J. William Greene
Music for the Church ~
Creative and Practical
Choral, Organ, and Harpsichord Music
available from major publishers
Compact Discs available from Pro Organo
This recording was conceived as a tribute to the great organist, E. Power Biggs, who inspired so many with his recordings. This disc includes all the pieces he recorded on his LP, Buxtehude at Lüneburg, plus others.
This recording, released in 2018, contains nearly all the music in my three volumes of Christmas Ayres & Dances, the first two of which have been released by Concordia Publishing House.
The settings of familiar Christmas carols on this disc stand in the tradition of the German “house piece” of the seventeenth century, in which favorite hymns or devotional songs were cast into popular forms, perhaps for home devotions or family amusement around the harpsichord in the evening. The pieces in this collection are not intended to be “new” Baroque music or literal dances, but impressions of the style, much as later Baroque dances became so stylized that they were no longer dances, but musical interpretations in their own right.