Swedish Organist Jonas Karlsson
Organist – Pianist – Composer – Improviser
Being an organist, and a pianist, you need to practise and book concerts. But once in a while it is also nice to take a new promotion photo. A photo you can use for YouTube, and stuff like that. People change, as the years passes, don’t they?
I do my best to look like a serious classical artist on this photo. The shirt is new.
To follow my music on facebook, just find my facebook page. It looks like this. I post videos and upcoming concerts here.
I bougt this organ in 2014. This means I can play all kinds of organ music at home. With 3 manuals, 50 stops, and 32 pedals, nothing is impossible.
Theese modern digital organs can imitate different types of organs, and this organ can be programmed to sound like any organ I want. For my personal use, I have made four great intonations, that I use for practise.
Now I am preparing this huge composition by J.S. Bach. The Chorale Partita ”Sei gegrüsset, Jesu gütig” BWV 768. It is a chorale with eleven variations.
When I play Bach, I use ideas from different kinds of organ schools. The romantic organ tradition is too outdated to really work for the modern music listener. Also the way organ professors play Bach today, often feels a bit tough. So my way of playing Bach is pretty much an updated version of what many organists in the 1960:s used to do.
I will show a few things about how I think, when I play this music.
In Variation III, I work with non legato and accents in the right hand. There has to be a feeling of a cello playing in the left hand. I play this Variation pretty much in the modern achademic style.
In the score in VAR. VI you can see the articulation I use. I use my own mix of staccato and portato, in sharp contrast to legato. The pedal is of course legato. I use all the organ stops I have, but no couplers. I do this to get an American flamboyant organ style from the 1970:s.
In the end of VAR. VI, I go crazy and play shorter and shorter notes in the hands, to surprise the listener. I also want to make the rythm a little bit ”elastic”, by staying too long on certain notes, and ”hurry up” the other notes. This should sound a bit unexeptected and you could say this is typical for a few modern organists from the French cathedral tradition.
In Variation VIII, I play in the style of the modern ”English” tradition, with air and puls in the scales. There are no specific accents I want to do. The scales in this variation should just flow.
And in the last Variations X, that is written in chorale style, I follow the older Leipzig tradition, with legato and a few powerful accents. As you can see the Cantus firmus is marked C. in VAR. X, and should be played on a separate manual.
This is a photo from my lunch concert in Gamla kyrkan, Östersund/Sweden. April 6, 2022.
It was fun to do this recital. I played three of my own compositions, and I made three improvisations. This time I did not play any traditional classical music (like Bach). I wanted to focus the whole concert on my own compostions and improvisations. The concert was filmed, and soon I will post some YouTube videos from this 12:00 PM lunch Recital.
Reading mails from people visiting the concert, I could see they enjoyed listening to my Toccata in Bb minor, Opus 14, and my Tango Militante in F minor, Opus 22. The Toccata in Bb minor was composed about 20 years ago, as a show piece. For the first time I will post this Toccata on YouTube, since I was pleased with this live performance of the piece.
This organ has a typical baroque sound, but one of my improvisations (a long tango) was in symphonic style. Far away from any music that is usually played on a baroque-style organ. But the Tutti on this organ (when all the organ’s stops is used at the same), has a kind of symphonic organ sound. At least from my point of view.
When I improvise or play my own organ works, I am very careful to let the music flow, to create alot of energy. I feel love when I do that.
At the moment I am playing Buxtehude’s Prelude & Fugue in D major. I am prepering this music for forthcoming concerts. This a happy organ work, and a great composition. Especially the fugue.
I have played this organ composition before. But now I make bigger contrasts between legato and non legato. This composition is made of many shorter parts. Each part should be played in a unique way. So if I play the Prelude like organists did in 1980, I play the Adagio part like organists did in 1880.
I will record this organ work for YouTube.
October 13, 2020. A fun meeting with my music colleague Louise Jaerde. Eating at a restaurant on Frösön, and planning music. And off course, we took a selfie.
I started to take organ lessons when I was a little boy. On this photo I am 9 years old.
I was much more interested in playing music, than other subjects in school. And I could play songs by ear. I learned playing music so fast, that I pretty soon started to play on a real church organ in my home church. Mostly I was composing music, or improvising music, when I sat at the church organ.
As a child I did not care so much about the pop music, that most kids listen to. I enjoyed listening to Chopin. When I for the first time heard Bach’s music played on a harpsichord, I felt hypnotized.
As a child, I always heard music for my inner ear. I was often composing music inside my head. Music that only I could hear. So it felt important for me, to learn how to play the music. So that other people also could hear this music.
The most important thing, sitting at the church organ, is to really know the legato. Not that you have to use it, but you have to know it. When you play a scale so much legato that the pipe attacks can not be heard any longer, it is a clean legato. The power of playing a clean legato, is that anything that is not played as a clean legato, will be a kind of articulation.
Anyway – everything about the articulation at the organ is relative. If every note is played legato, it is impossible to play one note longer. When you want to play an accent at the organ, that specific note must be played a little longer than the other notes. So if you play a scale non legato, then it will be easy to play one note a little longer, to get that accent you want.
Imagine that you have a second option than clean legato. Now you play a scale a little less legato than clean legato, so that you can bearly hear the pipe attacks. The power of hearing the pipe attacks, is that some organs might have a strong pipe attack, that makes it is easier to follow the musical lines, if you let the pipe attacks be heard. This is very useful, if play with only a Principal 8′ or something similar.
Usally organists that play Bach, are very careful with the articulation, not using too much, so that the music will not be too much colored by the articulation itself.
But if you want to wake people up, and you want to create energy, then powerful accents are very useful. In a tango rythm, you can play short stackatos, mixed with long notes, that gives the music strong rytmic accents at the longer notes.
If you improvise a fugue in rytmic style, you can play some parts of the fugue almost stackato, to get the possibility to later reach an intense climax with pure legato. If you use a powerful registration like Tutti, legato is a kind of a heroic king that enters the stage, because the longer notes you play, the more sound you get out from the organ.
There are many schools around organ articulation. Especially when it comes to play Bach’s music. Actually it is pretty difficult to create schools around that, since organs are very different.
When you improvise music, you can let the organ decide what will really work. You just listen to the organ, and you create the accents that ”swing” by using your ear.
Even if you play complicated music in the end, it has to be buillt up with small things.
Look what I found. A new music colleague. A very talented soprano. Louise Jaerde.
We decided to do concerts together. Organ and soprano – for concerts abroad. I will also play piano together with Louise.
To start with, we will create a program with Nordic (mostly Swedish) music. The name of this duo will be Nordic Passion – since we both share this passion for music and our home country.
Swedish Organist Jonas Karlsson 