storms don’t last forever

after BWV 60, O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort (O eternity, you word of thunder)

Although I, or anyone else for that matter, would not have anticipated experiencing what we have done in recent times, it has been a sobering reminder of how much music is a balm. Over recent months I have been returning to music that ‘takes me somewhere’. Music that sits with me. Music that enables me to tap into forgotten memories. Music that I have played as a child. Music that I had learned as a teenager. Reliving those long hours, nestled away in a practice room at school, listening to Glenn Gould recordings. Reliving that sense of safety, of blissful otherness.

‘storms don’t last forever’ is a response to (or even a reimagination) of J. S. Bach’s chorale setting of “O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort [‘O eternity, you word of thunder’]" (BWV 20, although also adapted for a choral cantata BWV 60), a chorale apt to our current times as we grapple with both loss and perpetual hope. A work for organ of two-halves, there is both a distillation of the original melody by Johann Schop and Bach’s harmonisation, a distant thunder, which dissipates into the chinks of light and hope seen in Johann Rist’s hymn:

O eternity, you word of thunder,
o sword, that bores through the soul,
o beginning without end!

O eternity, timeless time,
I know not, before such great sorrow,
where to turn.

My heart, completely terrified, trembles,
so that my tongue cleaves to the roof of my mouth.

[…]

Take me, when it pleases You,
Lord Jesus, into Your fortress of joy!

- njd.

solo organ

4’