With this edition, the second instalment of a planned five-part series, Robin Leaver and Daniel Zager have assembled, in essence, a twenty-first-century Choralbuch that not only demonstrates the sheer variety of eighteenth-century approaches to organ accompaniment, but also encourages ‘contemporary organists to improvise their own harmonizations’ (8) as practised by their baroque counterparts. Designed for scholars and practitioners alike, the volume is arranged in three sections: an introductory essay that surveys congregational singing practices from the Reformation to the end of the eighteenth century, a collection of excerpts drawn (primarily) from eighteenth-century German sources that describes facets of the organ's role vis-à-vis congregational singing, and an anthology of chorale settings that constitutes the bulk of the edition.

Beginning in the seventeenth century, organs and organists gradually assumed more prominent roles in Lutheran churches, resulting in a burgeoning corpus of chorale-based and free works for larger and larger instruments. They also accompanied the congregational singing of chorales with increasing frequency. As Leaver and Zager note in their Introduction, philosophies and practices concerning these accompaniments were anything but uniform: there were as many opinions as there were writers, and seemingly as many variants of a given chorale melody as there were congregations. Yet, as their collection demonstrates, beneath the variety of approaches lay a set of shared assumptions about the function of the organ and role of the organist in relation to pitch, tempo and extemporized harmonizations. The forty annotated documents – which include excerpts from church orders, correspondence, journals, organist auditions and contracts, organ examination reports, treatises and hymnal prefaces – together emphasize the versatility required of eighteenth-century organists. In addition to improvising congregational accompaniments from melodies (which could vary from congregation to congregation in the same city) and figured basses, organists were also expected to improvise preludes and adjust their playing to suit various service types ranging from festivals to funerals. Though the organ's primary function was to establish and maintain consistent pitch for singing, organists were also encouraged to improvise different harmonies according to affective and syntactic cues in chorale texts, adjust registrations according to the gradual gathering and dispersal of congregants during a service and render well-known chorales such as paraphrases of the Gloria and Credo in ‘different keys each week’ (24).

At the same time, the expanded role of the organ as a means of congregational accompaniment introduced new practical and aesthetic complications. As the speed of congregational singing slowed throughout the seventeenth century, organists – by nature of their placement directly in front of or even inside the instrument – often ended up playing faster or slower than singing congregations seated below and behind them. The issue was widespread enough to warrant Mattheson's recommendation in Der vollkommene Capellmeister (1739) that ‘because of the power which also sometimes deafens the organist’ it is necessary to employ a ‘song leader [Vorsänger] or someone of that kind . . . who would be of aid to the organist so that he could go at the same pace’ as the congregation (21). Others sought solutions by improvising Zwischenspiele between phrases that could allow either the organist or congregation to ‘catch up’ with the other; the editors have supplied both simple and lavish exemplars of this practice by J. S. Bach, Georg Friedrich Kauffmann, Johann Gottlob Werner and Johann Christian Kittel. Yet in the fingers of some organists, attempts at Zwischenspiele resulted in banalities that drew the ire of writers such as Quantz, who complained in his Versuch (1752) that such ‘unworthy’ organists ‘mislead the congregation with clumsy coloraturas, worthy of a bagpiper, which they din forth during each caesura of a chorale’ (23). Writing in the same decade and city as Quantz, Christian Gottfried Krause mused that ‘the way most organists play one would think that the congregation sings the canto firmo in order for the organist to rummage all over it with hands and feet’, adding, ‘the resulting dissonances are so disagreeable to listen to that they defy description’ (23). Daniel Türk, himself an organist, charted a more diplomatic course when he instructed fellow organists that ‘the interludes must be so constituted that they do not confuse the congregation but will lead them to the note with which the melody of the following line begins. A few well-defined chords . . . are far more suitable than an entire legion of meaningless notes’ (29).

Throughout their introduction and annotations, the editors also account for the pedagogical functions of printed and manuscript accompaniment collections, especially Choralbücher and the handwritten additions of new chorales or melodic variants contained therein. Several eighteenth-century writers – notably Georg Bronner (48–52), Johann Philipp Kirnberger (113–122) and Kittel (123–124) – provided multiple bass lines as a means of showing how an organist might either embellish a given bass or create his own, which was acceptable as long as it supported the sentiment and syntax of the text. Especially noteworthy in this regard are recent studies cited in the Introduction's footnotes, including Susan R. McCormick's dissertation ‘Johann Christian Kittel and the Long Overlooked Multiple Bass Chorale Tradition’ (Queen's University Belfast, 2015) and Leaver's own meticulous examination of a manuscript entitled ‘Sebastian Bach's Choral-Buch’ in the Sibley Library, Eastman School of Music (‘Bach's Choral-Buch? The Significance of a Manuscript in the Sibley Library’, in Bach and the Organ, ed. Matthew Dirst, Bach Perspectives 10 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2016)).

The trove of annotated source readings is followed by 166 chorale settings drawn from, among others, composed partitas such as Bach's bwv766–768, chorale settings with Zwischenspiele such as bwv729, printed and manuscript copies of chorale books, and organ methods from the early nineteenth century steeped in traditions originating from the Bach circle. Rather than assemble a compilation of disparate chorales, the editors have wisely chosen to collect variants of a ‘core’ repertoire consisting of ‘Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr’, ‘Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott’, ‘Erhalt uns, Herr, bei deinem Wort’, ‘Herr Gott, dich loben alle wir’, ‘Komm, Gott Schöpfer, Heiliger Geist’, ‘Nun danket alle Gott’, ‘Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland’, ‘Vater unser im Himmelreich’ and ‘Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern’. (Much of this core collection is also represented in the series’ preceding volume, Organ Accompaniment of Congregational Song: Historical Documents and Settings, Vol. 1: Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.) These core chorales are supplemented with accompaniments for other well-known chorales, among them ‘Vom Himmel hoch, da komm ich her’ and ‘Jesu, meine Freude’. The composers, compilers and attributions together represent a substantial cross-section of eighteenth-century organists, cantors and teachers whose writings brim with practical and pedagogical suggestions. In addition to some of the composers already cited, the anthology portion includes accompaniment settings by Diederich Christian Aumann, C. P. E. Bach, Johann Friedrich Doles, Cornelius Heinrich Dretzel, Christoph Graupner, Christian Gregor, Johann Adam Hiller, Martin Jellen, Johann Balthasar König, Johann Daniel Müller, Johann Pachelbel, Johann Samuel Petri, G. P. Telemann, Daniel Vetter, J. G. Walther, Michael J. F. Wiedeburg and Christian Friedrich Witt. While the overall focus of the edition is squarely on the Lutheran tradition, Leaver and Zager are careful to include mention of Catholic practices in Dresden and Leipzig, as well as Moravian traditions whose preachers ‘had the custom of breaking out into hymns during their sermons, without prior warning’. In these instances, ‘the organist was expected to accompany the singing immediately, no matter in what key the preacher had pitched the chorale melody’ (11).

The majority of the edition's printed chorale accompaniments present only the melody and figured bass, though the aforementioned settings by Bronner, Kirnberger and Kittel are given with some or all of the options that eighteenth-century organists would have encountered in these sources (only ten of Kirnberger's twenty-six basses for the melody ‘Ach Gott und Herr’ are included). The diversity of practices and approaches expected of organists can also be glimpsed in the melodic and rhythmic variants of chorale melodies, the keys in which they are set (some differ by as much as a fourth) and the rich assortment of harmonizations, as well as practices such as the trills added by Doles before the end of each chorale phrase in all but one of his settings. Some of the most exciting pieces are those that capture what must have been electrifying Zwischenspiele, especially those by Kauffmann and the setting of ‘Sei Lob und Ehr dem höchsten Gut’ of Kittel (153–154). Though the editors suggest that Kauffmann's lesser-known examples ‘may appear in modern notation here for the first time’ (15), the figured chorales from his Harmonische Seelenlust – all of which contain Zwischenspiele – were published this way in Pierre Pidoux, ed., 62 Choräle mit beziffertem Bass für Orgel (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1951). However, the Kauffmann chorales chosen by Leaver and Zager present an improvement over the Pidoux edition in that Kauffmann's beaming has been more faithfully rendered to show the intended division of labour between left and right hands. Its value as a historical and practical resource notwithstanding, the Leaver-Zager edition could also have benefited from more attentive copy editing, as slight errors persist in both the printed text and notated examples, such as the incorrect rhythmic values in the alto and tenor lines in bar 3 of Hiller's ‘Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern’ (152). And the organist wishing to realize the figured chorales or practise the fully notated settings will lament the glued binding that, unlike spiral bindings, stubbornly refuses to remain open on a music rack.

Though the series preface cautions that ‘the object of this anthology is not to provide alternative harmonizations that organists can use on Sundays’ (8), the selections accompanying the source material certainly provide inspiration – and perhaps licence – for any organist looking to enliven congregational accompaniments through what Jacob Adlung characterized as ‘wissenschaftliche’ (13) changes in registration and harmony, or even by adding Zwischenspiele and other embellishments, provided that they do not detract from or obstruct congregational singing. But, as Quantz warned in 1752, ‘the much too small wages at most places provide a poor inducement for application to the science of organ playing’. Even more, ‘many able organists will be disgusted by the arrogance and obstinacy of some of their spiritual overlords’ (23). That his remarks resonate so strongly in our own time is surely a testament to the wisdom of Ecclesiastes: there really is nothing new under the sun.