Günther Becker formed no single style but used each new composition to pursue a different aesthetic question — that is how Dominik Susteck describes in the booklet the work presented here complete. Four pieces from twenty-four years reflect important stations of recent organ music while keeping, as Oskar Gottlieb Blarr writes, an almost aristocratic distance from any pandering to current vocabulary; Becker adopted neither Olivier Messiaen’s model nor the critical counter-position of Kagel and Ligeti.
Meteoron of 1969 was written for the “Week of Contemporary Sacred Music” in Kassel, where Werner Jacob gave the première. The title names the principal monastery on the Meteora rocks in western Thessaly; the sound material comes from Byzantine Whitsun chants which, recorded on tape and transformed, form an overall structure repeatedly interrupted by organ and percussion. Becker thus takes up the rhythmically free, electronically influenced style established in 1961 by Mauricio Kagel’s Improvisation ajoutée, György Ligeti’s Volumina and Bengt Hambraeus’s Interferenzen.
After that monumental first work, the engagement with early music moved to the centre. A la mémoire de Josquin, written for Klaus Martin Ziegler and likewise premièred in Kassel, uses clearly recognisable quotations from masses by Josquin des Prez — Tu pauperum refugium and the Missa da pacem twice each, together with Ave Christe, immolate and the Missa pange lingua. Every homophonic passage is registered in a different colour; the music begins with a central sonority that frees itself from its static structure and draws its dramaturgy from a rising intensity interrupted by the Josquin quotations. Becker had come to know this music while studying with Kurt Thomas in Detmold.
The Three Little Organ Pieces of 1978 were written as an interlude for a sacred concert on the occasion of Hans Schweizer’s wooden sculpture “Mother and Child”. Chords in various shades of grey and accelerating trill figures mark the Meditation I; the Litanei has a recitative character; in the Meditation II Becker sets quotations from Gertrud von le Fort’s poem “Litanei zur Regina Pacis” beside noise-like clusters — the atonal layer rears up while the text-related tonal layer remains in stoic composure. After a long pause the Interpolationen of 1993 followed as the last organ work, a free toccata written for Werner Jacob in Nuremberg.
Becker studied conducting with Gerhard Nestler in Karlsruhe from 1946 to 1949, composition with Wolfgang Fortner in Heidelberg and Detmold from 1948 to 1956 and choral conducting with Kurt Thomas. From 1956 to 1968 he lived in Greece, taught in Athens and in 1962 built up a studio for new music at the Goethe-Institut there. Back in Germany he founded the live-electronic group “Mega-Hertz” in Essen in 1969; from 1971 to 1974 he was president of the German section of the International Society for Contemporary Music, and from 1973 he taught at the Robert-Schumann-Institut in Düsseldorf, which appointed him professor a year later. The recording was made on 28 March and on 21 and 22 May 2008 on the three-manual Sauer organ of 2004, the “Felix Mendelssohn” Europa Organ of the Church of the Resurrection in Düsseldorf-Oberkassel, whose disposition goes back in essence to Oskar Gottlieb Blarr.