Hexaptych

View all pieces in this project

In the 1990s, inspired by my professor Michael Hicks quoting Wallace Stevens’ “Anecdote of the Jar,” I purchased a cheap Dover edition of Wallace Stevens’ poetry when I happened upon it one day at the BYU Bookstore (back when BYU had a bookstore). Stevens’ use of language captivated me, full of energy and imagery.

In 2002, I entered the Barlow Prize for the organ commission—unsuccessfully (I sent in a really bad submission). The experience encouraged me to find a better voice in my organ writing, which I stumbled on the following year, during my first year at Indiana University. I found inspiration in Stevens’ “The Place of the Solitaires,” a poem that is full of motion and that is about motion, so I took my title for the piece from that poem: Manifold Continuation.

I sent the score to my old BYU organ professor Don Cook, who programmed it in his recital for the Eccles Organ Festival. Much encouraged by his enthusiasm for the piece, I turned my thoughts toward expanding the project from that one piece to others with titles from the same poem. It was a project that lasted another ten years. I conceived of a huge multi-movement organ symphony, of sorts, until I wrote Restless Iteration, a piece that seemed so big and a thing unto itself that I was no longer certain these individual pieces could work as a set.

With all six pieces well behind me, I’m still not sure they could work as a single concert-length set, with movement lengths from 4 to over 20 minutes and too many slam-bang finishes. It’s possible. But mostly, I think of these as six pieces that grew out of a similar frame of reference, that belong together somehow, even if they won’t quite actually work together in one evening.

Much as Stevens’ “The Place of the Solitaires” addresses the virtuosity of writing (the “restless iteration” of writing, or the “perpetual undulation” of the pen), and does so in a virtuosic manner, the pieces of Hexaptych are a virtuosic display of what the organ, and the organist, can do, and hopefully shows that not all virtuosity is empty, but that virtuosity can be a channel for transcendence that can, at times, be achieved in no other way.