FRANK MORANA
AmerOrganist 33/12

dist. Boosey & Hawkes, New York). Helmut Oehring writes "my music is

blood, it is tears, violence, hate, death, and love. [It is] dark,

morbid, operatic, dramatic, hard, schizophrenic, sick, broken, yearning,

androgynous, nightmarishly realistic. I want to make the instrument

defective. I want it to sound sick and unsteady". 4REAL is, so far,

his first and only published organ piece. It consists of a succession

of one- and two-measure repeatable segments, each interspersed with

text. The texts, however, are not meant to be recited intelligibly,

but only as a kind of "filler" between segments. The segments

themselves are to be understood as changing images or scenes, as in a

film score. The genre should be familiar to anyone who occasionally

savors cinemagraphic background music at a foreground level. Oehring's

polyrhythmics are difficult to execute, as in computer-generated

techniques prevalent in commercial film scores. And the piece might

well have been more suitable for ensemble playing than for solo organ.

The manual parts are idiomatic enough, but the pedal part is not, and

sometimes exceeds the possible range of the pedalboard, even when

understood in terms of 16' pitch. The score is, apparently, in the

composer's own manuscript, which, though clear, is by no means

calligraphic, and should have been issued at full size, rather than in

the present reduced format.