Tuesday, December 27, 2011

From the Archives

Distler and Messiaen

Fanfic, Filk, and the Story

The first of these essays dates from 2008, the centenary of both Distler and Messiaen. As my life has been devoted in large degree to these two composers over the last six weeks, it seems appropriate to revisit them. Since that time, we have had a performance of the “Quartet for the End of Time” in our parish church, part of a chamber music festival last summer. Its music continues to echo in my mind and heart.

As I prepared Les Anges, I was struck by its likeness in some respects to the “Dance of fury for the seven trumpets” from the Quartet (cf. Revelation 8, and 11:15-19). There, the four instruments are in unison throughout; in Les Anges, there are two voices, but the same rhythmic intensity. In both movements, Messiaen is seeking to portray Angels, but in different aspects – the one, unearthly joy; the other, unearthly terror and fury. He writes of the “Dance of fury”:
Music of stone, formidable granite sound; irresistible movement of steel, huge blocks of purple rage, icy drunkenness. Hear especially all the terrible fortissimo of the augmentation of the theme and changes of register of its different notes, towards the end of the piece.

It is well to remember that Angels have this other side, quite different from the one we see in the second chapter of St. Luke.

The second item? Yesterday, the Feast of Stephen, I played my old Archiv LP recording of the Christmas Oratorio. It reminded me of what I had written about it years ago, comparing it to “fanfic.” I still consider the comparison apt, and I still remember the 2006 movie I mentioned, “The Christmas Story.” It is probably still available on DVD. For those who live locally, I donated a copy to my favorite local library a few years ago.

The Christmas Oratorio is filled with magic from beginning to end. I think that the Alto soloist gets the best parts with arias such as “Bereite dich, Sion” and “Schlafe, mein Liebster,” but the Choir has plenty of fine music, not least the various harmonizations of stanzas from Vom Himmel hoch.

Here is the opening chorus, “Jauchzet, frohlocket” (in a fine performance from Spanish television via YouTube, complete with subtitles).

I love the intensity in the faces of everyone, instrumentalists and choristers alike. The way that the trumpets run up to the top in scales and arpeggios again and again is incredibly exciting, as is the choral counterpoint, and the string writing. No, it is ALL wonderful. And the Spanish source is a reminder that this is music for the whole world.

Soli Deo Gloria.

Sunday, December 25, 2011

Christ is made the sure foundation

A comment following Friday's Pageant rehearsal, from a nine-year old choirgirl: “If there were no Christmas, there would be no Church.”
For other foundation can no man lay that that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. (I Corinthians 3:11)


By the grace of God, my life is bound up with that of the Church, and at no time more than the final days of Advent and this day, the Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ. I long to build upon that sure foundation with gold, silver, precious stones; often enough, my works prove to be wood, hay, stubble. We cannot now judge which is which; we can only do our work with diligence in the light of reason granted to us, seeking by the power of the Holy Ghost to be crucified with Christ so that Christ can live in us.

Some of my work this week has gone well: this morning's prelude improvisation on Divinum mysterium went well, as did the hymnody, even the D Major scale in the pedals that opens “On this day earth shall ring.” Both of the choirs have sung well: the Eucharistic Psalmody for Advent IV and the Midnight Mass, the anthems at last week's Lessons and Carols service, the Youth Choir's two numbers at the Pageant last evening, and the Adult Choir's singing, with violin, of a fine Carl Schalk anthem last night. I delight in the choristers with whom I work, young and old, and if there is any good and lasting aspect of what I do, it probably is my contribution toward shaping them as “lively stones... a royal priesthood” (I Peter 2:9) built upon that foundation and offering up spiritual sacrifices of praise and thanksgiving.

Yesterday, a busy day that extended from 8 am until 1:30 this morning, included one surprise for me: “The snow lay on the ground.” We sang this delightful carol at the Midnight Mass, and I determined to make an arrangement of it for the brass quintet, for they needed more to do in the service. I was still working on the lower brass parts at 8 pm, hardly an hour before the brass players arrived. With no time to do the work properly by sketching it out in score, I was writing the parts on the fly, sitting at my computer working with LilyPond and trying to keep everything straight in my head as I went. This put me in good company: Mozart often composed in this desperate last-minute manner, notably writing a piano concerto on the stagecoach from Vienna to Prague, handing the parts to the concertmaster when he arrived (never having produced a score for the work), rehearsing that afternoon and playing the concert that night, his own part at the piano existing solely in his head. He later wrote out score and piano part for publication; the work remains one of the masterpieces of the concerto repertoire. Mozart is a towering giant; I am not. But the small work which I attempted turned out well, which was part of the surprise. It sounded well on each of the instruments, and fit together quite as I had imagined. The other part of the surprise: my delight in this act of composition, of putting notes on a page for people to play, and later hearing them as actual, living music.

But this is neither my calling nor my chief delight. That would be the singing of hymns, with which our congregation continually blesses me, and all others who hear them, with their beauty, intelligence, and grace. We did much unaccompanied or minimally accompanied singing last night; it was all so good that I hardly wanted to play the organ at all. I just wanted to listen to them.

Les Anges did not go well; I would grade it as perhaps a C minus, though it appears to have had its intended effect – one person was reported to have commented that part of it sounded “like angels flying up to heaven.” As Distler did a month ago, my teacher Messiaen has sent me back to the practice room with a challenge that, again, I do not see clearly how to address. I have much improved my practice methods, and (partly through last month's lessons from Distler) had last night's Messiaen thoroughly prepared. It was comfortably solid when I laid it aside before noon yesterday. The challenge: how to consistently transfer this into the playing of the music in public, especially in the liturgy when there are many mental distractions?

Distractions were part of last night's problem: I did not get my mind sufficiently still before launching into the piece – frequently a problem with postludes – and Les Anges is of a nature that once begun, it is a headlong rush, a flurry of angels' wings like thousands of geese taking off from a lake. So perhaps my challenge is not so much technical as it is spiritual, perhaps related to my insights learned from the pause at the asterisk in plainsong psalmody, discussed in the previous essay. How can one, almost instantly, become centered and in the proper frame of mind for the music at hand?

But all this is superstructure, work for another day. This day, this highest of days, is a day to praise him who is the foundation, the head and cornerstone. Christopher Smart, at Hymn 386:

We sing of God, the mighty source
of all things; the stupendous force
on which all strength depends;
from whose right arm, beneath whose eyes,
all period, pow'r, and enterprise
commences, reigns, and ends.

Tell them I AM, the Lord God said,
to Moses while on earth in dread
and smitten to the heart,
at once, above, beneath, around,
all nature without voice or sound
replied, “O Lord, thou art.”

Glorious the sun in mid career;
glorious th'assembled fires appear;
glorious the comet's train:
glorious the trumpet and alarm;
glorious th'almighty stretched-out arm;
glorious th'enraptured main:

Glorious, most glorious, is the crown
of him that brought salvation down
by meekness, Mary's son;
seers that stupendous truth believed,
and now the matchless deed's achieved,
determined, dared, and done.

Friday, December 23, 2011

Plainsong Psalmody from Portsmouth

The current BBC Choral Evensong is from Portsmouth Cathedral, and presents an outstanding example of plainsong psalmody. Most cathedral Evensongs are done with Anglican Chant, and it is worthwhile to listen to the plainsong as a contrast; it begins about 7'20” into the broadcast and continues for about ten minutes. A few items to note:
-- the pause at the asterisk: I have learned from my own singing of the psalms and from choral rehearsals in trying to do it this way (and undoing past habits of not making much of a pause) that this is spiritually valuable. It causes one to slow down. Evidence for this is that I tend to forget and rush through the asterisk when I am in a hurry, or not focused on the moment. I would go so far as to say that this little silence is a principal contributor to the following:

-- the hypnotic quality of the chant, when carried through the large quantity of psalmody appointed in the Offices: This has the potential to aid in the spiritual connectedness that is sought in Taizé music, and more effectively in plainsong than in the latter, in my opinion.

-- the shaping of phrases: In plainsong, most phrases have an arched shape, especially when there is much text on the reciting note. There is a slight crescendo through the reciting note, and relaxation through the ending. Many have likened it to ocean waves calmly and rhythmically washing up the beach and receding. The Portsmouth choir does it exceedingly well.

-- the objectivity: In our parish, we sometimes sing Eucharistic psalmody to the Ionian Psalter of Peter Hallock. These settings are excellent, and much valued. Hallock takes a radically different approach, with wide swings of dynamic, expressive of the text – and there is much in the Psalter that, on its surface, calls for such expressiveness. Anglican Chant psalmody can partake of such expression, as well. But that is not the approach of plainsong psalmody; it is the calm, meditative prayer of Holy Mother Church, generation after generation through all the vicissitudes of life, in spiritual union with the Father and the Son through the Holy Spirit.

-- the organ accompaniment: It is modest, and entirely in the background. In our parish, we generally sing plainsong without accompaniment, but if the organ is to be used, this is the way it should be done. Good plainsong accompaniment adds to the hypnotic quality of the chant.

The BBC only keeps the Evensong broadcasts online for a week; this one will disappear after Tuesday, Dec. 27. For those who encounter this posting after that, similar examples from Portsmouth might be found on YouTube – I haven't looked, so I cannot say for sure.

Next up from BBC Choral Evensong: the Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College, beginning on Christmas Day.

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Les Anges

The heavenly host praised God and said: Glory to God in the highest

Distler was my teacher earlier this month; now it is Messiaen. This is one of the nine “meditations” on the Nativity of Christ. Les Anges, “The Angels,” is the only one of the nine that I have not played, before this fortnight.

Here is Messiaen playing it:

What sort of music do the angels make? It is surely different from ours. Tolkien somewhere wrote about how it is that Elves and Men differ in their poetry, their songs – most of all because the Gift of Eru lies between them: Elves live forever, unless felled by accident or war, while Men grow old and die. He most directly addresses the issue in a practical way with the Song of Galadriel, when the Fellowship of the Ring prepares to leave Lothlorien.

The analogy carries over to Angels and Men. Our thought patterns differ, and so will our music. But Messiaen perhaps sensed that we have a model before us, an order of creature radically different (though, like us, mortal), but gifted with song: the birds. Messiaen's angels here sound at times like a tree full of songbirds in the spring, and they go twittering off into the distance at the end. Yet, the angels are unlike birds; they are creatures of might, beauty, intelligence, and glory, among the greatest works of our Maker's hand.

As I work at the organ console this week, I imagine myself in solidarity with the angels as they prepared for that night above the fields near Bethlehem. That night was as important to them as it is to us, and I have no doubt that they were as eager (and perhaps anxious?) as any human choir or orchestra before a performance. I suspect that in this, we are alike: music does not come into being without work, study, and preparation. So I work, perhaps as they worked. But we work to the same end:
Gloria in excelsis Deo
et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis.
Laudamus te.
Benedictus te.
Adoramus te.
Glorificamus te.
Gratias agimus tibi
propter magnam gloriam tuam.

Sunday, December 18, 2011

Revelation 12:1-10

And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars....

We read this at Mattins this morning. Stories known by heart (like this passage) remain inexhaustible treasuries of grace, with new details coming to the foreground each time they are read.

These two ideas struck me today:

-- The “crown of twelve stars” can be taken as representation of the twelve tribes of Israel. St. Mary and her son are the consummation of the history of Israel, the crowning glory of her people. It is through her that the latter part of Isaiah (chapters 40 and onward) finds fulfillment, with the grace of God extending through Israel into all the world.

-- The “war in heaven” (v. 7-9): I see now that this cosmic battle is related to St. Mary and the Incarnation. In one sense, “Michael and his angels fought against the dragon” (v. 7) ages ago, before the foundation of the earth. But Biblical time is slippery. The Hebrew language gets that part right; the verbs do not represent past, present, and future in the clear-cut manner of Indo-European languages. My point: the juxaposition of these two stories indicates that the victory of St. Michael and his angels over “that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole earth” (v. 9) is possible only through Christ, and not simply Christ as the heavenly Second Person of the Trinity, but in his person as Jesus of Nazareth, Son of Man, incarnate of the Virgin Mary. “And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.” (Genesis 3:15, the first lesson at Mattins). St. Mary is inextricably bound up into these things, into this story. Nova, nova: Ave fit ex Eva. It is indeed a new thing that has come to pass.

We held our Advent service of Nine Lessons and Carols this evening. We began with Genesis 3:1-15 as we had done at Mattins, and concluded with St. Matthew's account of the Incarnation (ch. 1, verses 18-25, “Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise...”). This follows the genealogy, the “book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham” (v. 1-16). The eternal purposes of God here become focused through all these generations into one time, one place, one child. And through this child, “that old serpent” is finally overcome, as promised to Eve at the beginning:
No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make his blessings flow
Far as the curse is found.

A quick prayer, with further thoughts: Benedict XVI, and St. Mary

I read this morning a news account claiming that the Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, is looking “tired" and "weak,” much declined in energy over the last few months. He has been in excellent health, but he is 84 years old. The news account (which I am not going to link) speculated at length as to whether he might retire, obviously hoping that he might. Not likely: the last Pope to retire did so in 1415.

Benedict has spoken on this subject, in 2010: "If a pope clearly realizes that he is no longer physically, psychologically and spiritually capable of handling the duties of his office, then he has a right, and under some circumstances, also an obligation to resign." But he went on to say that “One can resign at a peaceful moment or when one simply cannot go on. But one must not run away from danger and say that someone else should do it."

This is hardly a peaceful moment for the Church or the world that he loves so dearly. He is not going to walk away from his duty; instead, he has trips scheduled to Mexico and Cuba next spring.

But before that, there is Christmas, which is grueling for any priest, religious, or church musician. With all my heart, I wish him well. And that is why I offer this quick prayer, before attending to my own duties for the Fourth Sunday of Advent:
LORD God of hosts, look with favor upon thy servant Benedict, Bishop of Rome. Uphold him in his service to thee through this coming week. Grant him a sense of thy presence and every spiritual blessing, for the benefit of thy holy Church throughout the world: through him who is the Great Shepherd of the Church, even Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.


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[Further thoughts, later in the day]
Christmas is more than a grueling ordeal; it is a joy, more so the more one enters into it through the Church's liturgy and song. And I doubt not that it is one of the chief joys of the Holy Father, whose love for Our Lady shines through all of his writings. I hope that this is a good week for him.

One of my favorite passages from his writings comes at the end of the encyclical letter Spe salvi, where he turns to Mary, the "Star of Hope" (Ave maris stella):

With a hymn composed in the eighth or ninth century, thus for over a thousand years, the Church has greeted Mary, the Mother of God, as “Star of the Sea”: Ave maris stella. Human life is a journey. Towards what destination? How do we find the way? Life is like a voyage on the sea of history, often dark and stormy, a voyage in which we watch for the stars that indicate the route. The true stars of our life are the people who have lived good lives. They are lights of hope. Certainly, Jesus Christ is the true light, the sun that has risen above all the shadows of history. But to reach him we also need lights close by—people who shine with his light and so guide us along our way. Who more than Mary could be a star of hope for us? With her “yes” she opened the door of our world to God himself; she became the living Ark of the Covenant, in whom God took flesh, became one of us, and pitched his tent among us (cf. Jn 1:14)....

Through you [Mary], through your “yes”, the hope of the ages became reality, entering this world and its history. You bowed low before the greatness of this task and gave your consent: “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word” (Lk 1:38).... But alongside the joy which, with your Magnificat, you proclaimed in word and song for all the centuries to hear, you also knew the dark sayings of the prophets about the suffering of the servant of God in this world.... Notwithstanding the great joy that marked the beginning of Jesus's ministry, in the synagogue of Nazareth you must already have experienced the truth of the saying about the “sign of contradiction” (cf. Lk 4:28ff). In this way you saw the growing power of hostility and rejection which built up around Jesus until the hour of the Cross, when you had to look upon the Saviour of the world, the heir of David, the Son of God dying like a failure, exposed to mockery, between criminals. Then you received the word of Jesus: “Woman, behold, your Son!” (Jn 19:26). From the Cross you received a new mission. From the Cross you became a mother in a new way: the mother of all those who believe in your Son Jesus and wish to follow him. The sword of sorrow pierced your heart. Did hope die? Did the world remain definitively without light, and life without purpose? At that moment, deep down, you probably listened again to the word spoken by the angel in answer to your fear at the time of the Annunciation: “Do not be afraid, Mary!” (Lk 1:30).... In that hour at Nazareth the angel had also said to you: “Of his kingdom there will be no end” (Lk 1:33). Could it have ended before it began? No, at the foot of the Cross, on the strength of Jesus's own word, you became the mother of believers. In this faith, which even in the darkness of Holy Saturday bore the certitude of hope, you made your way towards Easter morning. The joy of the Resurrection touched your heart and united you in a new way to the disciples, destined to become the family of Jesus through faith. In this way ... you remain in the midst of the disciples as their Mother, as the Mother of hope. Holy Mary, Mother of God, our Mother, teach us to believe, to hope, to love with you. Show us the way to his Kingdom! Star of the Sea, shine upon us and guide us on our way!

Sunday, December 4, 2011

Distler, teachers, Evensong, and Mozart

I thank the choir for a fine Evensong today. The Weelkes Magnificat was the best that we have sung it, and the anthem (“Cause us, O Lord,” by Ronald Nelson) was splendid. And J.'s sermon was outstanding, helping me make sense of a particularly thorny pair of lessons (Amos 6:1-14, II Thessalonians 1:5-12).

As mentioned a few weeks ago, I scheduled Hugo Distler's Partita on Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland for today's Choral Evensong. It was the last of three major organ works which I have attempted since All Saints' Day. I did not get any work done on it until I had completed the Phillips and Bach pieces – so, I have had to learn it in a fortnight. I applied my standard practice routine to it, working out a complete fingering, then spending about six hours on the First Workout, and subsequently about three hours of every work day.

But it became clear that I was stuck. There was no way that I could bring it up to performance tempo, marked with Germanic precision by Distler in the score. And it is not that I was only a few metronome markings shy; on several of the movements, I was barely playing it at half tempo, and try as I might, I could go no faster. I considered dropping the piece, but what then would I play for Advent Evensong?

It was here that Distler became my teacher. Wednesday morning, I tried a different approach on the fourth variation, the one that was most troublesome for me. I began with my standard approach: slow play-through of a phrase, followed by rhythmic groupings. But then, an innovation: I played the phrase with the metronome at a comfortably slow tempo of quarter note at 72, moved the tempo up to 76 and played it again. Again at 80. And 84. Then 88, still just this one phrase. I continued working it up until I broke down, which was (that day) at 96. I immediately played the phrase slowly to avoid the spastic too-fast practicing that I tend to fall into when faced with such a situation (and which I hear sometimes from the students who rehearse in our building). I moved on to the next phrase, working it up in the same manner. Finally, I played the whole variation a couple of notches below my break-down tempo, and finished with my usual slow play-through. It was now thoroughly comfortable at 88, where an hour previous, I would have completely broken down at that tempo, despite (by then) a week and a half of work on the piece.

The problem is that this took me over an hour for two pages of music which take about one minute in performance. On Friday, I was able to work it up to 104 with another hour's work, and on Saturday to 112, which gave me my performance tempo for today of 108. I am still well short of Distler's indicated tempo of 132 (actually 66 to the half note, which is the same), but I can now see how I could attain it, given another couple of weeks. I believe that I got it to a musically acceptable tempo for tonight's Evensong. I applied the same technique to two other places in the Partita with similar success, most notably the end of the Chaconne.

Metronomic practice is nothing new. But normally, I hear people play long sections, entire movements, with the metronome. My innovation is to work on one phrase at a time, in combination with the rhythmic groupings approach I have described elsewhere. It is not so much the playing of this little Fourth Variation; it is the methodological breakthrough. It presented me with a problem that could not be solved with any approach that I knew to attempt, and forced me to find another way, a method that will be of value in other contexts.

It seems that such lessons come to me only when it is too late for me to fully apply them to the work at hand. Most of the Distler remained well short of his indicated tempi in tonight's Evensong. But I hope that my playing of it, faults and all, communicated the musical idea of the piece. And I have come away from it a better organist.

I revere my teachers: Vera Payne, who led me through John Thompson's “Teaching Little Fingers to Play” and encouraged my love of music, despite my late start with it (age twelve); Ron Fishbaugh, the best of the several piano teachers I encountered at college and after, and who told me after I played a recital that had included Franck and Bach that I ought to take up the organ (I did not act on that for another several years); Donald McDonald, who took this self-taught organist, corrected his faults (as best he could), and set him on the path toward becoming a better organist.

But there are other teachers who speak to us through the pages of their music, as Distler has done for me this fortnight. First among these is J. S. Bach. When I began to play the organ, I could not locate anyone to teach me, but I knew where to look: the Orgelbüchlein. It was my primary “teacher” in those days, as the Well-Tempered Clavier and the Suites had been under Mr. Fishbaugh.

Tomorrow is the Feast of St. Clement of Alexandria. I believe that, in his love of learning, he would approve of these ideas, and see Jesus our Rabbi, our Teacher, in the background, for all learning ultimately comes from Him:
Master of eager youth,
Controlling, guiding,
Lifting our hearts to truth,
New power providing;
Shepherd of innocence,
Thou art our Confidence;
To thee, our sure Defense,
We bring our praises.

(number 362 in the Hymnal 1940. A version of this text is at 478 in the Hymnal 1982, omitting the stanza here quoted).

Tomorrow is also the spiritual birthday of W. A. Mozart, who departed this life on December 5, 1791. I enjoy all of his music, but I would say that he is at his best at the opera. Cosi fan tutti, the Marriage of Figaro, the Magic Flute, Don Giovanni... I love them all, largely for his lighthearted and sympathetic portrayal in music of the human condition.

While in graduate school, I had the opportunity of observing the girls' choir of Trinity Church, Princeton in rehearsal, directed in those days by James Litton. That January evening, they sight-read the treble line for the Introit and Kyrie of the Requiem, which they would be learning that spring with the ATBs of the choir. Watching and hearing them encounter this music is something I hope I always remember. They were my teachers that day, showing me why I should work with children's choirs. For reasons having to do mostly with scheduling, I will never direct a choir that can rehearse three times a week and learn to sing at that level, but within the possibilities of my time and place, I hope that I have helped young people (older people, too) encounter Real Music, and develop the skills to sing it as they have opportunity.

Here is a performance of the Introit and Kyrie, with Sir Georg Solti and the Vienna Philharmonic, from 5 December 1991, the 200th anniversary of Mozart's death.

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

John Keble, and Fr. S.

I recently read a biography of John Keble. He was a saintly vicar of the country parish at Hursley, and one of those responsible for the Oxford Movement. It seems to me that he was the “glue” that held it together, especially after the defection of Newman to the Church of Rome. And he did most of this simply by observing the Daily Offices and the Holy Eucharist in his parish church, visiting the sick and the needy in the parish, diligently catechizing the young people, and encouraging Pusey, Newman and others behind the scenes. Two quotes from the biography (by Georgina Battiscombe: p. 354):
In spite of his obvious limitations, in moments of difficulty or crisis men's minds turned instinctively to Keble: “when all else had been said and done,” Liddon [another biographer] declared, “people would wait and see what came from Hursley before making up their minds as to the path of duty.”

It was not John Keble's wisdom which drew men to him, but his holiness, a very understated, English type of holiness..
.
As I read, I recognized that I had the privilege of working with a priest who followed in Keble's saintly footsteps: Fr. S., who was priest-in-charge of this parish during an interim, then assisting priest for a few years. The likenesses are many, and I dare not begin naming them, for time is short.

But I do wish to honor Fr. S., and what he has meant to me, even after his departure for other work. He instituted the Daily Office in this parish, over the objections of the Vestry; with my collusion, he instituted monthly Choral Evensong. He was at the church for Matins and Evensong six days a week (I covered the seventh, Friday), and celebrated a midday Eucharist on every major Feast, even the three Feasts that follow hard on Christmas Day, when most clergy are scattered far and wide on holiday.

I do not doubt that Fr. S. knew of Keble. Whether he was conscious of following that great example, I do not know. More probably, the likeness between them stemmed from the One whom they both followed and served.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren...

A few weeks ago, I played for the funeral of an older lady of our congregation. Today, I found a note in my church mailbox from her inseparable friend and companion, with a check for $25.

What should I do with this? I suspect that this lady can hardly spare $25. I could return it, with the observation that I was paid by the funeral home, but that would be an insult to her generosity. Yet, I cannot simply pocket the money. It is, in my view, a “widow's mite,” and of great value in the eyes of our Lord, so it must be used well.

On top of this, someone else whom I helped a little bit financially a few months ago has repaid the money in the form of a gift to the church, “to help the next person.” And all of this came on the day when the Gospel [St. Matthew 25:31-46] applies forcibly to such matters. What should I do?


Three answers to that question came my way this afternoon. After church, I was able to give a gentleman $10 to get a prescription filled for his wife. I did this grudgingly, for reasons I won't describe here, but thinking of that $25 dollars, I did it. “I was sick, and ye visited me not” is close enough to “I was sick and in need of medicine, and ye helped me not” to influence my actions.

Later in the day, another gentleman came by asking for $5 to get something to eat. Here again, I begrudged the gift, for the same gentleman came by last Sunday evening with the same request, and he could go to the Salvation Army for a free dinner, as I told him. Is he headed straight for the liquor store? Quite possibly. But I gave him the money and said a prayer with him. Fifteen dollars down, ten to go.

Not half an hour later, yet another gentleman came by, a young man. He had papers to show that he has just been released from the state prison in the next town. He had his final paycheck from the prison hospital where he was working as an inmate, but no one would cash it, because his only ID was his prison ID -- a perfectly fine photo ID, but not one that someplace like Wal-Mart or Target is going to honor. I gave him the remaining $10 plus a bit more, directed him to the Shelter House so that he has a roof over his head tonight, and suggested that he go get a proper ID from the DMV tomorrow, which he can do for $5. Then perhaps he can cash that paycheck and get started on a new life. We said some prayers to this effect; his manner of talking with our Lord suggested that he is not unfamiliar with prayer, so I was pleased to recognize him as a Brother.

I say none of this to claim any personal merit. But I say it to give witness to the strange and marvelous ways that the Lord works. Sequences of events such as these are too common in the Christian life to attribute to chance. If there is any merit, it belongs to the lady who remembers her dear friend, as do I.

May she rest in peace, and know that her works follow her in the life of her friend.
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Bach went fairly well. I was thoroughly prepared, and should have played it better, but I commit it into the hands of the Lord, mistakes and all; it certainly seemed to be the right music for this day's liturgy, and I gave it my best effort. With the fugue, part of the problem was that I got too emotionally caught up in it, along the lines of what I described in the previous essay, and my mistakes disfigured the most climactic moment of the piece. Psallam spiritu et mente. I must keep working on this. Emotion is good if it energizes the playing, but not so good if it leads to wrong notes.

What did go very well today was the communion improvisation at the contemporary service, and that was sheer gift, as improvisation always is, no matter how much one prepares and practices for it. Also, the hymns went well, as did the two choral pieces. Given a choice as to where the mistakes would be, I would be well content to have them in the voluntaries rather than the hymns and anthems.

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Toccata and Fugue in F Major

I asked myself in the previous essay why it would be inappropriate to play the Craig Phillips setting of Sine Nomine as a prelude because of its virtuosity, but the Bach Toccata in F is perhaps more appropriate.

Most often, my decisions about the appropriateness of an anthem, hymn, or voluntary are based on an inarticulate sense of the rightness or wrongness of an item for a particular point in the liturgy, based on my experience with music and the liturgy, my sense of the people in this place, and the capabilities of choir, organist, and congregation.

But, after further thought and practice on the Bach, I think I can articulate the way in which it differs from the Phillips. In the latter, there is a sense in which some of the virtuosity is for its own sake -- “showing off,” if you will. It was composed for an occasion for which that was appropriate. Because it is firmly based on a hymn tune, I considered it appropriate for the Sunday on which we sang the hymn, but not as a prelude. A postlude allows somewhat more scope for virtuosity, mostly because those who are not interested in music can escape to the coffee hour. The Bach is equally virtuosic (and more difficult), with its two extended pedal solos early in the toccata. But every note of the Bach is in service of the musical idea that is laid out in the opening two-voice canon over tonic pedal point, and my sense is that this musical idea is appropriate for the Last Sunday after Pentecost, Year A.

In fact, I am unable to name any mature work of Bach that exhibits virtuosity for its own sake. If there is any virtuosity present, it is a virtuosity of compositional skill in the execution of the underlying ideas, not in the exterior aspects of the performance. This is one characteristic that separates J. S. Bach from a perfectly serviceable composer such as Craig Phillips. To put it in terms of Bach's contemporaries, this is one way in which Bach differs from Telemann, a good musician whom the city fathers of Leipzig would have preferred to Bach. He would not have demanded as much of them as listeners.

So what idea is this that Bach is communicating, and that I consider a good fit for the Last Sunday of Pentecost, Year A? The phrases that come to mind are from Psalm 47: “Clap your hands, all you peoples; shout to God with a cry of joy.... For God is King of all the earth; sing praises with all your skill.” This Sunday is the end of the liturgical year, wherein thoughts turn to the end of days. In the Daily Office, we have made our way to the end of the Revelation of St. John the Divine; in the Sunday Gospel, we hear of the Day of Doom, “when the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him” (St. Matthew 25:31). There will in this day be weeping and gnashing of teeth as the wicked go away into everlasting punishment (v. 46), but it will be as well a day of victory, when the last Enemy, death, is overcome forever (Revelation 20:14). And it will be the day of final and complete answer to the daily prayer of Holy Mother Church: “Thy kingdom come.”

The Bach Toccata in F, with its Fugue, is the best response to this that I can make with the music available to me. The Toccata is boundless joy, the serious and all-consuming joy that is characteristic of the praise of God, the working out of one of the grandest ideas in all of Bach's music. The Fugue is more solemn. In the context of this service, I hope that it can be an expression (insofar as humanly possible) of the majesty of our Lord Jesus Christ at the right hand of God, sitting as righteous Judge of all the earth. When the two subjects combine in the final pages of the fugue, it is inexpressibly majestic, and causes me to consider the completion of the purposes of God, determined before the foundation of the earth.

These words are but a stammering and inadequate attempt to say what cannot be said. Yet, dust and ashes that we are, we must say something. No: we must sing something, and in this case, instrumental music has the advantage that it sings without words. And we cannot, for this occasion, play it safe; we must “sing... with all [our] skill.” This piece is right on the edge of my capabilities; that makes it just about right.

As Bach would say – and did say, at the end of nearly every one of his scores:
Soli Deo gloria.

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Here is a performance of the toccata by Helmut Walcha. For those who attend my parish, he was the teacher of D.D., and this is a much better performance than what you will hear on Sunday.

Friday, November 4, 2011

Apparition of the Eternal Church

I am playing this on Sunday.

I am nervous about it – not so much about getting through it, as about how people will respond to it. I have played it before, and no one has killed me yet. But this is a piece that elicits strong reactions. I love it. But I must remember that many will not.

Is it appropriate to inflict something like this on a congregation? They have come to worship, to pray, not to listen to loud spiky music. I do not have a proper answer to this, whether for this piece or any of the other strange things that I play. This morning after I practiced it, I considered moving it from its place as the prelude to postlude, which would mean moving the Craig Phillips setting of Sine Nomine to prelude. It is a more comfortable piece, but it is long and virtuosic. I do not like playing such a piece as a prelude, especially when it ends with a big loud toccata-like flourish that, in the context of a church prelude, is the wrong way to begin the Eucharistic service. It would be better as a postlude, and there is nothing virtuosic about the Messiaen. Power, yes; virtuosity, no.

(Having said that, I plan to play the Bach Toccata in F as the prelude a fortnight from now. How is that different from the Phillips?)

A few years ago, a gentleman by the name of Paul Festa made a video about the Messiaen piece (the Apparition of the Eternal Church). The body of the 50-plus minute documentary consists of watching thirty-one people listen to this piece with headphones, without being told what it is or what to expect. Their reactions are amazing.

I will not link to the video's website, because some of the content of the website (and the video) is graphically sexual and laced with lots of profanity – but that is how some of the people reacted to the music.
“That‘s a piece of music that just rips right through you. It just feels like my whole body was vibrating, it kind of started in my head and then it moved through into my chest and I even felt it in my legs … Which makes sense for an organ player, right? Because it’s so hyper-embodied. And the tension of the piece must be felt in just every fiber of your being … He clearly did not care what people thought. I mean, what is that? It’s literally assaultive …

Paradoxically, for a musician so associated with theology he’s one of the most sensual and physical and I think corporeal of musicians.” (comments from the transcript of the video, available on the website. The last comment is after the listener(s) have been told the title and composer of the piece)


Is it fair to do something like this to a church congregation?

Is it fair not to do something like this, that does everything possible within the musical art to bring the spiritual vision into visceral reality? Too many times, church musicians back off from the edge and play it safe. We stay in nice cozy major keys, Andante religioso from beginning to end.

But Christianity is not safe.

Here is a YouTube performance of the music:
Link

“A crescendo in granite... the pedal marks the blows of the hammer of grace … chisel, hammer, suffering, and trials cut and polish the elect, living stones of the spiritual edifice.” (from Messiaen's program notes: cf. I Peter 2:5, Revelation 21:2-3)

Sunday, October 23, 2011

Lord, thou hast been our refuge

October 23, 2011 - I have anticipated this day for a long time:
At the furthest reach of my plans: Oct. 23, 2011 - "Lord, thou hast been our refuge" (RVW), with the Youth Choir doing the semichorus part. This will be unorthodox, but I believe that RVW, practical musician that he was, would approve. The young people will sing the lines "The years of our life are threescore years and ten..." to the adults; I get chills imagining it, and contemplating a whole semester of living with Psalm 90 and this magnificent music alongside the young people. Singing it will teach them the Psalm more thoroughly than any words could do. (from the Music Box, June 9, 2010)

The Old Testament lesson for today was the last chapter of Deuteronomy, the ascent of Moses to the top of Pisgah, where the LORD showed him “all the land... unto the utmost sea.” The account says that “there arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face.”

In response, the Lectionary appointed a selection from Psalm 90, whose superscription reads: “A prayer of Moses the man of God.”
Lord, thou hast been our refuge from one generation to another ...


There are two settings of Psalm 90 that surpass all others: one is the setting by Charles Ives with its incomparable quiet ending, “as church bells, from a distance” (notation in the parts for orchestral bells, measure 93). The entire piece is over a C pedal point in the organ, and is “as evolution: quiet, unseen and unheeded, but strong fundamentally” (notation in choral parts, measure 14). Ives worked on this piece for over thirty years, and “Mrs. Ives recalled his saying that it was the only one of his works that he was satisfied with.”

Shortly before Ives brought this to completion in 1923-24, Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote his setting of the same text: “Lord, thou hast been our refuge.” It incorporates a stanza of St. Anne, “O God our help in ages past,” the metrical setting of Psalm 90 by Isaac Watts. At first this is pianississimo while the semichorus (the youth choir, in our rendition today) sings the first verses of the prose text. The hymn tune returns later, in other guise.

RVW wanted everyone to make music, and he gave options with this piece for performance by limited forces – the semichorus can be replaced by a solo baritone, and the trumpet is “ad lib,” and can be omitted – though with considerable loss to the effect. It seemed appropriate to me for our Youth Choir to sing the semichorus part, with the Adult Choir on the “full chorus,” and both choirs joining for the final pages. It works splendidly in the grandest of settings, but it also works in our little parish church, with our amateur choristers, young and old. Although our performance was far from perfect, I believe that RVW would be pleased with the way that we sang it. I certainly was.

I do not know if I can do this piece again; I barely made it through this day. After our one-and-only combined rehearsal with trumpet, organ, and both choirs, I was an emotional wreck. But I was saved by three things: the children, the congregation, and the trumpet.

After the rehearsal, one of the boys (Tom) complained about how loud it was: “I can't even hear myself.” “Yes. Isn't it grand?” I answered. One of the little girls (Elise) said pretty much the same thing, expressing her delight in it. They brought me back to earth with their reminder of the sheer practical childlike joy of making Real Music that is splendid and overwhelming. This is, I think, what Holy Scripture is expressing in passages such as II Chronicles 5:13-14 and Revelation 5:11-14.

It came even to pass, as the trumpeters and singers were as one, to make one sound to be heard in praising and thanking the LORD; and when they lifted up their voice with the trumpets and cymbals and instruments of musick, and praised the LORD, saying, For he is good; for his mercy endureth for ever: that then the house was filled with a cloud, even the house of the LORD; so that the priests could not stand to minister by reason of the cloud: for the glory of the LORD had filled the house of God.

And I beheld, and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne and the beasts and the elders: and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands; saying with a loud voice, Worthy is the Lamb that was slain...


Part way through the piece, I noticed the congregation. The youth choir filled the choir loft, relegating the adult choir to the front three pews. And behind them – the congregation, by this point listening intently. They too were part of the music, as was their inner response to it, a response that for some of them may echo for years to come. Dorothy Sayers explores this at length in “The Mind of the Maker,” to which I have referred in these pages. This is even more important when the audience/congregation and the musicians are one community, as we were today. The listeners enter into the music-making more fully, for they know the people from whom the music comes. Although the performance from Westminster Abbey linked above was from a much grander occasion, it too was “one community,” representing an entire nation on an important day of remembrance. This connects (again) with II Chronicles 5:13-14 and Revelation 5:11-14, where music serves this function on two of the most important occasions in history (past and future), and where, in the latter passage, the community encompasses “every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them.”


The trumpeter does not play until the hymn tune St. Anne returns on page twelve, more than five minutes into the piece. Her part appears to be simple, all of it in long notes, playing once through the hymn tune. But it is not; she needed careful and accurate cues from me, as did the trebles for their entrances, and the tenors for one key passage on page fourteen. And it was the hymn tune and my responsibility for it that carried me through the final pages.

Psallam spiritu et mente – I will sing with the spirit, and with the understanding also (I Cor. 14:15, the motto of the RSCM).

I become emotional at moments such as these, and the “understanding” must remain in control, else I would fail in my duty. A conductor has to do only one thing: give the ensemble what they need to get through the piece. The music-making comes from the singers and instrumentalists, not the conductor.


It was a Good Day. The choirs of this parish made this anthem their own, and sang it from the heart.
[When we sing,] we express ourselves and become vulnerable to God and to one another in our song in a unique way.... [There is] something intangible, something about health and healing that congregations and choirs experience in their innermost beings....

The point is that any music that bears repetition, music on which time and effort are worth being spent, will be fine art. The point is that music in worship, the highest activity of humankind, will of necessity invoke the finest craft and that, in turn, has the potential to issue in the finest art. Precisely because music serves a greater good than itself gives it the best chance to be the finest art. Gregorian chant, Palestrina motets, Bach cantatas, black spirituals, and innumerable hymns with their tunes are prime examples [as is this day's anthem] – amazing art and amazing gifts to the whole human race.
(Paul Westermeyer, “The Heart of the Matter,” p. 50-52)

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

"Old times there are not forgotten; look away, look away ..."

It's all now you see.... For every southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and ... yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time. [William Faulkner, from “Intruder in the Dust”]


When I was a lad, I often visited the graveyard near home, especially the lichen-covered stone marker set flat in the ground in one corner at the highest point of the yard. In worn letters, it recorded the names of the Confederate home-guard militia soldiers who died on that hilltop, defending their home town in 1862. (There is now a fine modern monument, erected a few years ago by the Sons of the Confederacy. I left some flowers on it the last time I was there.) It was just a skirmish, not worthy of being called a battle, and the handful of boys and old men who fought there were not even soldiers of the regular Army. Their opponents in blue were indeed “real” soldiers, a nineteen-year-old future president (McKinley) among them. Despite opposition they could not hope to overcome, the militia men of the community fought as best they could and did their duty as they understood it. I doubt that slavery, or states' rights, or any of the other reasons given in history books for the war, figured in their minds that spring day.

Our county, at that time so sparsely populated and remote that it was considered a “wilderness,” sent eleven companies of men into the Army of Northern Virginia. I have stood on Seminary Ridge at Gettysburg and read the names of these eleven companies where they waited through the artillery bombardment that July morning. I have stood, and wept, beside the statue of General Lee astride Traveller looking across that field, much as he was that day in 1863 as the shattered army streamed back past him, defeated.

One of my friends, an African-American musician serving a historic church in the South, related his victory in getting the Confederate Flag removed from his church. He threatened them with a lawsuit because, he said, the Flag constituted harassment, creating a threatening and unwelcoming workplace. I did not even try to explain; I could not, not in terms that he would understand. Even my wife, who knows me better than anyone, does not understand. Her take: “The war is over. You lost. Get over it.”

I will never get over it.

The legacy of the Confederate States of America is a mixed bag. Yes, slavery was part of it. The racism of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan that followed the war must be counted as part of it. In this, the CSA was no better, and in my opinion no worse, than the USA, or any other nation of the earth. For every nation and people of the earth, history and culture amount to a mixed bag, with shameful deeds alongside moments of glory; men and women who would be better forgotten, and those whose names should live forever.

A certain indescribable freedom was lost when Old Dixie went down. I have felt the evanescent spirit of it lingering among gatherings of my older relatives, and in conversation with neighbors and co-workers “back home,” especially the more backward and uneducated among them. I have tasted it in the moonshine at my uncle's funeral, and in my mother's corn bread and beans, made just the way her mother, and her mother's mother, made it. Some of it can be heard in the old “hillbilly” songs, and to a lesser degree in the bluegrass and country music that descended from them, or in the “shape-note” singing that has survived mostly in the Old South.

The victory by the North was a victory for Yankee capitalism, for centralized government, for the “robber barons” that would follow the war, for the tenement and factory over the hardscrabble hill and delta farms of the South. It was, as well, the emancipation of a people who should never have been enslaved. It was when the United States became a nation. Shelby Foote noted in his three-volume study of the War that before 1860, people would say “the United States are . . . .” After 1865, it became “the United States is . . . .” We are no longer a collection of states, but one nation, and I am glad of it.

I came to better appreciate the men who fought to save the Union by reading Walt Whitman, and from a courthouse monument in northern New York. The men from that little town and the countryside around it were among the men who were behind that stone wall across the field from my people on that July afternoon. One can read it there on the monument, where the names of battles were engraved. Almost from beginning to end, these men of the Army of the Potomac were badly led, driven off battlefield after battlefield, or sent to their deaths in ill-conceived assaults that should never have been attempted. One can read of those horrors graven on the monument in names such as “Fredericksburg. . . Chancellorsville. . . Cold Harbor. . . .” Yet, they persevered, and almost in spite of their commanders, won the war.

And above all, there was Abraham Lincoln.

But my heart will always be in the South. I will always revere Robert E. Lee, Thomas Jackson, J.E.B. Stuart, James Longstreet, A. P. Hill, Dick Ewell, “Allegheny” Johnson, Albert Sidney Johnston, Patrick Cleburne, Bedford Forrest, William Lamb, Raphael Semmes, Jefferson Davis and his cabinet, and many others who were faithful in their duties to home and country. I will try to live up to their example. But it is not only leaders such as these, the ones whose names are in the histories, whose example I emulate. . . .

In the South, there was no money for monuments after the War. Confederate monuments are almost always smaller than those in the towns across the North. The one in the county next over from where I grew up is smaller even than most. It can be found behind an old church on the edge of the little town that is the county seat, and dates from about 1910, when the people of the county finally scraped up enough money to hire a local stonecarver to make it. It is a boy, a teenager, in slouch hat and ragged clothes, barefoot, musket in hand. He looks across the field to the hills that he doubtless loved, and perhaps never saw again after he marched off to the war. I will try, as well, to live up to his example, and the example of those home-guard militiamen buried on the hill near my home, stubbornly persevering in duty and love of country even in defeat.

Inscribed on the monument is just one sentence, a quote from Lee: "There is a true glory and a true honor: the glory of duty done -- the honor of integrity of principle."
Northern politicians will not appreciate the determination and pluck of the South, and Southern politicians do not appreciate the numbers, resources, and patient perseverance of the North. Both sides forget that we are all Americans. I foresee that our country will pass through a terrible ordeal, a necessary expiation, perhaps, for our national sins....

The truth is this: The march of Providence is so slow and our desires so impatient; the work of progress is so immense and our means of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope. - Robert E. Lee

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I wrote this several years ago on my LiveJournal page. It is perhaps worth revisiting today in honor of Mr. Lee, who passed from this mortal life on October 12, 1870.
O God, who hast brought us near to an innumerable company of angels and to the spirits of just men made perfect: Grant us during our earthly pilgrimage to abide in their fellowship, and in our heavenly country to become partakes of their joy; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. (BCP p. 198)

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Libraries

The library for my home town occupied a small room in the War Memorial Building with a Sherman tank in the front yard by the flagpole, exactly one mile from our house. To a little boy, the War Memorial Building was vast, smelling of times long disappeared, with high ceilings and dark wainscoting and dust and flies buzzing and adults going about their business (for some of the county offices were there, spilling over from the court house across the street). My mother used to bring me to the room in the back that said in black letters painted on the frosted-glass window: “Public Library.”

Inside, there was a small wooden desk with an ancient white-haired lady seated behind it; she must have been at least fifty years old (and closer to seventy by the time I left high school). As I would learn, she was kind to children so long as they were quiet, and I was, partly because I never encountered another child there. Normally, my mother and I (and perhaps my sister) were the only patrons in the room, but occasionally there would be other ladies whom my mother always knew, and they would exchange pleasantries (in whispers, of course). There was one goodly-sized oak table in the middle of the room with wooden chairs around it, and a ceiling fan turned lazily on high.

And there were books. Three walls of the room were shelved from floor to ceiling, with a ladder that could be used for the higher shelves. Tall books, short books, paperbacks (not many of those), hardbacks, most of them old, some of them (I would now realize, were I to return) dating to the mid-nineteenth century.

In the book “Rocket Boys,” which was set in a nearby county and in a time just a bit earlier than that of which I speak, one of the teenage “rocket boys,” Quentin Wilson, had read every book in the McDowell County Library. That made me feel better, for by the age of seventeen I had at least opened and sampled every book in our library, and had been forcibly impressed by my experiences at school that this was Not Done, not by anyone who had hope of a social life.

Some of the books in the library, especially the adult contemporary fiction of the time, I quickly laid aside as “boring.” Some of the books were so far over my head that I found no connection with them. But I believe that many books have their own time and place for us, and wait until we are ready for them, and early experiences may pave the way.

I especially devoured anything that had to do with science or mathematics -- thinking back, I do not recall anything whatsoever about music, my other passion as a teenager, not even a music dictionary. Nor do I recall anything in a language other than English. The card catalogue, guarded by the ancient librarian on her desk, was one unit of three side-by-side drawers: Subject, Title, Author.
In truth, I spent relatively little time in that room, except when I would take one of the reference books over to the big table and read for a while; mostly, I checked books out to take home, armloads at a time.

From there, I went to college. Not just any college, but a school with one of the major research libraries in the United States. My chief memories of freshman orientation are three: the fine gothic Chapel, the quarters of the music department (a dilapidated pile that would be condemned as unfit for human occupation the next summer), and the card catalogue room of the library, with the circulation desk nearby: a roomful of cards, several times the size of our entire library back home. The ancient and kindly librarian at her desk was replaced by squadrons of busy work-study students, processing books in and out and with no time for nonsense from callow freshmen. And the “real” librarians, those in charge? They would no more notice a lowly undergraduate than a gnat.

I spent little time there; it was not a place to linger, and the music library (where I later became one of those busy work-study students) was on the other campus. But I still dream of that place sometimes, usually in one of my frantic-search-for-something dreams. And I found one little corner that I liked. It was the Classical Studies collection, which was in the furthest corner of a sub-basement with utilitarian metal shelving, and at the end of some of the rows against the wall, small metal desks and chairs of (probably) World War II vintage. It was a good place to get away from everyone, for almost no one ever visited these old books, row upon row of them in Latin and Greek, with more scholarly commentaries than there were primary texts, and shelves full of journals, covered with years of dust. I hope they haven’t been consigned to a landfill, for we might still need what is in these dusty old books.

In later years, I used to visit another small town Appalachian library, the only one in the county. It was on the ground floor of what had once been a bank, and had more enthusiasm and space than money or books. Despite their limits, they served as the cultural focus for the county in many and creative ways, which were lost on most of the people in the community. But it was a haven for the score or so of us who cared about books and ideas. When I moved away from that county, I donated most of my books to them, including some that I wish I had kept.

My graduate school was strictly a music school, with an excellent (if specialized) library, clean and modern and efficient, and the finest reference librarian I have encountered. She is retired now, and I still see her at Hymn Society conventions. As always with every library since my first, I lacked the time to do more than sample the riches that were in the collection -- the tall bound volumes indexed in Historical Collections and Monuments of Music -- things like the Denkmäler Deutscher Tonkunst or Tudor Church Music, or the collected works of Beethoven, and Bach, and Mozart, and Haydn, and pretty much anyone else that would come to mind. I remember one fine spring day, my exams complete, every paper submitted, my degree work complete, when I spent the entire day there, browsing. It was heavenly.

Later still, there was yet another small town. Its library was a fine Victorian mansion, donated to the town some years before. The large central reading room on the ground floor, with newspapers and other periodicals, had comfortable high wingbacked chairs. One could settle in with a magazine or book and read for hours, with the tall windows, their glass wavy with age, overlooking a flower garden and tree-shaded lawns sloping down to the river. It was on the way home from work, and I stopped there almost every day to read the news, both in print and online. For they had computers, two of them, with Internet connections, something we did not have at home or at the church.

This library was an unmatched place to browse, for the collection was divided up into the many rooms of the old house, all with their tall windows and wide windowsills. One room that was perhaps unique was what the librarians called the “Little Boys’ Room.” It was in the basement, and housed books that had been bequeathed by an engineer in the town and maintained as a special collection in his honor. I loved it: a whole room of books on science and technology, with special emphasis on architecture, boat-building, automobiles, motorcycles, airplanes, and space travel.

Nowadays, I have cards for two libraries. The one close to the church is larger and has an excellent collection; the one in the nearby town where I live is friendlier. I love that place, and wish I could spend days there. It is filled with comfortable places to read or work; there is a little cafe right there, and a natural-foods cooperative five minutes’ walk away with excellent sandwiches. It is a sufficient collection with pretty much anything I would want -- and if it doesn’t have it, I can try the larger library by the church.

Finally, there is our own library at home, or I should say two libraries -- for my office at the church is more library than office. At home, my wife and I each have our own desks, both of which she made. Hers is a genuinely fine piece of furniture; mine is smaller and utilitarian, but still, being from her hand, priceless to me. There are plenty of books within reach without rising from my chair, and my computer (on which I write most of these Music Box essays) is to the right. There is almost always a cat nearby -- as I write, she is sleeping on the cherry chest to my left. There is a fine view of the sky, and all the comforts of home are close at hand.

Most of all, there are books. Many of these books are my old friends -- though there are, when I think about it, far too many books that I own but have not yet read, probably more than I can ever read. I still want to read them just as much as the day I bought them, but other things have taken precedence.

The books overflow the library into the front room, where the Harvard Classics reside next to my rocking chair. They came into my life after college where I bought the whole (incomplete and somewhat battered) set at a Planned Parenthood booksale. For the years that followed, they were the core of my “collection.” My wife made a bookcase out of scrap wood specifically to fit them, along with my Classics Club volumes. That was a mail-order book club to which I subscribed in the late 1970’s; every two months brought a shipment of two volumes until the set was complete, and at the outset one selected which volumes were desired. I used it to fill in the gaps in the Harvard set. I got behind on the Classics Club books, and still have not quite read them all (six remain, all of them nineteenth century novels), but I did make it through the Harvard Classics and know them well enough to find what I want in them readily enough.

Every good book, even the non-fiction books on technical subjects (such as Strong’s Concordance, mentioned a few weeks ago), takes its reader into its own universe. It may be the world of King David and Asaph and the Sons of Korah which one enters through their language, or (to name a few titles within reach) Marcus Aurelius, or Anton Bruckner (a biography), or Aesop’s Fables, or the Army of Northern Virginia (“Lee’s Lieutenants” by Douglas Southall Freeman, the companion volume to his biography of R.E.L.) and the wider scenes of that conflict (Shelby Foote’s three-volume history, “Civil War”), or A Field Guide to Trees and Shrubs, or the Federalist Papers, or T. S. Eliot, or the fictional land of Chalion, with Cazaril and the Five Gods (Lois McMaster Bujold, with Miles Vorkosigan and his friends beside the Chalion books), or Flatland, or the Catechism of the Catholic Church, or The Food and Drink of Mexico.

In some respects, books make civilization possible. And disdain for books hastens its decline. This puts librarians, along with booksellers, readers, and others who love books, on the front lines.

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

A prayer for Rosh Hashonah

Hidden from our sight are the events of the future.
But we trust in Thee and fear not.
Open unto us in mercy the portals of the new year,
and grant us life and health,
contentment and peace.
Amen.

(from the Evening Service; it is followed by Psalm 90: Lord, thou hast been our refuge from one generation to another...)

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

St. Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist

I do not have time to write at length about St. Matthew, whose feast is today. Instead, I will but mention my favorite passages from his Gospel:

Chapter 1: “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” The wording of this first verse echoes the great histories and lineages of the First Book of Moses: Gen. 5:1 - “This is the book of the generations of Adam...”; 10:1 - “Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah...”; 25:19 - “And these are the generations of Isaac, Abraham's son: Abraham begat Isaac.” [What a remarkable “book of generations” that is: just that one verse, that one son of promise]; 36:1 - “Now these are the generations of Easu, who is Edom...”; 37:2 - “These are the generations of Jacob.” As if it were not enough to establish Jesus Christ as “the son of David, the son of Abraham,” heir to the promises given to these two friends of God, and legal heir of the throne of David (by the royal lineage, unlike St. Luke's genealogy), we have the second half of the chapter: “Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise...” It is brief, only seven verses (plus the subsequent action in Chapter 2), and magnificent.

The Sermon on the Mount (Chapters 5-7): This is, perhaps, the “stump speech” of our Lord, reflective of his teachings in village after village. There is nothing better to say about it than what St. Matthew writes at the end: “And it came to pass, when Jesus had ended these saying, the people were astonished at his doctrine: for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.” (7:28-29)

The Parables (Chapter 13): When I was twelve years old, my neighbor friends Keith and Darrell drug me along to the Vacation Bible School at their church. The school that week was based on the parables (these, plus the Good Samaritan from St. Luke). I had never heard anything like this, and by the grace of God these parables brought me to repentance and conversion, with baptism following a few weeks later. “I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see.” As the years have passed, these little stories have taken on increasingly great meaning for me, and are windows into the kingdom, awakening the holy desire for its fulfillment. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.”

More Parables (Chapter 25): These are more frightening, in their warnings to “Watch... for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh” (v. 13). I have special affection for the first of these parables because of the hymn Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme.

The end of the Sabbath (Chapter 28): This passage is appointed as the Gospel for the Great Vigil of Easter. I look forward each year to its majesty as the fitting climax to that greatest of all liturgies, as well as the final word of promise:

“... and lo, I am with you alway even unto the end of the world. Amen.”

The Collect of the Day:

We thank thee, heavenly Father, for the witness of thine apostle and evangelist Matthew to the Gospel of thy Son our Savior; and we pray that, after his example, we may with ready wills and hearts obey the calling of our Lord to follow him; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.


Afterword:

I would be remiss were I to overlook the St. Matthew Passion setting by J. S. Bach. As I grow older, I have more of a love for the St. John Passion, especially its final sections, but my astonishment at the St. Matthew Passion is greater, especially in the use of the Passion Chorale and other chorales, always at precisely the right moment in the story, and most of all in the opening, Kommt, ihr Töchter, for triple chorus. Even by Bach's standards, it would be hard to name any passage more astonishing than this.

Sunday, September 18, 2011

The Planning Cycle, and some Messiaen

Selection of music is a major part of the church musician's work. Most of us muddle through a week at a time, and this can be done effectively (e.g.: J. S. Bach in Leipzig, when he was composing a new Cantata every week). I have done too much of that lately, and not at the level achieved by JSB. It is hard to maintain a suitable overview of the Story when looking at it one week at a time; I do much better when I can plan a larger chunk of the year at one time, perhaps spread over several weeks. I must do this with the choral music, and ought to do so with the hymnody and organ voluntaries.

The “planning cycle,” as I call it, is so large a task that it can become paralyzing. All told, it accounts for several hundred hours of work each year. I think that this is one reason many church musicians have trouble addressing it in a healthy manner. The best way to tackle a large project of this sort is to break it into a number of smaller tasks. I have a list of these tasks on my computer: it is a nineteen-step process, with several of the steps being sizable in their own right, such as Number Nine: Plan the Eucharistic Psalms for the year; or Number Seventeen: Select the organ voluntaries for the Eucharistic services.

This last is a task I prefer to tackle in the summer, when I can try things out on the piano outside my office door. It is, in my view, less important by far than establishing good selections of choral music and hymns, and it cannot be done until both are in place, for most often the voluntaries are based on the hymns of the day. Thus, I have muddled through most of the current liturgical year, rarely getting more than a few weeks ahead on the voluntaries.

But after about six hours on the task this weekend, it is done! Not only that, but I have completed the final two short steps in the overall planning cycle, and it, likewise, is done, right through Christ the King 2011, some two months from now. I should have been to this point on the 2010-11 season a year ago and should instead be finishing up 2011-12 by now, but I nonetheless rejoice in getting as far as I have.

I am excited about many things that are coming up in these remaining two months, and have two large tasks before me at the organ:

Nov. 6: Fantasia on Sine Nomine, by Craig Phillips. This was commissioned for the retirement of my friend D.D. several years ago, and is a terrific piece, intended for a much larger instrument than our Pilcher. But I think that it will work. I have done nothing on it yet.

Nov. 23: Toccata and Fugue in F (BWV 540), J. S. Bach. I played this several times in the 1990's, but it needs to be carefully re-fingered, and I have not played it on a mechanical action instrument. It is time to do so, for it is one of the glories of the organ repertoire.

Looming ahead are three more challenges:

For the Advent Evensong: Partita on Nun komm der Heiden Heiland, by Hugo Distler. I have played most of Distler's organ music, but not this one. I ordered a copy of the score, and it arrived this past week.

For the Lenten Recitals at the Congregational Church:
Variations on Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, by Franz Liszt. I have never played any of the large-scale organ works of Liszt, and it is time to remedy that. This will involve some significant technical work, and I hope that I am up to the challenge. I have a battered old copy in the edition prepared by Marcel Dupré, complete with his printed fingerings. I have gone through and checked them, making revisions to fit my hands, and have this one ready for registration and its First Workout. I hoped to get that done in August, but it did not happen.

The Dupré edition of Bach is notorious, because his fingerings represent a style of playing that is no longer in vogue. But I have found his fingerings of the Liszt enormously helpful, and left about ninety percent of them in place.

Further ahead: one of the three large-scale movements that I have not yet learned from the Livre du Saint-Sacrement of Messiaen: L'apparition du Christ ressucité à Marie-Madeleine. This is a sprawling eighteen-page piece that may leave people scratching their heads when (Lord willing) I play it as the postlude for Easter Day. Much of it is is pianissimo, though it works up to a four-page toccata-like passage at full organ before a quiet ending on a long-held pianisssimo C major chord that makes me think of St. Julian's famous line: "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." With Christ risen from the dead, all shall indeed be well, forever. The final bars of this movement, a few quiet chords played "trés lent," express this in music about as well as can be imagined.

I would love to play the entire Livre in concert. It might be possible on the Casavant at the Congregational Church; I do not think that our Pilcher could carry it off, though I have played many of the individual movements on it.

I attended the first performance of this work at the AGO National Convention in Detroit: 3 July 1986. The performance of this piece, with Messiaen in attendance, was the reason I got in my rusty pickup truck and drove to Detroit for the convention, the only AGO National that I have attended. To some degree, it left the audience of organists in a muddle; I loved it, but I heard a good bit of scorn heaped on it in the conversations afterwards. That causes me to think that, were I to play the thing, all eighteen movements and 165 pages of it, an audience of (mostly) non-organists might not be receptive. It is not a piece that reveals its secrets immediately. But for those “with ears to hear,” the Livre is a spiritual journey like no other. It needed better program notes than it had in Detroit, and I think that I could write them, giving people a better window into the music.

Such a project is tangential to my duty, and will probably not happen. But I can at least play the movements individually on occasions when they fit the liturgy. I thought that this would be the way the piece would become established, as has happened with La Nativité du Christ and some of the other Messiaen cycles. But I do not think that there are many organists who play anything from the Livre. They ought to; many of the movements are not difficult, and are highly effective.

This evening, I celebrate the completion of the planning cycle. Tomorrow is a day at home for errands and shopping, and (hopefully) lots of time outdoors, for it is supposed to be a fine sunny day. Tuesday, it will be time to dig in and try to bring some of these ideas into reality. And next weekend, I had better start on 2011-12.

Friday, September 16, 2011

RSCM 2010 revisited

Weezer posted this YouTube clip, from last year's RSCM course:

Kyrie, from Messe Solennelle (L. Vierne)

That, my friends, would be us. In that place. Singing.
Soli Deo gloria.

Here is an account of one aspect of that day. Listening to the recording brings back the sound of Jenna, Kyle, and Meara singing beside me that morning on the risers “with spirit, excellent diction, musical phrasing, and tone so beautiful as to melt my heart.” And Laura, in her first Course since her auto accident. And Mike, Mark and Spencer in the row behind me on tenor. And the fine elderly Roman Catholic African-American brother in the parking lot afterwards, chatting with Judith and me about our Lord and our Blessed Virgin Mary and how good it was to be Christians together.

And myself, singing Alto (I am in the back row in the picture). I do not expect that I will do that again, for in the year since that course, I find that I can no longer reliably sing alto for extended periods. I hinted at this in the passage linked above, for my voice was pretty much gone by Evensong that day in 2010. Between then and the 2011 Course, I made an effort to sing the Daily Office in my alto voice, and to work on it in my daily vocal warmups. But it got worse instead of better, and I believe that it is the result of old age. I was glad that there were strong female altos at this year's course to carry the load, and glad to sing tenor.

I will be sixty in a few years. I wonder how many RSCM Courses I have left wherein I can be a contributor and not a burden. I hope I have the sense to step aside when the time comes.

But that time is, Lord willing, not yet.
O God, you have taught me since I was young, *
and to this day I tell of your wonderful works.

And now that I am old and gray-headed, O God, do not forsake me, *
till I make known your strength to this generation
and your power to all who are to come. (Psalm 71:17-18)

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Where were you on 9/11?

I was on the organ bench. It was a fine September morning, and I remember starting the work day full of energy. The secretary came in and told me what had happened, and shortly after my wife called.

It became clear that we needed to have a church service that evening. Our priest in residence, Fr. Sanderson, organized a simple service of Evening Prayer and we posted it on the website. Quite a few people came. I played the organ arrangement of Barber's “Adagio for Strings,” and we sang a couple of hymns.

This last came back to me with remarkable force when I sat down a fortnight ago to begin preparing one of them, “America the Beautiful.” As soon as I opened the hymnal, I was carried back to that evening.

One of our parishioners suggested we sing “America the Beautiful” in this morning's Eucharist. For reasons I won't describe, we sang it last Sunday instead of today. There is a former State Senator in our congregation, a veteran of many political battles. After the service last Sunday, she told me that she has probably heard and sung the song hundreds of times, but that day, hearing the congregation sing it, she could not sing for the tears.

Today, we sang no patriotic hymns. But for the postlude after the contemporary service, I played a long introduction and slipped quietly into “My country, 'tis of Thee.” One of the ladies on duty for Altar Guild stopped what she was doing and listened, obviously in prayer. When I finished, she reminded me that we had sung that hymn ten years ago at that little evening service. She remembered the gist of Fr. Sanderson's sermon, as did I.

Our youth choir sang at today's contemporary service. Most of them have lived their whole lives under the shadow of 9/11 and its aftermath. My prayers this day were mainly for them:

“Save us from the time of trial, and deliver us from evil...”

Sunday, August 28, 2011

Small Planet

Diet for a Small Planet (Frances Moore Lappé)
Recipes for a Small Planet (Ellen Buchman Ewald)
The Book of Whole Grains (Marlene Anne Bumgarner)
The Limits to Growth (Meadows, Meadows, Randers, Behrens)

It seems that we have entered an age of revolution. Across Africa and the Middle East, regimes that have been stable for decades are tottering. Others may follow, including some of the democracies of Europe.

In the case of Egypt, the spark for revolution was not primarily ideological. Alongside the lack of decent employment, it was the lack of affordable food, especially grains, brought on by poor harvests in places thousands of miles away. Egypt, one of the cradles of agricultural civilization, cannot feed itself. Mr. Mubarak’s regime is gone now, but that is not going to change the underlying problem of food scarcity. What will happen when people find that the new government cannot feed them any better than the old? History gives many examples of newborn governments that begin in freedom and end with a Napoleon or Hitler.

And that brings me to a trio of cookbooks. I read Diet for a Small Planet and its companion Recipes for a Small Planet back in the 1970’s, and they convinced me that I should stop eating meat. Nothing in the thirty-plus years since has changed this conviction. These books introduced me to the idea of protein complimentarity which makes a vegetarian diet feasible -- indeed, healthier than a diet based on large quantities of meat. But the vegetarian diet is not primarily about health; it is about food for hungry people. After writing Diet, Ms. Lappé wrote other books, such as Food First, and has become increasingly involved in the politics of food. Why does a steer destined for McDonald’s Happy Meals rate higher in the world’s values than a hungry child on the streets of a third-world city?

Eating meat is not in itself evil. Meat is part of the natural human diet, and a gift from God. Animal husbandry is an essential part of a balanced farmstead. Cattle, goats, sheep, pigs, chickens -- they all have their place. If one has a brush-covered steep hillside, the best thing to do with it is probably to put goats on it. And if you want to establish a garden on an unpromising and weed-choked plot, there is nothing better than to put some pigs on it for a year or two. They will “till” the ground, dig up and eat every weed, and lavishly manure it for you. In the meantime, these animals are turning plant matter that humans cannot eat into high-quality protein-rich food.

The problem is that this is not how modern industrial agriculture raises meat animals. Instead of getting their food from sources unusable by humans, they are kept in confinement and fed grain, lots of it. In Diet, Ms. Lappé asks her readers to pretend that they are seated in a restaurant, eating an eight-ounce steak -- and “appreciat[ing] that the grain used to produce the steak could have filled the empty bowls of forty people in the room.” The steak is expensive not only in the eight pounds of grain and soy feed that went into the half-pound of steak, but in the fossil fuel that is the lifeblood of agribusiness. “Each calorie of protein we get from feedlot-produced beef costs seventy-eight calories of fossil fuel” in the form of ammonia-based fertilizers, processing, and transportation costs. By comparison, one calorie of protein from soybeans costs two calories of fossil fuel.

So, why is that third-world child hungry? In the poorer parts of the world, the agricultural land is mostly owned by a handful of people. For them, the most lucrative use of the land is often to grow feed grains, which are fed to cattle for the tables of the well-to-do in their own country, or in Europe, North America, and (increasingly) China. If not feed grains, then it is luxury vegetables or flowers to be shipped to the Northern Hemisphere where they are out of season. I have spoken with people who have visited the small African country of Swaziland, a desperately poor country. There are fields surrounded by high fences with razor wire on top, their production destined for tables in Europe (either directly or in the form of meat) while the bulk of the local population goes hungry. They cannot afford to buy what is grown in those fields. Such scenes are increasingly common in Central and Latin America and across Africa.

Lacking the means and land for even subsistence farming, people flock to the cities. In the cities of the Third World, they often find themselves without work, dependent on subsidized food -- like the bread that is the staple in Cairo, for many years available in the bread shops at a fixed price, kept that way by government subsidies and price controls.

But as population grows and food becomes more expensive (driven in part by the price of fossil fuel), it becomes harder for the governments to maintain the food subsidies. They might try raising the prices, as was done in Egypt, and eventually, a breaking point is reached.

I am not strict in my rejection of meat. In part, this is because it makes little difference in these matters that I eat tofu instead of hamburger. Others will more than make up for my economy with their wastefulness. Nonetheless, as little as this gesture is, it is a step in a better direction.


Diet for a Small Planet outlines Ms. Lappé’s journey to a vegetarian diet, the nutritional background that makes it possible, and the way to change one’s own diet in a more sustainable direction. It includes some recipes, but she admits that this was not her strength. Instead, it was her friend Ellen Ewald who interpreted protein complimentarity into tasty recipes which began a whole tradition of what some called “hippie food,” rich in lentils and legumes and whole grains and fresh vegetables and a far cry from “meat and potatoes.” There are many cookbooks that have gone far beyond Ms. Ewald, but she was a pioneer and her book retains a place of honor in our kitchen.

From Frances Lappé’s preface to Recipes for a Small Planet:
In my head I knew which plants were protein-rich and which combinations of non-meat foods create the highest quality protein. But was this alternative practical in the kitchen? Luckily for me, I knew Ellen Ewald.

She not only proved that the possibilities were practically infinite, but that they ... represented in fact a practical means of living daily in closer harmony with the earth’s capacities to provide for the entire human family. (page ix)

One of the successors to the “Small Planet” books of the early 1970’s is The Book of Whole Grains (Marlene Anne Bumgarner, 1976). It is a book I return to regularly for its recipes, and for its window into the world of natural food. It is primarily a recipe book, organized by grains: wheat, oats, rye, triticale, buckwheat, barley, corn, rice, millet, sorghum. It includes as well chapters on nuts and seeds, dried peas and beans, for they are essential to the vegetarian diet. For each grain or legume, she includes an outline of its history as a food source, its strengths and weaknesses, and its cultivation – including how to grow it yourself in your garden, store it, and prepare it. There is an appendix describing the equipment that is useful in a vegetarian whole-foods kitchen, with tables of amino acid composition and nutritional values. And the recipes are terrific.

I enjoy these three books, but I must include one more that I have not enjoyed at all: The Limits to Growth (Meadows, Meadows, Randers, Behrens, as a project of the “Club of Rome,” 1972). Ridiculed from the day it appeared, it presented the idea that the exponential growth upon which our economy is based cannot continue for ever. It is worth quoting their conclusions at length:
1. If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.
2. It is possible to alter these growth trends and to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustainable far into the future. The state of global equilibrium could be designed so that the basic material needs of each person on earth are satisfied and each person has an equal opportunity to realize his individual human potential.
3. If the world’s people decide to strive for this second outcome rather than the first, the sooner they begin working to attain it, the greater will be their chance of success. (p. 29)

That was 1972. Almost forty years have passed, and the implications of their third conclusion loom larger each year: “the sooner they begin working to attain it, the greater will be their chance of success.” It seems to me that the “condition of ecological and economic stability” is no longer attainable. Even if it were, the political consensus to make the hard decisions that would be needed is lacking.

Most of the ridicule aimed at this book focused on the authors' computer models, which attempted to predict likely outcomes given a variety of scenarios. The baseline scenario of continuing as we were in 1970 leads to a collapse in the mid-twenty-first century. They ran other models in which variables were changed – for example, what if the resource base were doubled through new discoveries? What if population magically stabilized at its 1970 level?

Criticisms of these models and the book's conclusions tend to fall into these categories:

“Technology will find a way.” Petroleum exploration and extraction, for example, are continually improving in their efficiency, if environmental costs are overlooked. We will always be able to find all the petroleum we need (so the argument goes). If it becomes scarce, the higher market demand will lead to technological improvements until the scarcity is relieved, or a substitute is developed. This seems to me a misplaced “faith-based” reliance on the false god, Progress. The universe does not have to provide us with a fix just because we want it.

“If we run out of (x), we will use (y).” If (continuing with the example of petroleum) we really run out, we will drive electric cars. Or fusion-powered cars. Or something. The thought of not driving at all does not enter the American mind. But (y) will have costs of its own, and will likely be less efficient and more expensive than (x). For example, we could all drive electric cars -- if the vast infrastructure of the internal combustion engine were replaced by an equally vast infrastructure to generate and distribute the electricity that would be needed, including “powering” stations in every place where we now have gas stations. At that scale, such electricity would have to come primarily from coal and nuclear sources, which present problems of their own and likewise depend on non-renewable resources.

“Environmentalists will have to make way for the realities of life.” In this argument, we need not worry about the environmental costs of resource extraction to maintain our standard of living (e.g., the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, mountaintop removal strip mining, ecological costs of shale-gas extraction, global warming, extinction of species). Such things are unfortunate, but they are the price we must pay. The authors of Limits argued that the environmental costs would, in such a scenario, catch up with us eventually, primarily through the food chain. If the environment is sufficiently degraded, the agricultural lands of the world could reach a point where they would no longer produce enough food, and widespread starvation would result. This would most likely happen in a sudden, non-linear way rather than gradually over many years. The world’s system of food production and distribution is more fragile than most of us would like to think.

“I’ve got mine and I don’t care about anyone else. We’ve earned the right to what we have, and we have the guns to protect it.” Or, as a leader of the previous administration said, “The American way of life is not negotiable.” The developed world may be able to maintain its hold on the majority of the world’s resources for a while, perhaps for decades. It will require increasing levels of violence to do so, and is unlikely, in the end, to be successful. And it fits right into the predictions of this book: nothing brings on a “sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity” like a good, protracted war.

“God will take care of us. Jesus will come back before we run out of everything, snap His fingers, and make everything all right.” If one is using religious arguments, one must consider our stewardship responsibilities, and the One before whom we shall stand at the Day of Doom. That thought alone should be enough to press us toward a more responsible way of life. As for God sparing us from catastrophe brought on by our own actions, that does not fit with the revelation of Scripture. “It is written: thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.”

The most important argument of Limits is not about the individual problems, such as resource scarcity, overpopulation, or environmental degradation. Rather, it is the likelihood that all of these bitter fruits will ripen at the same time, and their combination will make it impossible to work around any of them.

If I were to find fault with Limits, I believe that they underestimated the importance of petroleum and natural gas to our situation. To a larger degree than was apparent in 1972, our prosperity since the Industrial Revolution has been the result of easily available energy. It appears likely that a combination of the increasing difficulty of fueling our machines and the environmental consequences of doing so will be our undoing. Further, the authors were overly optimistic that the peoples of the earth, especially their political leaders, would act rationally and with foresight. The past forty years have not been encouraging in this regard.


While we must not use the argument I just described (“God will bail us out”) as an excuse to do nothing, neither can we forget that God is capable of anything. It may be that the God who spared Ninevah might spare us.

Or it may be that most of the world’s population will die horribly in the next fifty years from war, famine, and disease, and that those few who survive will face lives that are “nasty, brutish, and short,” with little left on this planet to sustain them. I grieve at this prospect, most of all for the children in the choir I direct and other children like them around the world, who will likely be the generation that bears the brunt of the collapse.

But, no matter how dark it gets, they will find that God is still with them. The record of Scripture, and the broader record of history and the testimony of the saints, bears this out.

Prayer would be in order, along with amendment of life. The kitchen and the grocery store are places to start.
We humbly beseech thee, O Father, mercifully to look upon our infirmities; and, for the glory of thy Name, turn from us all those evils that we most justly have deserved; and grant that in all our troubles we may put our whole trust and confidence in thy mercy, and evermore serve thee in holiness and pureness of living, to thy honor and glory; through our only Mediator and Advocate, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (BCP p. 154)