The cycle Échelons grew over six years: the movement composed first, Sonorités (1962/64), opens it; the movement conceived two years later as a tombeau for the painter and poet Lothar Schreyer, a master of the Weimar Bauhaus, Sons brisés (1966/67), closes it; and the middle movement Arrêtages (1968) was inserted last — it binds the other two into a larger whole and for that reason cannot be played on its own. The complete cycle was premièred on 16 March 1968 in the Lutherkirche in Hamburg.
Gerd Zacher, who comments on the works in the booklet, hears in them a tradition carried further. In Sonorités — sound colours — Allende-Blin takes up the three-manual writing of the baroque North German chorale fantasias as found in Buxtehude, Tunder and Reinken on Hauptwerk, Rückpositiv and Brustwerk, and continued late by César Franck; striking is the polyphonic pedal writing with its interferences, audible on the recording as a pulsation. The second movement brings another forgotten tradition into play: the rest as a fully valid part of the music. In the middle of the slow movement stands a well-prepared silence of 24 seconds — the composer thinks it is best experienced in a church; an earlier work of his was tellingly called Silences interrompus, and of it he wrote: sounds are the shore of silence.
In the third movement one plays for a quarter of an hour on falling wind: unlike Ligeti’s Volumina or Kagel’s Improvisation ajoutée, where the wind runs out at the end, here it is exposed as a second subject and determines the further course. Often it is as though the whole organ were drawing its last breaths; at the close almost nothing is left but the clattering of the keys, which over the expiring wind grows stronger than the sound itself. Mein blaues Klavier too — the title comes from Else Lasker-Schüler’s poem, in which a line runs “the keyboard is broken” — is fed almost throughout with reduced wind. At lowered wind pressure the usual relation is inverted: the more keys and stops are added, the quieter and lower the sound becomes.
In the second half of that piece a barrel organ joins in, a piece having been chosen beforehand on its cylinder; it plays only in bursts, for as soon as the melody threatens to become recognisable the crank is stopped. Last of all comes the Jew’s harp, as a third wind instrument the reduced sum of the other two: it is played fast and at a constant pitch, so that inhaling and exhaling become audible — living human breath, with which the piece dies away and suddenly breaks off. Transformations II of 1952 is Allende-Blin’s first organ piece; he chose the title because, after analysing Webern’s Variations Op. 27, the term “variations” no longer seemed to him to apply. It contains only 144 attacks, arranged in twelve twelve-note rows across three manuals and pedal, and through the difference between the pure fifth and equal temperament it enters the realm of microtonality for the first time.
Coral de Caracola of 1985 is dedicated to the memory of Allende-Blin’s uncle and composition teacher Pedro H. Allende-Saron, who would have turned a hundred that year and about whose work even Debussy had spoken enthusiastically. The composer writes: it is the chorale of a great sea shell; hold it to your ear and you hear the sounds it has gathered at the sea — that hidden music is what he wants to make audible. Unusually large spans of time mark the piece, including its silences, against which lightning-fast passages are set. The recording was made from 15 to 17 March 2004 in the Protestant church of Essen-Rellinghausen; Juan Allende-Blin plays the barrel organ himself. The hybrid SACD runs to 61:34 in stereo and 5.1 surround.