The bracing organ sounds in the joke entry below come from a two-CD issue on the Phono Suecia label, with the brilliant Swedish organist Hans-Ola Ericsson — protagonist of one of the finest recorded surveys of Messiaen's organ music — playing works of Ligeti, Sven-David Sandström, Arne Mellnäs, and various others. No recording in my collection demonstrates more vividly the organ's capacity to produce an extraordinary variety of timbres, or, on a more basic level, to scare everybody to death. The set opens with Ericsson's own work Melody to the Memory of a Lost Friend XIII, first heard in 1985. It's the source of the huge cluster crescendo in my peculiar tribute to Kate and Wills, which also contains a reprise of the "Dark Harvest Song." The opening fanfare is, of course, from Shostakovich's Salyut, Ispaniya.
