Daniel Gottlob Turk on the Role of the Organist in Worship (1787). (Book Reviews).

Daniel Gottlob Turk on the Role of the Organist in Worship (1787). Translated and edited by Margot Ann Greenlimb Woolard. Studies in Liturgical Musicology, 9. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2000. [xxv, 171 p. ISBN 0-8108-3704-8. $59.50.]

Daniel Gottlob Turk's treatise On the Role of the Organist was published in Halle, where Turk was organist and director of music at the university. As Robin Leaver points out in his preface to this translation, there is some irony in this: as a locus of both Pietism and rationalism, Halle was a city in which Lutheran church music had declined considerably during the eighteenth century. In such an environment, Turk set forth the skills and knowledge necessary to discharge the duties of an organist.

Turk divides his discussion into four sections. "Chorales," the first and by far the most extensive, concerns both the simple accompaniment of hymns and more advanced topics such as variations and interludes; it also includes basic instruction in church modes and the appropriate marriage of text and tune. The following sections, "Preludes," "Accompaniment," and "Organ Construction and Maintenance," are progressively shorter. Turk writes, as he announces in his foreword, for "beginning organists and village schoolteachers" as well as for "church colleagues, clergymen, etc."; he intends not only to offer practical instruction to would-be organists, but also to suggest "how the musical portion of the service might encourage devotion" (p. xxiii). In his first three sections, he addresses an audience with enough musical ability to comprehend music notation, harmonize melodies, and improvise at a basic level. Even the fourth, his basic introduction to the mysteries of the organ's mechanism and maintenance, might be understood by a clavier player or nonmusician who is not already familiar with the organ.

Like any translation, this one deserves scrutiny on two grounds: the quality of the translation itself and the value of what is translated. On the first, Margot Ann Greenlimb Woolard's work stands up well. The translation is readable anti consistent in tone. Woolard's copious notes document and corroborate nearly every aspect of Turk's remarks, situating them in the musical culture in which he lived and wrote. This documentation comes at the cost of the reader's occasionally finding two or even ...