English composer Howard Skempton (b. 1947) was born in Cheshire and began composing at a young age. He was a protégé of Cornelius Cardew with whom he studied privately and at Morley College. In 1969, Skempton was one of the co-founders (with Cardew and Michael Parsons) of the Scratch Orchestra, a landmark ensemble in the history of English experimental music. In addition to his active compositional output, Skempton has worked as a music editor and a performer (on accordion and piano). Known for his economy of means and essentialist compositional style, Skempton’s language has come to encompass a variety of genres and scopes: from miniatures to large-scale ensemble works. He has described his lifelong output of solo piano pieces (beginning in 1967) as forming the “central nervous system” of his catalog. Commissions and projects in the decades that followed led to explorations of other genres, including orchestral works and a great deal of chamber and choral music. His orchestral work “Lento” (1990) won wide acclaim and brought his music to significant mainstream attention. In 2005, Skempton joined the composition faculty of the Birmingham Conservatoire.

50 Preludes and Fugues (Book 1: 2022; Book 2: 2023) were written in response to a commission from English organist and conductor Matthew Owens, a longtime champion of Skempton’s choral music. Owens premiered the music in a series of concerts in the UK and USA during 2022 and 2023 and recorded it for a CD release on Resonus Classics.

The organ did not play a significant role in Skempton’s compositional output for the first decades of his career; however, the organ shares very important aspects with both instruments that are central to his catalog: the piano and the accordion. He has described his piano pieces as forming “the central nervous system” of his output and his accordion pieces as forming “the heart.” Although Skempton had written a short organ piece in the early 1970s for his brother’s wedding, it was not until 1994, when he received a commission to write for the English organ virtuoso Kevin Bowyer, that Skempton applied himself to serious consideration of the instrument.

In 2019, Skempton wrote 24 Preludes and Fugues for the pianist William Howard, approaching this classic genre with characteristic individuality. The piano cycle led very directly to the idea of preludes and fugues for organ. 50 Preludes and Fugues are divided into two books of 25 pairs each. Each book contains a complete cycle of the 12 major and 12 minor keys (though often interpreted freely) with a 25th piece based on the B-A-C-H four-note motive.

Skempton’s compositional style is essentialist. His music interacts with its material in a very pure form. During a pre-concert discussion in 2024, he commented “I am interested in ambiguity, and that means distilling things to the point of clarity. It’s a matter of subtlety and refinement. Clarity is perhaps the most important thing of all. To achieve a sort of clarity that can’t be explained, that’s really the ultimate goal. If you can do something that is transparent, and magical, and mysterious—what could be better than that?”

What does this then mean in the context of 50 Preludes and Fugues? In each movement, a prelude of distinct and singular character is followed by a fugue that employs a theme derived from the paired prelude. The preludes are striking in their variety. In his note for Owens’s Resonus CD, Skempton wrote: “The challenge in composing 50 Preludes and Fugues was somehow to embrace everything: modality, chromaticism, canon, sonority; and even the simple (or not-so-simple) melodic writing to which my accordion had given me access.”

Each prelude is then answered by a fugue. In terms of the key sequence of the work, each fugue starts “in the key” of the prelude it follows; but each fugue ends “in the key” of the next prelude. A musical fugue refers to a composition constructed from a short musical theme that is developed contrapuntally and imitatively: each musical voice enters in turn with a version of the original material. The word “fugue” comes to English (via French) from the Italian “fuga” (literally “flight”) which comes itself from the Latin verb “fugēre,” meaning “to flee.” The fugues in Skempton’s music return very strongly to this etymological source. Quite simply, rather than concluding, they escape.

The result of all this is a remarkable large-scale work that presents a startlingly fresh look at a very familiar form. While one can dip into the collections like a jewel box and pull out individual pieces, each complete book also presents a large-scale concert cycle that is itself a journey filled with memorable musical flora and fauna. And for a listener approaching a hearing of a complete book—surrender to the emotional landscape that is created by this journey: the hills and valleys, the colors, and the vividness that is brought about by absolute clarity.

50 Preludes and Books (Books 1 & 2) are published by Oxford University Press

Organ by Mathis Orgelbau, 1997/2006
Pfarrkirche St. Peter und Paul, Görlitz, Germany
Model by Jií Žrek, Institute for Classical Studies, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague, 2015