Joseph Jongen

Joseph Jongen (December 14, 1873–July 12, 1953) was a Belgian organist, composer, and music educator.

Biography

Jongen was born in Liège. On the strength of an amazing precocity for music, he was admitted to the Liège Conservatoire at the extraordinarily young age of seven, and there he spent the next sixteen years. The admission board was not disappointed. Jongen won a First Prize for Fugue in 1891, an honors diploma in piano the next year, and another for organ in 1896. In 1897, he won the prestigious Grande Prix de Rome which allowed him to travel to Italy, Germany and France.

He began composing at the age of 13 and immediately exhibited exceptional talent in that field too. By the time he published his Opus 1, he already had dozens of works to his credit. His monumental and massive First String Quartet was composed in 1894 and was submitted for the annual competition for fine arts held by the Royal Academy of Belgium, where it was awarded the top prize by the jury.

In 1902, he returned to his native land, and in the following year he was named a professor of harmony and counterpoint at his old Liège college. With the outbreak of World War I, he and his family moved to England where he founded a piano quartet. When peace returned, he came back to Belgium and was named professor of fugue at the Royal Conservatoire in Brussels. From 1925 until 1929, he served as director of that institution; a quarter of a century after leaving the directorship, he died at Sart-lez-Spa, Belgium.

=Compositions= From his teens to his seventies Jongen composed a great deal, including symphonies, concertos, chamber music (notably a late string trio and three string quartets), and songs, some with piano, others with orchestra. (His list of opus numbers eventually reached 241, but he destroyed a good many pieces.) Today, the only part of his "oeuvre" performed with any regularity is his output for organ, much of it solo, some of it in combination with other instruments.

His monumental "Symphonie Concertante" of 1926 is a "tour de force", considered by many to be among the greatest works ever written for organ and orchestra. Numerous eminent organists of modern times (such as Virgil Fox, Jean Guillou, and Michael Murray) have championed and recorded it. The work was commissioned by Rodman Wanamaker for debut in the Grand Court of his palatial Philadelphia department store, Wanamaker's. Its intended use was for the re-dedication of the world's largest pipe organ there as part of a series of concerts Rodman Wanamaker funded with Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Mr. Wanamaker's death in 1928 precluded the performance of the work in the venue for which it was written, though it has now been performed for the first time with the Wanamaker Organ and the Philadelphia Orchestra in a special benefit gala and evening concert on September 27, 2008 at The Wanamaker Building in Philadelphia, PA. Interestingly, during the same weekend, Cameron Carpenter will perform the work twice at Middle Collegiate Church in New York City, on an organ inspired by that originally in the Auditorium of the John Wanamaker store in New York City (1921-1956). This instrument was the only other organ built by the Wanamaker Organ Shop. The New York performances on September 26 and 28, 2008, will be webcast live.

References

Some of the information on this page appears on the website of Edition Silvertrust but permission has been granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

External links

* [http://www.cebedem.be/composers/jongen_joseph/en.html Worklist]
* [http://joseph-jongen.org Les Amis de Joseph Jongen]
* [http://editionsilvertrust.com/music-books-h-to-m.htm Joseph Jongen String Quartet Nos.1 & 2, Opp.3 & 50 & Piano Trio No.1, Op.10] Soundbites and short biography.
*IMSLP|id=Jongen, Joseph|cname=Joseph Jongen