Dr. Robert Parkins’s career at Duke has spanned five decades, and the music in his recent farewell recital spanned three centuries. A professor of the practice of music and university organist at Duke, Dr. Parkins performed on all three of the Duke Chapel’s main organs, employing each for the musical era to which it is best suited. In this episode, Dr. Parkins reflects on his forty-seven years of service at Duke and gives a brief survey of 300 years of organ music history, as heard through the pieces in his final recital.
TRANSCRIPT
James Todd:
Welcome to Sounds of Faith, a podcast exploring traditions of faith, sacred music, and spoken word here at Duke University Chapel.
Dr. Robert Parkins performed Eugene Gigout's piece Toccata at Duke Chapel in 2009 at the rededication recital for the Kathleen Upton Byrns McClendon Organ. Professor of the practice of music and university organist at Duke, Dr. Parkins performed the same piece again this month at the culmination of his farewell recital.
Parkins' career at Duke has spanned five decades, and the music in his final recital spanned three centuries. He performed on all three of the chapel's main organs, employing each one for the musical era to which it is best suited. I'm James Todd, communications manager here at Duke Chapel, and I'm here with Dr. Robert Parkins to reflect on his 47 years of service at Duke, and also learn something about 300 years of organ music history, as heard through the pieces at his farewell recital.
Dr. Parkins, let's start at the beginning. The first piece you played at your recital was Medio Registro Alto by the Spanish composer Francisco Peraza. It dates to the 16th century, and I want to listen to that piece as you performed it on the organ in the side chapel of Duke Chapel, the Brombaugh organ, which has a historically appropriate tuning system called meantone that's different than modern tuning. So, could you explain how that type of tuning works in this piece?
Robert Parkins:
Well, when you speak of modern organs, basically you're talking about 19th and 20th century instruments that tend to be in what we call equal temperament. And that is that on a modern piano, for example, every half step is exactly the same as every other half step. Every perfect fifth, from, say, C to G, is going to be the same as every perfect fifth, no matter what key you're in at the time.
Now, the early instruments, and the early organs in particular, were not tuned in equal temperament until much later than the 17th centuries. And some meantone organs existed even into the early 19th century in some places and beyond that. And meantone temperament was the rule for 16th and 17th century organs. And it means that you're giving up a lot of intervals and chords and keys that would be easily transferable on modern instruments with equal temperament. But what you gain is that the major chords, the major triads, and specifically the major thirds, that are usable, and there are eight of those that are usable in a quarter-comma meantone temperament, are perfectly consonant. They're perfectly consonant, just like the octaves are on the piano. No other interval on the piano is perfectly consonant. Everything is tempered. It's either pushed or pulled in one direction or another to make all 12 notes fit into the 12 note octave.
And so you get really pure consonances, but it also makes the dissonances a lot harsher and more dramatic, which is all part of the system. So, it brings this early music, even the very simple things that would sound like a keyboard version of, say, a Renaissance motet or Mass movement, and that's the way a lot of keyboard music developed at that point, when you come to the end, to the final cadence, and it's a major chord, it sounds so relaxed and so smooth and so in tune. But then when you run into, say, a chromatic scale, you can hear that all the half steps are not quite the same. Or a dissonant chord that needs to be resolved is going t
