When Calvin Bowman really gets going on the organ, both hands fly across the keyboard in different directions and his legs pump away as each foot plays a different part on the pedal-board. During pedal solos, he has to hang on to the seat so he doesn’t fall off. We don’t think of organ players as athletes, but maybe we should: there’s a level of dexterity, coordination, muscular control and core strength involved in playing the instrument that rivals many sports.
This Sunday, the Australian composer and organist adds endurance to the list: across 16 hours, starting at 6am, he’ll play Johann Sebastian Bach’s entire catalogue of organ music, back-to-back, on the Queensland Performing Arts Centre (QPAC)’s behemoth instrument, in a free concert as part of Brisbane festival. It’s the third time he’s performed this feat, after performances at Melbourne festival in 2009 and Mona Foma in Launceston in 2022.
The Melbourne performance was so physically arduous it took him a week to recover. “I could barely move, all my muscles seized up … I was hobbling about like an old man,” he says. This time the 54-year-old will have a masseur helping him with his upper and lower back from afternoon onwards, during brief breaks.
But the real work, Bowman says, is in the brain: “One hand [is playing] a singing melody, and I have another part in another hand, and then I accompany myself with both feet – and they’re all going in different directions.”
To do this requires concentration “at the limit of our brain’s capacity,” he says. “And I’m doing it on the spot, over and over, for 16 hours.”
I say that it sounds insane. He pauses: “It is insane.”
Why do it? Bowman, who has been playing the organ since falling in love with its vibrational sound in high school chapel, and was the first Australian to be awarded a doctor of musical arts from Yale University, says Bach’s music is “a perfect amalgamation of brain and soul and heart … If you’re in tune with all of those, then Bach’s the greatest composer ever.”
To play his most complex pieces, such as the five-part fugues with interlocking parts for hands and feet, is “like flying … There’s no feeling like it.”
Bach composed prolifically for organ from around his late teens in the early 1700s to the end of his life, and performed the compositions himself in church, as organist and director of music for various churches and cities in Germany. His catalogue of about 150 pieces ranges from short pieces of less than a minute to more substantial works of about 15 minutes, including pop-cultural hits such as his dramatic Toccata and Fugue in D minor.
Some pieces Bowman “could play in [his] sleep”; others he only ever performs as part of the entire corpus. Over time, his interpretations and experience of the music have changed. “Overall, it becomes more comfortable. But my brain isn’t quite as quick as it was when I was in my early 20s. I’m now in my mid-50s and it feels different, because my head is full of 30 years of good things and absolute garbage and everything in between – life. You don’t really have that when you’re a student, you just immerse yourself in the music.”
He’ll start his Brisbane performance with the most difficult pieces: the six trio sonatas. He’ll end not with a bang but an existential murmur: the Orgelbüchlein (Little Organ Book), a collection of short chorale preludes based on hymns.
“The last one just happens to be about how fleeting life is. It’s very quiet, it just flows along and then it finishes.”
The organ he’ll be performing on, made in the 1980s, is very different from the instruments Bach would have played, with their hand-operated bellows. But Bowman says QPAC’s instrument has a beautiful collection of sounds and “colours”, from “beautiful little flutes through to the full-throated roar of what we call organo pleno”.
Visitors can come for as much or as little of the performance as they choose. In Melbourne, Bowman says, around half a dozen people sat through the entire performance, camped out in the town hall with picnic baskets.
At the same performance, at about 5pm – nine hours into his performance – “Bach came to visit,” he says. “I really felt this presence. I was in the middle of all these big preludes and fugues. It was an extraordinary moment.”
• The Complete Bach Catalogue for Organ is at Queensland Performing Arts Centre on 13 September as part of Brisbane festival
