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Charles Tournemire was a brilliant but now largely forgotten musical Titan who, through his genius, created a seminal corpus of works for organ of supernal mystical transcendence that rightly ought to be lauded by each passing generation. Born…
The music of Tournemire and the mysticism expressed through his art did not manifest itself ex nihilo but is part of a greater metanarrative that begins with the theodicy of the Gallican Church as secular society grappled with dramatic…
While the organ world was embroiled with its own philosophical imbroglios, what was to be a seminal musical influence in France was established in 1832 by Pope Gregory XVI in the form of the Benedictine monastery of Solesmes. Under…
In 1894, inspired by the work of Solesmes, Charles Bordes, Alexandre Guilmant, and Vincent d’Indy founded the Schola Cantorum, a society established to rival the Conservatoire devoted to the performance of plainchant according to the Gregorian tradition and that…
The vicissitudes endured by the Church and the appeals within the institution for musical integrity proved highly formative upon Tournemire, but then, in 1903, he married Alice Taylor, through whom he would have his initial foray into mysticism. Her…
Tournemire’s antebellum period (1898–1914) was a happy one fecund with success. In addition to acquiring the post at Sainte-Clotilde and his marriage to Alice Taylor, his musical output included his first five orchestral symphonies, and his cantata Le Sang…
After this period of personal tragedy, Tournemire voraciously busied himself with some of his most profound musical output, climaxing in 1927 when he began perhaps his greatest work, the landmark L’Orgue Mystique. Written in the context of the interbellum…
His musical works were legion; yet despite Tournemire’s enormous and incredibly profound compositional output, he is still most famously known as an improviser extraordinaire. In fact, most organists fail to know him beyond his Cinq improvisations. Recorded on cylinder…
On the fourth of January 1927, Tournemire played for the marriage of his student, Joseph Bonnet, and at the wedding, he announced in the presence of Dom Joseph Gajard (choirmaster at the Solesmes Abbey) and Louis Vierne that he…
History has been grievously neglectful of Tournemire’s music and obdurate to his Ideals, and understandably so: His music’s intimidating intellectual content, the chaos enveloping the world at that time, the ever-burgeoning myopic apostasy of the secular postwar period where…