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.