Description
Already in Ravel, Gershwin and Stravinsky you can find the connection between the melancholy blues character and the melodic and tonal style of art music. On the basis of the pictorial phrase “I feel blue,” which gives the secular vocal form of expression of the colored people its name, a direct bridge can be built to the popular passion song “O sadness, o heartbreak.” Wittrich’s “Choral Blues” plays with jazz-typical harmony sequences (changes), a triplet-shaped groove with characteristic drone supports and a “lamento” basic mood that expresses itself melodically in chromatically falling lines. The stereotypical 12-bar blues scheme is left out. A valuable contribution to the expansion of the organ repertoire, which has also been open to popular music forms from rock, pop and jazz in church rooms for several decades.
