way. 

 

MOVEMENT I:
The first movement serves a few purposes - its the 'toccata' of the work (placed in the beginning, rather than the end for once), and also develops out of a fair amount of counterpoint, but vacillates between traditional, tonal sections, and harmonically-freer sections.  I always enjoy writing pieces that draw almost all of their material from a very small motif or figure - in this case, a simple neighbor group.

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MOVEMENT 2:

The second movement is a pedal-soli scherzo.  Since the entire organ is capable of "coupling down" to the pedals (in most cases), it seemed to me like a pedal solo against the orchestra could be a great opportunity to play with registrations.  This is one of the organ's greatest strengths, yet composers very rarely attempt to exploit the organ's abilities in "synthesis," either due to lack of understanding, lack of consistency between different organs, etc.  As such, the organist's hands spend a decent amount of time, "playing the stops" in this movement - though a sequencer would be greatly appreciated in this movement.

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MOVEMENT 3:

The final movement is a mosaic of American hymn tunes.  Although the organ really deserves a prominent place in the concert hall, breaking free of its long-held stereotype of being exclusively a "church" instrument, I felt it was worthwhile to write a movement that allows the instrument to be used in a concert-way, just using the tunes and melodies that it often accompanies in sacred settings.  This movement is, without doubt, the most personal thing I've ever written.  To this day, I still enjoy listening to it.  As with much of my other work, I tend to not let a single note be written, "by chance," but instead must be drawn from the original motif, or in this case, source material.  The opening harmonies in the cellos, bases, and violas are the first notes of the hymn tune SLANE, for example.  As the various tune fragments come and go, I never intended for the listener to "pick out" or "latch on" to the tunes but instead tried to craft them in such a way that they freely weave in and out, constantly being passed back and forth between the orchestra and the organ.  As such, this movement really seeks to make the organ just another part in the orchestra - leveraging solo stops, soft string choruses, etc.  Eventually the music makes its way to a dark and mysterious place in which we find two different hymn tunes, in two different keys (one major being sung by the orchestra and one rewritten in minor in the organ) finally played at full length.  You might say I drew some inspiration from Charles Ives, here, and while that is likely true to a point, the idea actually came to me while standing in a dark, cold field one winter night.  While standing there I heard two church congregations singing, very faintly, in the distance.  (Growing up down south, there are churches everywhere - so finding yourself conveniently located a mere 100 feet between two congregations isn't all that unusual!)  The piece reaches its climax here, as we here a single phrase of all the previously eluded-to hymn tunes played simultaneously.  The music then disappears into the distance almost as quickly as it emerged.  I decided the piece, like my compositional life, should end here.  The piece, rather unusually, ends quietly rather than with a loud bang.