Guise, Jean François de – Contemplation for Organ

Guise Jean François de
Contemplation for Organ
Op. 12 No.4 (2005)

In 2005 Jean François de Guise composed the organ piece "Contemplation for organ".
In this work he dealt with the organ as an instrument of the 21st century, inspired by a call for entries for a competition for contemporary church music. Despite the fact that the deadline for the competition had passed, he accepted the challenge for himself and created a piece that dealt with the extended 12-tone technique and transcribed it for the organ. The difficulty here was the layout of the organ itself, because, various stops, such as those represented by the octave stops, which sound tones in "other" registers, could easily interfere with the music-theoretical construction and thus appear inconclusive.
The composer also chose a polyrhythmic structure that further methodically counterpoints the tonal discussions, which could have invoked further dilemmas. However, Jean François de Guise manages to make the piece emerge, as it were, gradually, which is achieved through sporadic cluster structures that break up already established structures and thus push the work in a new direction. This unwinds a dynamic in its development that keeps the conclusion completely open until the end.

Playing score / 8 pages