SGL-Solidarity Week 1 | Auguste Larriu, Canzona

Four days ago Hive account@ylich launched a Sonic Groove Live Solidarity intitiative (https://beta.peakd.com/hive-148441/@ylich/sgl-solidarity-week-1-peridodico-de-ayer-cover). The Sonic Groove Live contest ran on Steem for little over a half year, but was suspended in the Justin Sun troubles and the consequent move to HIVE. The tribe is still on Steem-Engine, and a port to the new Hive-Engine is probably a bit complicated.

While the Sonic Groove Live contest is still in suspension Hive account@ylich proposed this initiative "which is simply that all of us who regularly participate in the event (and all those who want to join), upload our song as if it were the contest and that we all commit to vote for the participation of other users."

As a semi regular participant I think it is worthwhile to express my appreciation of the Sonic Groove Live Contest and to support Hive account@ylich's initiative. Hopefully the contest will return. In the meantime this offers an opportunity to still regularly prepare something for just this goal: share the joy of creating music and listening to each other's contributions.

Now I know my contributions are a bit different from the average contribution. Not only I play classical music instead of popular music, I do it on an organ as well. And we classical musicians mostly do not call our music and art "songs". We call it "interpretations" or "performance" or another posh word.

Today however, I do have a "song", for that is, after all, what "Canzona" means.

Auguste Larriu (1840 - 1925) was a French organist and composer. He was born in Oloron and became organist of the church Saint-Croix d'Oloron in 1868. He stayed in the function till his death 57 years later. He wrote numerous compositions, mostly for organ. Though his music was quite frequently published and printed in his own days, most of it now lost, or scattered around various libraries. Some of his music is available on IMSLP: https://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Larriu,_Auguste

This Canzona comes from a collection called "Nouvelles Pièces" (new pieces). As they were meant for harmonium as well as for the organ, the use of pedals is scarse, and doubles mostly the lowest note of the left hand part. In this Canzona the pedal gives the composition just the little extra punch it needs to sound really great. And it is a nice piece for me to practise the use of swell pedal. Being mostly a Baroque playing guy, music from the French Romantic era has a lot of performing difficulties for me.

The recording was done with the Hauptwerk software and the sampleset, made by Sonus Paradisi, of the Cavaillé-Coll organ in the St. Omer church in the city of St. Omer (http://www.sonusparadisi.cz/en/organs/france/st-om.html).