David Briggs Premieres Bruckner's 7th
Editor's Note: On February 26, Artist in Residence David Briggs performed the world premiere of his transcription of Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 7 in E Major. These notes accompanied the performance.
I’m very pleased to welcome you to this, the world premiere of my new transcription of Anton Bruckner’s monumental Seventh Symphony. It represents the culmination of a huge and wonderfully enjoyable project, spanning just over 6 months.
In truth, this project started with a distinctly stressful interlude. Last September, after having finalized the program at St. John the Divine several months before and in an attempt to stay two steps ahead, I drove up to our storage unit in Yonkers to unearth the score of my Bruckner Seven transcription which I made back in 2002, when I was still Organist of Gloucester Cathedral. No sign of it in the ‘Austrian/German’ box (A-H). Hurriedly I check all thirty boxes of my organ music to no avail. I search for the computer manuscript print out - it is ominously absent. The actual computer upon which I inputted the transcription now graces a landfill site in Birmingham, UK, probably buried underneath at least thirty feet of sludge. The black, plastic floppy discs have mysteriously dissipated, probably somewhere mid-Atlantic about 14 years ago when I emigrated. In any case, I can’t play floppy discs on my MacBook. So there was only one solution, to start again. But, as J S Bach once remarked, there is no better way to become fully immersed in a piece of music than to copy it out. The ‘re’-transcription took about 80 hours, so quite a labor of love, you could say, reconstructing the full score in its new guise, note-by-note. Knowing my luck, on the morning of the 26th February (today’s premiere) the original 2002 manuscript will turn up…