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By <\/span>the time the French musician Louis Vierne arrived in England for a short recital tour in January 1924, he was already a well-known figure. Titular organist at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris since 1900, Vierne was also a celebrated composer, with four organ symphonies and a clutch of other pieces to his credit.<\/strong><\/p>\n One of the recitals Vierne played in England was at Westminster Cathedral in London, where a new organ was being built in stages. Its designer, Henry Willis III, was at the concert and at one point he apparently hummed a tune to Vierne \u2013 who, severely sight-impaired since birth, would have been unable to read it on paper \u2013 and waited for the master organist to weave an imposing improvisation on it.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> The tune Willis provided was that of the so-called \u2018Westminster Quarters\u2019, a four-note sequence struck in various permutations to mark the quarter hours on Big Ben, the clock in the Elizabeth Tower at the Houses of Parliament. The Quarters had actually originated not in London, but as a peal written in 1793 for St Mary the Great, the university church in Cambridge. Exactly who composed the chime is uncertain, though it\u2019s often attributed to William Crotch, an undergraduate at the time. Some hear in the initial four-note motif an echo of the aria<\/a><\/strong> \u2018I know that my redeemer liveth\u2019 from Handel\u2019s Messiah<\/i><\/a><\/strong>, but the link is not conclusive.<\/span><\/p>\n We have no record of how Vierne expanded on the Quarters theme at his Westminster Cathedral concert. But its potential clearly interested him, as eight years earlier he had asked the owner of a clock shop in Switzerland where he heard the chime to write it down for him. And three years after the 1924 recital, Vierne returned to the Quarters again, in a swirlingly flamboyant work entitled Carillon de Westminster<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n The Carillon<\/i> is a relatively short piece, but packs a large variety of colour and incident into its six-minute span. In it, Vierne gradually builds an imposing edifice of sound from the four basic \u201cWestminster Quarters\u201d motifs (including, for some reason, a slightly misquoted second \u201cquarter\u201d), drawing on the massive tonal and technical resources of the French symphonic organ tradition. The full-throated roar of the Carillon<\/i>\u2019s conclusion is a classic moment in organ literature, with a searing bevy of reed stops, swell effects and deep-set pedal notes conspiring to thrill the listener.<\/span><\/p>\n