Variations on Four Sunday School Tunes (complete set of all 4)

Number 3 is the new piece in this upload. The others vanished in the three-months-of-work-deleted debacle, but I re-recorded Number 2 here as well, since that one had originally appeared on a different organ. At last, the set is complete on the excellent Hildesheim Beckerath (SP).

Virgil Thomson (1896–1989) composed his Variations on Four Sunday School Tunes for Organ almost 100 years ago in 1926–27 while studying in Paris with Nadia Boulanger and in close association with Gertrude Stein. The cycle was first performed in May 1928 at the Paris Conservatoire by André Fleury.
Thomson himself described the Variations as “gentle kidding and a loving pat for certain tender memories of my childhood. They also poke fun at the pipe organ itself, of all instruments the least suited to comical treatment.” He even sketched the character of each:

Come, Ye Disconsolate — games with scales, chords, and pedal cadenzas.

There’s Not a Friend Like the Lowly Jesus — question-and-answer figures, bugle calls, merry-go-rounds, and a fugue that toys with stretto.

Will There Be Any Stars in My Crown? — dominated by fanfares.

Shall We Gather at the River? — an oom-pah accompaniment displaced into witty rhythmic patterns.

Marilyn Mason, who recorded the works in the 1950s, noted that all four are “characterized by free treatments, emotionally outspoken,” and that while adventurous—even raucous—they always retain the hymn at their core. Behind the humor lies what she called a “generally pious and devout spirit,” akin to Thomson’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts (also hymn based and with a Stein text). Mason’s words remind us that these are not mere curiosities but deeply personal works, where irony and wit walk hand in hand with seriousness and faith. She closes by saying that “they were written obviously for the entertainment of the composer and whoever is to hear them.”

(I used ChatGPT to help lightly edit this introduction and the information about each movement in the comments.)