The organ music of Betsy Jolas

The organ music of Betsy Jolas

AI translation with ChatGPT from French

Far from the clichés usually attached to the instrument, the organ music of Betsy Jolas resounds with the same inventive richness that characterizes all her work, exploring the instrument’s full potential — whether as a solo voice (Angela Metzger) or in dialogue with a chamber orchestra (the SWR Cologne).

Betsy Jolas has a deep affection for the organ, an instrument she studied during her years at Princeton. This recording — almost a complete collection, missing only Musique d’autres jours for cello and organ (2020) — gathers four works whose very titles reflect a musical thought nourished by the composer’s experience of everyday life.

Leçons du Petit Jour (2007) is an homage to her teacher Messiaen, with stylized birdsong and natural sounds, free figures set against a quiet sonic canvas that fade as quickly as they appear. Jolas invites us to listen to the act of emergence itself, carefully choosing her colors and occasionally playing with the mechanical noises of the instrument: sonic discoveries and feline arabesques evoke fleeting sound phenomena inspired by that privileged moment of the day.

Musique de jour opens on a G — a note of special significance in her life, she confides — one that initiates many of her keyboard works. It serves as a grounding tone, like Varèse’s “ison,” around which a polyphonic space unfolds, culminating midway through the piece in a refined four-voice fugato.

In Musique d’Hiver (1971), for organ and chamber orchestra — the most striking work on the recording — the organ of Cologne’s Klaus von Bismarck Saal becomes a generator of sound, and the score, written without barlines or metric indications, a vessel for all possibilities. The role of percussion, the spatial dispersion, and the sudden emergence of chordal blocks again recall Varèse. There are no violins, but ten violas and six double basses, joined by piano and harp. The organ adds its colors to a virtuosic, constellatory writing that shifts between transparency (through timbral relay) and density, nourished by the organ’s full stops and the percussion’s exuberant outbursts. With evident joy — and a touch of humor (including a jazzy double-bass solo) — Jolas expresses her ideal of a living, liberated music, brilliantly realized here by Angela Metzger and Titus Engel with the SWR Cologne.
The Trois Études Campanaires, originally conceived for the carillon of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois, are performed here on the church organ of St. Antonius in Düsseldorf-Oberkassel, whose percussive registers (celesta, marimba, and carillon) prove highly effective: free polyrhythms overlay celesta, marimba, and carillon in the first and last studies, while the second is graced by the wandering line of the celesta alone. The music is minimalist, written purely for the beauty of sound — reaffirming the composer’s fascination with rare timbres and unexpected combinations.

Michèle Tosi

ResMusica, November 2, 2025