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.
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