Biography
Frederick Frahm
Frederick Frahm (b. 1964, California, USA) is an American composer, organist, publisher, and parish musician residing in the foothills near Albuquerque with his partner of 37 years, mezzo-soprano Susan Foster Frahm.
Frahm co-founded the new organ repertoire artists collective Firehead Organ Works with Huw Morgan in 2015. In 2024, he retired after several years as a Production Editor at Augsburg Fortress (Minneapolis).
He holds degrees in Church Music (BM) and Organ Performance (MM) from Pacific Lutheran University (Tacoma, WA), where his studies encompassed historic and contemporary repertoire, improvisation, and counterpoint under David Dahl and Gregory Peterson; composition with Roger Briggs and Gregory Youtz; and conducting with Richard Sparks.
Prior to his parish work retirement in 2021, Frahm directed church music programs in the United States for four decades. He also served as a classical music critic for the Bellingham Herald (Bellingham, WA) and held an adjunct faculty position at Concordia University (River Forest, IL), teaching 16th-century counterpoint, music theory and composition, and orchestration.
From 2011 to 2022, Frahm was a collaborative teaching artist, resident composer, and accompanist for the Santa Fe Opera Company's LifeSongs & Active Learning Through Opera (ALTO) programs.
A prolific composer, Frahm's extensive catalog includes works for organ and piano, choral and chamber ensembles, art song and song cycles, symphonic and concerto forms, and extended vocal works such as opera, oratorio, and cantata.
Commissions include the Santa Fe Opera Company, Albuquerque AGO, Festa Cultura di San Giovanni Battista, Chiesa di Santo Stefano dei Cavalieri, performers Carson Cooman and Robin Walker, and various parish communities and individuals.
Frahm's catalog is represented by distinguished publishers in the US and Europe including Augsburg Fortress (Minneapolis), Concordia Publishing House (St. Louis), Firehead Organ Works (Bristol), Musik Fabrik (Paris), and Zimbel Press (Cambridge).
Organ Music of Frederick Frahm (at 60)
Extracted from recital program notes by Carson Cooman
“Organ Music of Frederick Frahm (at 60)”
King’s Chapel, Boston
16 January 2024, 12:15 PM
Carson Cooman, organist
Program:
Préambule (2021)
‘Liebster Jesu’ (2001)
Three Fantasies (comprising the organ concerto)
—Second Fantasy (2009)
—Third Fantasy (2012)
—Fourth Fantasy (2012)
“...Frahm's powerful and distinctive music draws on his background in sacred music, his lifelong interest in abstraction ( especially in visual art), the landscapes of the American West, and great literature from all historical periods.
I first came to know Frederick Frahm and his music in 1997. I do not now remember the specific impetus that connected us, but given that I was then in the very early years of a career as a composer and organist who was interested in much more than church music, I felt an immediate connection to Fred's own work and wide musical interests. Our first project (of many in the years to come) was a piano solo that he composed for me in 1998 inspired by an Emily Dickinson poem. In the years since, I have seen most all of his major works, performed a number of his compositions for organ (as well as some for other forces), and served as the editor for several of his publications.
I have worked with a very large number of composers in my career to date as a new music specialist. With some my interest has ebbed and flowed at various points. However, Fred's work has been an enduring constant. I admire tremendously his distinct and personal artistic voice. His work speaks with great clarity. Shapes and forms are articulated and etched with precision. Juxtaposition and repetition create a dialogue in time between the musical blocks that comprise a Frahm piece. But ultimately what moves me the most is the emotional landscape that the pieces create in sound and time. Technical matters are one thing; however, I find that his work is not only accomplished, but consistently profound in its emotional depths and the experience that it conveys to both performers and listeners. I consider his body of work a truly important contribution to the American organ literature.”
“...Chorale melodies have been a constant part of Frahm's life and musical background since childhood. Chorale Prelude on "Liebster Jesu" (2001) comes from the near the "end" of his first period of chorale preludes-largely melodically-driven pieces drawing on the historical baroque tradition but enlivened through his characteristic and colorful harmony of the present. (His chorale-based works from the next several decades have moved in a different direction: treating the chorale as raw source material for significant tessellation and abstraction.)”
collected works for organ
extracted from the preface by Joseph Z. Pettit
Collected Works by Frederick Frahm
Firehead Organ Works
ISBN: 979-8-9853-0790-0
“...Frederick Frahm’s compositions have been familiar to me since our shared college days. His organ, choral, handbell, art song, and cantata output has always been staple fare for my congregations, ensembles, and recital programs. Frahm has trusted me with many of his experimental works and first drafts, and it is always a new path to tread with myself, my singers and players. His unique musical language permanently expands the common idiom wherever I make music.
His organ oeuvre encompasses hundreds of pieces, more or less delineated as chorale based Gebrauchsmusik or more virtuosic concert pieces. His chorale preludes are profoundly rooted in the Lutheran tradition, with a clear affinity for the German composers of the early and mid twentieth-century. Paul Kickstat, Ernst Pepping, and Helmut Walcha would easily recognize Frahm as one of their own, with his chorale præludia never failing to present a theological exposé of text and tune.
Frahm’s vocal compositions, whether choral, art song, or stage, are conceived textually, with primacy of word and meaning as their fabric. His setting of the English language in solo song rivals any modern American composer in the art song genre, including Daniel Pinkham and Ned Rorem, in my estimation. He is an astonishingly well-read man, of poetry, theology, history, theater, and art, of many places and periods – all those things that constantly inform a composer.
An important aspect of Frahm’s upbringing was his exposure to twentieth-century visual art by his mother. It is her great love, and she passed it wholesale to the young Frahm. She taught him how to look, how to see, just as a musician is taught to listen and hear. This training, together with his early fascination with liturgy and the organ (along with his obsession with the 1962 horror film Carnival of Souls and its hallucinogenic cinematography and improvised theater organ score), leads Frahm to wonder if even today his mind was not formed to perceive synesthetically.
As with any self-aware composer, his work continues to evolve, now forty years hence from our first collaboration. As I hope to have demonstrated above by citing his wide ranging, yet highly specific influences, Frahm’s particular gift is that of distillation, crystallization, enfleurage, if you will, for lack of a single word to describe his process. A cursory glance at these organ scores will immediately reveal him as a minimalist, but upon second encounter reveal a surprising lyrical facility. Despite his strict architecture, all of his “bricks” contain something singable, something melodic, some element that is tantalizingly trying to shape words. My analysis (not his) of his bricks relates to a vocal standpoint, a brick of recitative with or without arioso, a brick of aria, a brick of chorus, a brick of a chorale, a block of sinfonia. Hold each of these new works, or prisms, to the light and the projected spectrum fans out into a cantata, an opera, a play, an oratorio, no longer in narrative form, but in a timeless, clarified, adamantine compression.
In a note originally attached to one of the pieces in this volume, Frahm writes, “This music struggles for breath when there is plenty of room to breathe, the sections are striking (if not adverse) in their variety, yet they find themselves gathered together, the final passage attempts resolution but leaves many questions unanswered. Metaphoric and contradictory, yes, anxiety, heartache, grief, all present... Yet there is hope knowing that disparate things can be gathered in a frame of negative space and by their assembly have meaning.” (Emphasis mine.) Though diverging in detail, this descriptive statement is valid for every one of these new works.”
12 Flower Pieces
Extracted from the book preface by Frederick Frahm
12 Flower Pieces by Frederick Frahm
Firehead Organ Works FH-404
“...My dad was a nurseryman, and our life at home revolved around the seasonal life of the nursery he owned. We measured time by the arrival of Christmas Trees in the winter, bare-root roses soon thereafter, bedding plants in the spring, pumpkins in the summer... we lived by the ordinary and serenely predictable calendar of what would be ready for market.
While flowers were very much part of my dad’s livelihood, he didn’t consider them so much as decorative, but as a miraculous testament to the creator’s genius in distilling such beauty and perfection into such a small place. Flowers are serious things. Their manifold color, shape, size, and perfume demonstrates that the universe is capable of immense expression in nature, and their poetry is singular above all pretenders.
The music collected here is not about decoration or figurative artifice, rather it explores the metaphor, symbol, affekt, meaning, beauty, and love displayed in the radiant floriverse that attends us on all sides.”
Ezra
Extracted from the book preface by Frederick Frahm
EZRA by Frederick Frahm
Firehead Organ Works
ISBN: 979-8-9853-0797-9
“...This collection of keyboard works was inspired by selections from A. R. Ammons' cycle of poems entitled Ommateum (1955). Ezra, the poet's nomadic main character who moves through time and place, life and death, has long captured my imagination. The detached sense of curiosity with which he observes the world and the manner of its striving human occupants routinely saves him as he comes to witness true atrocity and grief. Yet each experience makes Ezra richer for it, he matures with wisdom, and his heart fills with wonder as his Terran journey unfolds unbound by time or embodiment.
The 15 sketches seek to capture an 'affekt' of the Ammons' poems in a tonal frame . While the poet's narrative pattern occasionally guides the structural form, this music is more about subtext — here presented as an abstract and subjective interpretation of the resonance between emotion and sound.
Josef Albers once said, " ... unlike a painting where all elements can be seen at once, music exists in time from before to now to later ... " (how very Ezra-like!). My hope is that listeners will hear the sequence of tonal events gather over time and find them to be assembled into a structural yet expressive form of dialog.
Silence within music, used here as a form of punctuation to articulate architecture, allows for breath in the midst of cognition. Imagine the orderly and carefully observed physical space between choristers as they process from one end of a cathedral to another. By not breaching the requisite fore and aft proximities, their uncluttered appearance is stately and reassuring. Likewise, as you perform this music, relish and attend to both the sound and silence you create.