The air is fair and kind today - (2018)   

for organ

 

 A poem by organist Clarence Mader was published in a monograph entitled "The Stylistic Variance and Underlying Unity in Selected Organ Works by Clarence Mader," Jacob Richard Benda, Louisiana State University, 2015. That text, in part, reads:  "The air is fair and kind today, it teases my hair, it hurries ‘round my chin; / it comes scented with pine and clover and syrupy honeysuckle."

 

Mader was among the many organists and choirmasters from an era in Los Angles with which my parents dealt in their work with the Southern California Council of Churches, American Guild of Organists and Guild of Temple Musicians.. My mother had served a time as historian for the AGO in the 1960s. Other names which touched our family and my early years included Frank K.Owen , Robert Mitchell , E. Robert Kursinski , Owen Brady, Marcia Hannah Farmer , Richard Keys Biggs, Rayner Brown, Gaylord Carter, Robert Tusler and Irv Riskin. Many had been guests in our home, and many had worked with my brother as with me during our young adult years. In recent years, another generation of organists and choirmasters in this new era in Southern California have added to such connections, including Manuel Rosales , James Walker , Timothy Howard , as those who have inspired a work for organ.

 

 Mader's poem speaks of "the silent, swirling eddies bring me awareness…" A musical awareness, nurtured from childhood and its memories to this time of composing an organ work, is made in part of "silent, swirling eddies" of these musicians now passed into time, and yet "the air is fair and kind today." The musical imagery of this small organ work grows from the words of a poem, discovered in Benda's scholarly work.

  

Clarence Mader at Immanuel Presbyterian, Los Angeles.

 

 The work is of several component parts, gestures like unto the traditional ornamentations, "swirling eddies" of melodic gesture, meanderings and musings.

 

 

 

5 pages, circa 6' 30" an MP3 demo is here: 

 

The score is available as a free PDF download, though any major commercial performance or recording of the work is prohibited without prior arrangement with the composer. Click on the graphic below for this organ score.

 

The air is fair and kind today