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)

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Strong's Concordance

I use the Strong's Concordance intensively. I love this book. But it was not until today – a few moments ago, as I was composing my article for the church newsletter – that I noticed the Hebrew and Greek Dictionaries in the back. The Greek is of little use to me, but the Hebrew ... My goodness, what a wonderful thing this is!!! I am almost jumping up and down with excitement over it. With the numbers as cross-reference between the main body of the Concordance and the Hebrew Dictionary, one can easily work from the English text, hunt up the Hebrew word behind said text, get a brief definition and etymology, and if desired go from there to Brown-Driver-Briggs for more detail. As Dr. Strong writes in the introduction: “By observing the subjoined directions, in the associated use of the Main Concordance, the reader will have substantially a Concordance-Dictionary of the Authorized Version and the Hebrew Bible.”

Wow!!!!

The Wikipedia article on Strong's cautions the reader that "Strong's Concordance is not a translation of the Bible nor is it intended as a translation tool. The use of Strong's numbers is not a substitute for professional translation of the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into English by those with formal training in ancient languages and the literature of the cultures in which the Bible was written."

In other words, people like me ought to leave it to the pros. But we can't let them have all the fun. Besides, such an attitude represents the increasing specialization of academia. Regular people are not supposed to do anything except amuse themselves on Facebook and YouTube; anything with substance should be left for the people with academic training in the subject. Bah!!!!

I am adding Strong's to my sidebar in the Music Box as a favorite book. And while I am raving over it, I might as well quote the title page in full. I wish I could duplicate the typography; they don't print title pages like this nowadays.

The Exhaustive Concordance of THE BIBLE:
Showing every word of the text of the common English version of the canonical books,
and every occurrence of each word in regular order;
together with a
KEY-WORD COMPARISON
of selected words and phrases
in the KING JAMES VERSION
with five leading contemporary translations
also brief Dictionaries of the Hebrew and Greek Words of the original,
with references to the English words:
by James Strong, S.T.D., LL.D.



Sunday, August 14, 2011

The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Tonight is the eve of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which Anglicans usually refer to as the Feast of Saint Mary the Virgin. It is a high and holy day.

The old office hymns for the Blessed Virgin Mary are the most beautiful of the entire Gregorian repertoire. It is, I think, because these old saints loved her so much. Here are some of my favorites:

Ave, maris Stella
Salve, Regina
Quem terra, pontus, aethera
Ave, Regina coelorum
Regina coeli
and most of all, Ave Maria

The BCP service of Compline omits the Marian hymn that ought to follow the Nunc Dimittis and its antiphon. I find it proper to end the day with thoughts of Our Lady, who looks upon her children around the world with the love of a mother, so I add it back in. I do not know the seasonal hymns by heart and I usually do Compline from memory, so I most often do the Ave Maria instead. And that suffices.

May the blessings and prayers of the Mother of God be with us all this night, and always.

Friday, August 12, 2011

RSCM Report 2011: Part Three

Sunday, July 31, and Afterword

Most of my organ practice this week was on the little Wicks instrument in the St. Cecilia chapel. Most often, this was after evensong and the nightly staff meeting. I played on the little Gemshorn 8' with the swell shades closed to avoid disturbing the adults in the adjacent house, and I will carry good memories of this work in the quiet darkness.

I played the closing hymn and postlude for the Mass at Grace Church in the morning: “Guide me, O thou great Jehovah,” and the St. Anne Fugue of Bach. Playing the organ for the course fulfilled a dream. But the responsibility, even in small measure as it was, left me emotionally detached from the music in comparison with other years. The experience was more akin to normal Sundays at home with organ and choir -- fulfilling, in that I am doing the work for which God made me, but with the balance tilted more toward mind than heart.

That is, until the choir -- these choristers, my friends young and old -- launched into the hymn. To be at the organ supporting their sound was sublime.

Evensong was at the Cathedral. The floor of the nave was cool, as it had been on Tuesday; the choir gallery was sultry. As one ascended the stairs, the temperature gradient was some fifteen or twenty degrees. I had the prelude and opening hymn, along with one of the anthems, so I climbed the steps some twenty minutes before the service to prepare. That gave me time to do a silent play-through of the Howells prelude, which significantly improved the results. At the stroke of 4:00, on cue from Br. Vincent, I began the Howells. I then watched from my perch as the choir sang “Bawo, thixo somandla” down front [unlike the other musical links in this and the previous post, this one is our group, the RSCM 2011 Course].

And it was time for the hymn: “O love, how deep, how broad, how high” (Deus tuorum militum). It was this hymn that chiefly occupied me through the week. A long interlude was needed to allow the choir to mount the steps and wriggle into the crowded gallery. The text presented a logical break after stanza four, so I planned to go from B flat Major into G Dorian, leading to C Major for the final two stanzas. I wanted it to be good. In rehearsal, it was not; I lost track of which manuals I was on, playing loud ugly chords on the big solo trumpet. But in the service, it went fine, as did the anthem. There was a shaky moment near the end, but we held it together.

I found my place in the corner of the choir with the other tenors. We were crowded into the back row and the corner; it was great. My favorite of the music that we sang was the Peter Klatzow Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis.


The service nearly complete, we went downstairs to sing the Victoria from the rear of the nave, blissfully cool. Then, we processed to the front during the concluding hymn, “Love divine, all loves excelling,” to the tune Blaenwern with Brother Vincent at the organ. As it happened, I was in procession behind Meredith and beside Mike W. In such company, the balance shifted from mind to heart. By the final stanza, I was unable to sing. I was not alone in this; I think the congregation carried the hymn more than the choir.

I should speak of Mr. Garmon Ashby, our music director. He was outstanding in a quiet, steady, disciplined manner very different from last year’s director, Simon Lole. Most of what I know about choral singing has come from these Courses and their directors; I learned much this week from Mr. Ashby and his rehearsals that I hope I can apply at home.

There were many new choristers and adults this year, the largest group coming from the Cathedral of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Dallas, Texas. I had the privilege of travelling with them to the local Roman Catholic parish for the Saturday Vigil Mass, where I accompanied their anthem. It was a delightful nineteenth-century German Catholic edifice with a little pipe organ and a Clavinova keyboard in the rear gallery, both equipped with boom microphones for the organist/cantor, an energetic young man obviously in love with his work.

And there were old friends: choristers who have grown up remarkably since last summer, and the adults who staff the course, from Mr. B. and Br. Vincent, “Miz Deb,” and Debra, Weezer, Michael, and H.J., to our own Meredith and Jennifer, who were the girls’ proctors and whom I remember as little girls themselves. These people are my family (cf. St. Mark 3:33-35).

But I have family at home, too. As I revise this essay for posting a week later, Vacation Bible School is concluding in our parish. I am not involved in it this year, but I attended the closing ceremonies on Friday. These children of the parish and their parents, the adult choristers, the people in the congregation who sing the songs and hymns – they are my family, too. Some of them told me that they were looking forward to rehearsals in a few weeks.

So am I.

Sunday, August 7, 2011

RSCM Report 2011: Part Two

Thursday, July 29

An imaginary Sermon, for Holy Eucharist at the Chapel of St. Cecilia: the feast of Bach, Handel, and Purcell

II Chronicles 7:1-6 (I would suggest 5:11-14 as a superior alternative)

Psalm 150 (at the Eucharist this day we sang Psalm 17 instead, since that is what we were learning for Sunday. But Psalm 150 is certainly appropriate)

Colossians 2:2-6 (this has no connection whatsoever with the feast. Might it be a misprint in the publication "Holy Men, Holy Women" for Colossians 3:12-16? That passage would be a good choice – “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.”)

Luke 2:8-14 (“And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night...” As the preacher for our Eucharist noted in his [real, not imaginary] sermon, Handel set these verses memorably in “Messiah.” I would add that Bach's treatment of this passage in the Christmas Oratorio is equally notable.)

Collect of the Day:
Almighty God, beautiful in majesty and majestic in holiness, who dost teach us in Holy Scripture to sing thy praises and who gavest thy musicians Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frederick Handel and Henry Purcell grace to show forth thy glory in their music: Be with all those who write or make music for thy people, that we on earth may glimpse thy beauty and know the inexhaustible riches of thy new creation in Jesus Christ our Savior; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.



-------------------
On the twenty-eighth of July 1750, J. S. Bach departed this life, busy with his work to the end. In his final days, he completed the organ chorale Vor deinen Thron tret’ ich, “Before Thy throne I stand,” dictating the last page of it to his son-in-law, his hands too weak to hold the ink pen. It is a fair statement of his frame of mind as he approached death, having poured out his sixty-five years of life in music for the glory of God. Jesu, juva, “Jesus, help!” he wrote at the head of most of his manuscripts, and Soli Deo gloria, “To God alone be glory,” at the end.

[here, play the Chorale]
Before thy throne, my God, I stand,
Myself, my all, are in thy hand.
O show me thine approving face,
Nor from thy child withhold thy grace.

In the Episcopal sanctoral calendar, Bach is joined today with Handel and Purcell. Much could be said about Handel, the composer of "Messiah" and "Israel in Egypt," and about Purcell, the young organist, dead before the age of forty and buried next to his instrument in Westminster Abbey among poets and kings, perhaps the finest composer Great Britain has produced since Thomas Tallis. Purcell’s tune Westminster Abbey, drawn from one of his Anthems, was sung last fall when Pope and Archbishop visited the Abbey for Choral Evensong:

[here, play a stanza of the hymn: number 518 in the Hymnal 1982 -- “Christ is made the sure foundation”]

Many of us in this room are Protestant or Anglican, like Bach, Handel, and Purcell. Many are Roman Catholic, alongside Tomás Luis da Victoria, composer of our Anthem this morning:

Gaudent in coelis animae sanctorum,
qui Christi vestigia sunt secuti:
et quia pro ejus amore sanguinem suum fuderunt,
ideo cum Christo exsultant sine fine.

The souls of the saints rejoice in heaven,
whom Christ's footsteps have followed:
and, because for love of him they shed their blood,
therefore with Christ they will rejoice without end.

[Link to a performance of this motet]


Today is not just about Bach, Handel and Purcell. It is about Victoria, who spent his life in church music. He was a choirboy, adult chorister, organist, priest, and spent most of his adult life as chaplain and choirmaster for a convent, busily writing motets, Mass settings, and other choral music, like what we will sing in a few minutes. He is generally considered the greatest Spanish composer, and all of his work -- indeed, all of his life -- was about singing to God. It is four hundred years ago this month that he died: August 20, 1611.

Today is about dozens of other composers of faith, from those of our own time back through Messiaen, Franck, Bruckner, and Mendelssohn (whose work we are singing this week), and on through Joseph Haydn, who began each day’s compositional work on his knees in prayer, and Antonio Vivaldi, the “Red Priest” who, for the benefit of the girls in the orphanage where he served, wrote music for stringed instruments that continues to soar into the heavens. Further still we could go, through Heinrich Schütz and the masters of the Renaissance and Middle Ages, and the anonymous composers who crafted the repertoire of Gregorian Chant in the early generations of the Church.

And it is about composers whose faith is known to God alone, people who, on the surface, seemed agnostic or at the least uninterested in religion, but in their music showed their true colors. Who can hear or sing the Missa Solemnis of Beethoven, or Ave Verum Corpus of Mozart, or the anthem “Lord, thou hast been our refuge” by Vaughan Williams, and doubt their faith?

We are here this week: Roman Catholic, Methodist, Episcopalian, perhaps other faith traditions. I know that many of you are people of deep faith, thoroughly involved in your congregations at home. I suspect that others of you would tell me that you do not believe; you are here for the music and your friends. But this week, we sing, and that transcends all divisions. Latin, English, Xhosa, German -- all are languages of Music, as indeed is every language ever spoken on this planet. Young and old, Anglo, Latino, African-American, Chinese-American, Protestant, Catholic, believers, unbelievers. We are all here.

It is often hard to see the unity of the Body of Christ. Our culture thrives on division, pitting one group against another. Too often, our churches do the same. Some of us will take communion this morning, some will not. This is wrong, but there is nothing that any of us in this room can do about it.

When we sing, none of that matters. The Song transcends every boundary.

That brings us back to Bach. When he was a boy of ten, he used to sneak into his uncle's study at night. His uncle, an organist, kept his music locked up because he thought it was too valuable for children to mess around with it. But Bach figured out that he could slip his arm through the latticework of the cabinet door. He would take out a manuscript, spend most of the night copying it by candlelight, and carefully slip the original back into the cabinet before morning. He worked with similar diligence at his music-making throughout his life. Much of it was spent in daily choral rehearsals at the Thomasschule in a manner that we would find much like an RSCM course.

The Song does not come without cost; to do it well, it requires all that you are, every part of your being. One of my teachers, Helen Kemp, used to sing:

[here sing, and have the congregation echo:]
Body, Mind, Spirit, Voice:
It takes the whole person to sing and rejoice.

It is, in short, a little “martyrdom.” We give ourselves over to the Song, without regard for where it will lead us. We practice, we rehearse while others are outside playing, or watching a movie, or hanging out with their friends. It is the musician’s way to fulfill the words of St. Paul: “I die daily” (I Corinthians 15:31). It puts us on the path of the saints described in our anthem, who “with Christ, rejoice without end” – cum Christo exsultant sine fine. It leads us to the same end as theirs, the end that Bach foresaw on his deathbed, and the end foreseen in the final pages of Handel’s masterwork. In his text from the Revelation of St. John the Divine, the four “beasts” (KJV) or “living creatures” (NRSV) have the last word, representing the participation of every living thing that God has made in the eternal Song. In a masterful stroke, Handel depicts the four beasts in a four-voiced fugue:

Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing.

Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever.

Amen

Thursday, August 4, 2011

RSCM Report 2011: Part One

Tuesday, July 26: Parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Last year, I described a week at the RSCM St. Louis Course in considerable detail.

This year, I had to practice. Brother Vincent was the principal organist, and I assisted as sub-organist, responsible for two anthem accompaniments, two hymns with interludes, and two voluntaries, divided equally between the two Sunday services. Thus, I was unable to write about the week as I would have liked. I will concentrate on my impressions of working as sub-organist, and I begin with Tuesday, the first full day of the Course.

After breakfast, Br. Vincent and I drove downtown in Mr. B.’s car to Christ Church Episcopal Cathedral in downtown St. Louis, site of the concluding Evensong. Unlike the Basilica where we sang last year, it has the feel of a downtown church. It is tall, elegant, Gothic -- and cool, at least at the level of the Nave. In the summer, it is purposely kept cool during the day for the street people, who are welcome to come in, cool off, drink some ice water and fill their water bottles, sleep, hang out, visit with friends. Many were there already as we arrived.

The resident organist (William Partridge, a fine gentleman and musician) showed us up the steep staircase in the rear to the west gallery and the organ. This is a distinguished instrument, a four-manual Aeolian-Skinner with parts of it dating back to a nineteenth century Roosevelt installation and some of it from an early twentieth century E. M. Skinner rebuild. These are names that, for an organist, are equivalent to Steinway or Bösendorfer on a piano. It is the finest instrument that I have played, or will likely ever play.

I wrote elsewhere about the proper way to visit a pipe organ, beginning with improvisation through the various divisions of the instrument to explore its sounds. Today, there was no time. I stumbled through my appointed hymn, adjusting to the layout of the pedals (it is an AGO standard console, unlike the Pilcher back home), and began working on registrations for the hymn. There is a fine horizontal trumpet rank at the east end, which is ideal for soloing the tune; I will use this for the introduction and the fifth stanza. A note on the music desk politely requests that it be used minimally because it is near the church offices, so mostly I used the Krummhorn on the Ruckpositiv (played from the same keyboard, the topmost of the four), and my imagination. The polite request also asked that the organist refrain from using the 32’ and 16’ Open Wood ranks in the pedal for the same reason of respect to the church staff, so despite my curiosity I took them on faith, setting them on the general pistons for the hymn but not trying them out before the service on Sunday.

I had only forty-five minutes; no time to linger. I finished my work with the hymn, never playing it all the way through and focusing mostly on the interlude, which will be needed for the choir to climb the stairs and squeeze into the loft. I hastily found registrations for my anthem accompaniment and prelude voluntary, one of the Howells Psalm-Preludes.

Then it was time for Brother Vincent. As the principal organist, he had a lot of ground to cover, especially in a technically challenging setting of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis. I sat in the loft as he worked, thinking through my registrations, marking them in my scores, and realizing that I needed to modify one the hymn registrations -- more upperwork, less reeds. I made a note to do this on Sunday afternoon when we arrive for the service.

I could do a much better job of registration with a half-day or so to work at it. But generic registrations must suffice. Part of the examination procedure for the A.A.G.O. and F.A.G.O. certificates is the stipulation that the tests be conducted on an instrument unfamiliar to the candidate, and that there be a maximum of one two-hour practice session at the instrument. A good organist ought to be prepared for precisely the situation in which I find myself this week.

We finished at noon, clearing out in time for the Midday Prayer office. I suggested staying for the prayers; Br. Vincent noted that we needed to hasten on back to Todd Hall; time was short.

But our car was gone.

The organist had gone to lunch. The security guard told us that the car had been towed; it was staff parking (though, as I later confirmed, un-marked). The rest of the cathedral staff was unhelpful, and completely unsympathetic. We called a taxi.

At the impound lot, we learned that Br. Vincent could not pick up the car; he was not the owner. Mr. B. had to find a car to borrow, drive a half-hour into town, and present himself in person, driver’s license in hand, along with $245 cash money; no checks, no credit cards. We waited for him. There were no chairs, so Br. Vincent sat on the edge of a planter, and I sat on the floor.

It was instructive.

I was angry at the loss of precious practice time, at missing a rehearsal back at Todd Hall, leaving Mr. Ashby to fend for himself without either of his organists. But I have no forgiveness unless I forgive the people who put us in this predicament. All of them, in sincerity of heart. “Be not high-minded, but fear” (Romans 11:20).

We easily become puffed up with the importance of our busy agenda, our tasks and responsibilities. But none of it matters as much as we think. Our privileges, our possessions, our time and energies, even our bodies and souls -- they are in truth not ours, but His. If our plans go astray, the response of faith is to leave it all in His hands, without fear, anger, or concern.

In the end, Mr. Partridge apologized to Br. Vincent and Mr. B., and saw to it that the cathedral reimbursed us for the towing fee, probably a painfully large expense for them. He came to the evensong on Sunday and was thoroughly supportive of our work.

Wednesday, July 28

The weeknight evensongs in the Chapel of St. Cecilia at Todd Hall are among my favorite parts of the course, in some ways better than the Sunday services. And, this night, it fell to me to play part of the service. The opening hymn was Cwm Rhondda, which I am to play on Sunday morning; the anthem was one of the two which I was accompanying.

Afterwards, Mr. B. told me that I would have to take the hymn more slowly. Despite the fact that he knows his congregation and I do not, I bristled: it was my tempo, and I do not respond well when people tell me that my tempo is wrong.

“My” tempo. Tuesday's lesson showed me that this thought was a warning flag. I will play the hymn at Mr. B's tempo, and be glad that he advised me from his experience.

[to be continued]