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Evensong Winter Sale and 2019 Price Reductions

We’re pleased to announce our Winter Sale and 2019 price reductions. The sale began Black Friday as a celebration of our merger with CLR Resources, and will continue until January 1   EXTENDED TO January 7!

All sets from CLR are on sale for 15% off, and the following price reductions have been made to our Evensong sets:

1983 Schantz – Price reduced from $149 to $99
1926 Wangerin – Wet reduced from $79 to $69, Dry from $59 to $49

Also, in response to a few requests, the CUI 17 rank Schlicker is now available as a separate purchase and download.

Happy/Merry Whatever You Celebrate!


Direct links:

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Evensong and CLR announce Merger!

We’d like to announce the merger of CLR Resources and Evensong’s Hauptwerk™ sample set businesses. As the Hauptwerk™ market matures, we feel that it is important to leverage economies of scale and experience. Evensong’s many years in the market and excellent connections with the Hauptwerk™ community will provide an outstanding customer experience, while CLR’s experience in efficiently developing very large instruments will enable a streamlined process for providing the market presence and scale to develop new instruments. Together, we will provide greater value and better products to our valued customers.

Evensong/CLR now becomes the Hauptwerk™ sample set producer with the largest number of American  and American Classic instruments available for purchase:

Best wishes to all,

Charles Raasch (CLR) and Jonathan Orwig (Evensong)

*Indicates instruments sampled by CLR Resources

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The Organ Symphonie – Where it All Began – France | Maurice Le Boucher

Maurice Le Boucher? Who was he? And wasn’t Cesar Frank the original “creator” of the Organ Symphonie?

Well, yes. Yes, it was Franck.  But most organists know a LOT about Franck, and so why should I belabor that?  A big reason for writing this book and these posts is to pique curiosity, to encourage folks to explore and hear things they’ve not heard, to walk outside of normal lines. So, this post goes out of order… because I want to.  And, there is a Cesar Franck connection, too. We’ll get to that.

Maurice Le Boucher (b. 1882, Isigny-sur-Mer; d. 1964, Paris) was a student of Fauré and became director of the Conservatoire in Montpellier. He wrote this lone Symphonie for organ, a lush impressionistic work. The work is written in a cyclical form, with the themes undergoing transformations as the work progresses. (there’s your Franck connection) The Symphonie is not in movements per se, but is divided into sections by tempo and character. At the beginning of the first section:

At the beginning of the Adagio section:

In the fugato Allegro section:

in the Allegro vivace, both as an accompaniment:

and as a melody in the pedals:

There are also secondary themes throughout the piece, but the original melody returns over and over, and lends great cohesiveness to the work. The examples I’ve given here are only the main transformations of the theme – if you were to listen and/or study the work carefully, you would find other ways it is transformed and used as well. The Symphonie was published by Leduc in 1917.  As I mentioned earlier, the Franck connection is due to the cyclical use of the theme, something that good ol’ Cesar was known for.

Franck-ly, I’m puzzled that this work isn’t known more – it is an amazing piece. Granted, not many have heard of Le Boucher… but the music is beautiful.  Don’t believe me? listen for yourself… (and make sure you give the media a bit of time to pre-load, sometimes it takes the player a bit to respond after you click “the play button) :