James Welch performed the world premiere of Franklin D. Ashdown’s Steinbeck Suite for Organ on February 16 at the Mission Church on the campus of Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California, where he is university organist, as part of a program in the university’s American Music Festival. The composer was present for the performance.
The suite was commissioned by the former organist of John Steinbeck’s childhood parish, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Salinas, California, to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the publication of The Grapes of Wrath. Each movement was inspired by a passage from that novel and Tortilla Flat, his first commercially successful work of fiction. Steinbeck studied piano as a boy, sang in the junior church choir, and was a lifelong fan of Gregorian chant, opera, jazz, and the music of Bach, which he listened to while writing The Grapes of Wrath.
Cup of Gold, Steinbeck’s first novel, ends with the protagonist—Welsh pirate Henry Morgan—hearing the reverberation of a remembered organ chord in his mind as he dies. Steinbeck insisted that his publisher print the words and music of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” in the endpapers of The Grapes of Wrath when the controversial novel appeared in 1939. Since then, numerous American composers, notably Aaron Copland and Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, have written orchestral, operatic, and musical theater works inspired by Steinbeck’s fiction. Ashdown’s piece is the first known organ composition based on Steinbeck’s work.
Ashdown, who lives in New Mexico, is a widely published composer of organ and choral music. His works for organ are characterized by dramatic contrasts, colorful tonality, and programmatic references. An avid reader of Steinbeck, in 2013 he accepted the commission to write an organ composition based on the writer’s work. The premiere attracted wide attention from Bay Area organists and composers who were present for Welch’s performance, including Lothar Bandermann. Also in attendance were the director of the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas and the curator of the Steinbeck Studies Center in San Jose, California.
Welch’s program included James Hewitt’s Trip to Nahant (ca. 1811), Horatio Parker’s “Allegretto” from the Sonata in E-flat Minor, Dudley Buck’s Concert Variations on ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ works by John Weaver, Richard Purvis, Richard Elliott, Dale Wood, and Rulon Christiansen, plus Clifford Demarest’s Fantasie for Piano and Organ, with son Nicholas, age 15, at the piano.
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