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...)

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.

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.

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)

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...”