Georg Andreas Sorge (1703-1778) - Sonata in F (c.1747)

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Composer: Georg Andreas Sorge (1703-1778)
Work: Sonata in F (c.1747)
Performers: FeIix Friedrich (organ)

Painting: Johann Christian Vollerdt (1708-1769) - A mountainous winter landscape with skaters on a frozen river near a village
Image in high resolution: https://flic.kr/p/2jcvaTH
Map: Peter Schenk (1693-1775) - Accurate Delineation Derer Hochgraefl. Reussischen Herrschafften Lobenstein Und Ebersdorff Nebst Der Pflege Hirschberg (1757)
Image in high resolution: https://flic.kr/p/2jcv8DH

Further info: https://www.prestomusic.com/classical/products/8044029--the-silbermann-organs-vol-2
Listen free: https://open.spotify.com/album/5AuNKeFtYeJDHbNQKYoB29

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Georg Andreas Sorge
(Mellenbach, 21 March 1703 - Lobenstein, 4 April 1778)

German organist, composer and theorist. According to his autobiography (in Mattheson) Sorge first received singing lessons from a local Kantor and organist, Nicolas Walter, and his substitute, Caspar Tischer. When Tischer moved to Schney (Franconia) in 1714 to become court organist, Sorge followed him and continued to study keyboard and other instruments with him for another two years. Returning home in 1716, Sorge became a pupil of Pastor Johann Wintzern for theology, Latin, oratory, German poetry, mathematics and especially musical composition. He ‘composed in his 18th year various church pieces to texts he had prepared himself’ (Mattheson, p.338). After a brief episode as private tutor in Burg (Vogtland), Sorge was appointed at the age of 19 court and civic organist at Lobenstein, a position also entailing teaching in the local school. Although on more than one occasion he was offered other attractive positions, he remained committed to his employer at Lobenstein for the rest of his life. He established himself throughout central Europe as a talented composer, an authority on organ building, and particularly as a prolific writer of music treatises. In July 1747 he was elected the 15th member of Mizler’s Societät der Musikalischen Wissenschaften, a Leipzig corresponding society of musical scholars and composers (which Bach had joined a month earlier as the 14th member). Throughout his long career Sorge published a considerable amount of keyboard music, little of which is accessible for study today. However, his greatest contributions were as an assimilator of theoretical currents of musical thought in a period of rapidly changing musical tastes.

Sorge published most of his compositions and treatises at his own expense. The majority of his pamphlets and books are devoted to a lifelong preoccupation with the practical and theoretical problems of tuning and temperament. Among his major works in other areas of music theory, attention should be drawn to Anleitung zur Fantasie (1767), an informative guide to teaching a keyboardist to play extempore, or ‘aus dem Kopfe’, with skill and musicianship. Unlike writers earlier in the century who taught improvisation from the principles of thoroughbass practice, Sorge prescribed a course in harmony, emphasizing the central importance of chords, their inversions, scales, the concept of modulation, various applications of dissonances, the improvising of fugues and finally the concept of the Affections. According to Sorge, major and minor are the only modes, and he developed his concept of a circle of tonalities in which each key centre has a primary relationship to a set of ‘Nebentonarten’ (auxiliary keys). C major, for example, has as its auxiliary key centres G major, A minor, E minor, F major and D minor. He ridiculed Mattheson’s well-known doctrine of key affects, published in Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre (Hamburg, 1713), contending that in describing the affects of keys one can only state that major keys are suited to joyful and pleasant emotions, and minor keys to sad and longing (‘sehnlichen’) emotions. With this attitude, as with so many of Sorge’s theoretical and aesthetic viewpoints, one sees clearly the waning influence of the Baroque and the developing principles of the Classical style. #ClassicalMusic