RSCM Report, Part One: The Question

From plague, pestilence, and famine,
Good Lord, deliver us. (BCP p. 149)

Monday, July 23: Feast of St. Mary Magdalene

Last week as I cycled to work, I walked my bike through a narrow railroad underpass as is my custom, and met a deer. She was at the road's edge, eating weeds – short, tough weeds. She stood still, gazing at me as I approached almost close enough to touch her. She was thin, her bones showing through her brown coat – too thin for midsummer. There is nothing to eat, and winter lies ahead.

Today we drove to the RSCM Course in St. Louis, through more than two hundred miles of the finest farmland in North America, almost entirely devoted to corn and soybeans. It was grim: some cornfields entirely dead, the stalks brown and brittle. Some were still green, more or less, but they will not make a crop; it was too hot and dry at the critical time when corn tassels and pollinates. Later in the week I walked to the edge of the soybean field behind the chapel. The plants looked well enough, but most had not set any blossoms. Only about one plant of every three or four had anything, and then it was just one or two little pods, an inch long or less. The other plants were half-heartedly putting out blossoms; with rain, they might yet make a crop, if there is time before first frost.

I will utterly consume all things from off the land, saith the LORD. I will consume man and beast; I will consume the fowls of the heaven, and the fishes of the sea, and the stumblingblocks with the wicked; and I will cut off man from off the land, saith the LORD. (Zephaniah 1:2-3)

We have made this mistake before, pinning everything on one or two crops [e.g., the Great Famine of Ireland, 1845-52]. But this is America. We don't have famines.

And I will bring distress upon men, that they shall walk like blind men, because they have sinned against the LORD: and their blood will be poured out as dust, and their flesh as the dung. Neither their silver nor their gold shall be able to deliver them in the day of the LORD's wrath, but the whole land shall be devoured by the fire of his jealousy: for he shall make even a speedy riddance of all them that dwell in the land. (Zephaniah 1:17-18)

When these and like passages come in the Daily Office (they rarely if ever appear in the Sunday Lectionary), I am terrified. How can we escape the wrath of God, we who have turned judgment into wormwood, and leave off righteousness (Amos 5:7)? And when a summer like this comes, we do not repent. Nor, for the most part, do we even pray for rain. We do not any longer believe that God “sendeth the rain on the just and on the unjust” (St. Matthew 5:45) -- why should we? It is all a matter of atmospheric circulation and moisture. Or is it?

We have plenty of food, for now; one bad year for crops won't kill us. We can buy corn from Brazil, as the Smithfield company is doing; the same for wheat and soybeans. Sure, it will be expensive. But we are Americans: someone else can go hungry. Ethanol for our cars is more important than masa for someone else's tortillas. This is iniquity, and one day we will be judged for it.

The Missouri and Mississippi Rivers at St. Louis looked to be about half their usual size, with wide and dry sandbars, grass growing where there had always been water.

A dry summer? Perhaps it is random chance, a fluke. But what if next summer is like this, and the next after that? “The times, they are a-changing.”

And also I have withholden the rain from you, when there were yet three months to the harvest: and I caused it to rain upon one city, and caused it not to rain upon another city: one piece was rained upon, and the piece whereupon it rained not withered. So two or three cities wandered unto one city, to drink water; but they were not satisfied: yet have ye not returned unto me, saith the LORD. (Amos 4:7-8)

What is to become of these young people, the chapel filled with them at rehearsal this evening? Children and teenagers and young adults whom I love: what is to become of them?

Tuesday, July 24: Feast of St. Thomas á Kempis

Just as I am, thy love unknown
hath broken ev'ry barrier down;
now to be thine, yea, thine alone,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come. (Charlotte Elliot: Hymn 693)

I love solitude. Much of my work depends upon it – the organ playing, the selection of choral music, score study. But all of these things can bear fruit only in the congregation of the faithful (Psalm 149:1).

Choral rehearsals are the bridge. They draw me out of myself into the community of singers. This is true when I conduct rehearsals at home; it is even more true when I am a chorister at the RSCM Course.

Our tenor section this year is young, largely men of middle school age, thirteen or fourteen years old. There are only two adults: Eric and me. I was shy about plunking myself down into their midst at the first ATB rehearsal this morning; surely they did not want this grey-haired old coot beside them for the week. But singing together casts down all such barriers of age and background, which in truth are mostly constructs of a culture that seeks to pigeonhole us into market segments in order to enslave us.

It is not only age that is a barrier: on my left was Chris, an African-American Baptist from a Lutheran school, on my right for most of the week was Mario, a Hispanic Roman Catholic, and me in the middle, a white Episcopalian from the old South who can well remember the days of Jim Crow. By the end of this first full day of rehearsals and Choral Evensong, we were talking, working together, accepting one another's imperfections, becoming brothers in song. I respect their quick intelligence, their obvious love for this music and for our Lord. They appear to respect me as well.

Today there were many mistakes, but it was a good beginning.

Fundamentals of Musical Composition

Fundamentals of Musical Composition: Arnold Schoenberg (Faber and Faber, 1967).

For the last two months, I have worked my way through this book, and I have hardly scratched the surface: to do it properly, I would need a second transit, with much work at the keyboard. I hope to do this; I hope that my intention may remain until late this fall when I might have time to begin the task, applying these lessons to the work of improvisation at the organ and piano.

Some of my “teachers” are gentle and pleasant: some are prickly. Schoenberg (1874-1951) comes across in this book as a a hard-bitten old drillmaster of a teacher, immensely intelligent, with a vast knowledge of music and little patience for slovenly work or ignorance. Like many other Austrians and Germans of his generation, he fled the horrors of National Socialism, having to start over in his old age as a professor of music at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the nearby University of Southern California. The low level of the American students he there encountered, much lower than what he had known in Vienna, caused him to revise his pedagogy, as his editors describe in the Preface (p. xiii), creating this textbook for undergraduate students of composition and analysis. Schoenberg writes in the Appendix (p. 214): “The principal aim of this textbook is... to provide for the average [music] student of the universities, who has no special talent for composing or for music at all." [my emphasis]

Nonetheless, he took up the task and devoted some ten years and four revisions to this volume. The editors (Gerald Strang and Leonard Stein), who knew Schoenberg well, attest that “all his life Schoenberg laboured to share with his students his knowledge of music” (p. xiv).

One might expect a book from this hand to focus on the areas in which Schoenberg himself worked: the atonal or “twelve-tone” music which he developed with others, notably Alban Berg and Anton Webern, in the early twentieth century. But one finds none of this in the book: he focuses instead on the work of Ludwig van Beethoven, with examples from other classical masters such as Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, and Brahms. Schoenberg insisted that if one is to compose in a more modern style, one must first master the traditional skills represented by these composers. Copies of Beethoven's piano sonatas and string quartets are essential to a proper study of this book, for Schoenberg refers to them constantly as examples for the student.

He begins with the construction of the Phrase, then the Motive, the connection of Motives into simple Themes such as Sentences and Periods, their accompaniment, and the building from these smaller elements of complete smaller musical forms, such as the ternary Song Form, the Minuet, the Scherzo, the Theme and Variations. From there, he explores the larger forms such as Rondo and Sonata-Allegro. For my purposes, the earlier parts of the book are more applicable – I must crawl before I can walk, and running is out of the question [an example of the latter would be the organ improvisations of Anton Bruckner, which were reportedly large symphonic-scale works similar to what one hears in his orchestral symphonies. I will never reach that level; I will be content if I can improvise a decent prelude and postlude for church].

As I mentioned, I have worked my way to the end of this book. If the Lord allows, I hope to start over in October or November, working with the book while at the keyboard and seeking to imitate the forms as they are used in the works of Beethoven. The inestimable value of this book for the organist and improviser is that Schoenberg shows how this can be done.

To make sketches [or, for the improviser, to try many approaches with a given theme or concept in rehearsal] is a humble and unpretentious approach toward perfection. A beginner who is not too self-assured, who does not believe too firmly in his 'infallibility', and who knows that he has not yet reached technical maturity, will consider everything he writes as tentative (p. 117).

Hymnal Revision: pitfalls and potential

I should expand on my comment the other day concerning the sort of hymnal the Episcopal Church would be likely to produce in our generation. There are many potential pitfalls, but among them lies potential for good.

Three of the reasons I would not be sanguine about a new Episcopal hymnal can be illustrated by our closing hymn at the 11:00 Eucharist this morning: number 481 in the Hymnal 1982, Rejoice, the Lord is King with the tune Gopsal. It is a terrific hymn -- and it would be unlikely to appear in a new Episcopal hymnal. For one reason, the title: many clergy and others in authority are hesitant to refer to the Deity as either “Lord” or “King.” There is overwhelming Biblical support for using these names, such as Psalm 97:1, which may have been in Wesley's mind when he wrote this hymn -- “The LORD is King; let the earth rejoice; let the multitude of the isles be glad.” But these terms imply a hierarchy with which many would disagree – the Deity, especially in its incarnation as Jesus of Nazareth, is our Friend, our Companion, our Lover – but not our Lord. Further, both “Lord” and “King” are masculine terms, which are unacceptable in many circles. For reasons such as this, most of the corpus of traditional hymnody is dissonant with the more liberal expressions of contemporary theology, and many argue that it is time to lay aside the old texts, with the ideas they embody.

A second (and related) reason is that this hymn is the work of two Dead White Males: Charles Wesley (1707-88) and George Frideric Handel (1685-1759). Many modern clergy (and not a few laypersons) are not interested in hearing from such persons, for they are part of the oppressor class and did their work before 1960, meaning that they have nothing to say to our generation.

A third reason is that the tune Gopsal is musically challenging, especially to the organist or pianist. With all my certificates, diplomas, and experience, I have to devote a good bit of work to this tune in order to play it convincingly. What is the volunteer musician in a small parish to do? Or worse yet, what is the guitarist to do? This piece will not work without a keyboard accompaniment.

The Hymnal 1982 is more musically challenging than most denominational hymnals. One senses that the committee which assembled it took pride in the Episcopal Church's tradition of being a place where the best possible music was sung and played. That remains true in places, but not as widely as in 1982, and a new hymnal would probably strive to be more “accessible” at the expense of tunes like Gopsal.

To be fair to the Episcopal hymnal supplements, it is their duty to include new songs and hymns, and there is a lot of excellent new material available. Part of what needs to be added to the wider congregational song are voices that have indeed been overlooked, and the supplements have been at their best when they have attempted to do that.

There is difference of opinion as to whether a new hymnal will ever be needed, or for that matter a new prayerbook. I gather that the Standing Commission's feasibility study discovered that many churches either print all of the day's music in the service leaflet or project it onto screens. The denomination's current trend is to encourage the use of “RiteSong,” which is a subscription-based download service for the hymns and songs in all of the Episcopal hymnals and supplements. This makes it easier to produce service leaflets and PowerPoint presentations. Why have a printed book in the pews if it is not going to be used?

For many reasons, I am convinced that we should continue to have printed Prayerbooks and Hymnals and that we should use them: perhaps I can write of this another time. Should a committee someday be charged with the preparation of a full-scale hymnal to replace the Hymnal 1982, it could easily turn into a battleground, with every constituency pushing its own agenda. But with God's grace it could instead be a feast of many cultures, the best of old and new. One recent book that I think presents a good example is the 2005 hymnal of the (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland, Church Hymnnary 4, where one finds eighteenth century Scottish Paraphrases and items from the old Scottish Psalter alongside Iona songs, Graham Kendrick and others from the “praise and worship” genre, contemporary authors such as Shirley Erena Murray and Carl P. Daw, songs from Africa and Asia, Watts and Wesley, Fanny Crosby, and much more.

There are only two verses in the New Testament that explicitly instruct about music in the church: I Corinthians 14:15 and Colossians 3:16. Both verses occur in the context of forbearance for one another: the first in relation to the exercise of spiritual gifts in worship, most of all in the context of the “more excellent way” outlined in chapter thirteen; the second likewise in the context of “charity, which is the bond of perfectness” (Col. 3:14), and submission to one another (v. 18-24) that there may be “neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ... in all” (v. 11):

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord. And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by him. (v. 16-17).

It is perhaps the challenge and the privilege of our generation, more than any that have come before, to sing one another's songs – across the centuries as well as the continents and islands. The hymnal can be a model of how this may be done.

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As a footnote, here is a YouTube rendition of "Rejoice, the Lord is King." The first version is to Gopsal, as discussed here; the second is to Darwall's 148th, which is the tune more commonly given with this text -- a thoroughly worthwhile pairing, but not quite as challenging as Gopsal. [the first clip begins with something of an advertisement, and continues after "Rejoice, the Lord is King" with another hymn: "God is love, let heaven adore him" with the Welsh tune Blaenwern with which it is most often sung in Great Britain. The whole thing is taken from the BBC series "Songs of Praise."]

Do take the time to watch this clip. Seeing the people in these two churches brings to mind a sermon by Martin Franzmann, "Theology must sing." In it, he refers to the Albrecht Dürer woodcut, "Hymns of the Chosen before the Lamb." Franzmann said:

[Some persons] begin by criticizing the good hymns as 'hard to sing.' One might ask in return, Why must a hymn be easy? Who ever said that it should be easy? Look at that woodcut... in which those that came through the great tribulation, who have washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb, sing their heavenly song. Look at those faces, their intensity of concentration... if you would know what singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord really means. ["Come to the Feast," edited Robin A. Leaver, MorningStar Music Publishers, page 139]

And now, a few words about General Convention....

Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music:

Some of these materials reflect what is already happening in our parish, such as “proposed rites honoring creation,” including the designation of the Sunday nearest the Feast of St. Francis for the blessing of animals, and offering rites for “civic occasions” such as Earth Day. Fortunately, they decided not to press ahead with the “Creation Cycle of the Pentecost Season” as an optional replacement for the Revised Common Lectionary materials between Trinity Sunday and the First Sunday of Advent. This had been urged by resolutions at the 2009 convention, and would be very popular in our parish. It would however further distance us from any connection with the Reformed concept of systematic reading of Holy Scripture in public worship.

There was a 2009 resolution to conduct a feasibility study of a replacement for the Hymnal 1982. The Commission has determined that no, there will not at present be a new hymnal. Considering the content of the hymnal supplements beginning with “Wonder, Love and Praise,” it is probably just as well – any new hymnal that our denomination would produce would likely be an embarrassment.

I worry about the resolution to “[set] translation standards that include reflecting 'the idiomatic style and cultural context' of the languages used.” Perhaps they are simply talking about translations of liturgical materials into non-English languages, but I wonder if they are moving toward the official exclusion of the King James Version and the traditional “Rite One” liturgical texts from public worship.


Report of the Church Pension Group:

The continuing decline in the number of active participants in the defined benefit plan (almost entirely clergy), and especially the number of males (down about 15% in six years) is of interest, as is the continuing rise in their average age (now 53.7 years) and the decline in new ordinations, down from 570 in 2005 to 369 in 2011, with average age at ordination of 48.2 years.

In short, there are fewer clergy, they are older, and despite their age they tend to have limited experience in their work because they came to it as a second career. Then again, there are fewer Episcopalians, so the downsizing of the clergy is perhaps a good thing. And the decades of life experience before ordination cannot be discounted – most of these new clergy were active as laypeople in the church for many years, and they doubtless bring insights that would not come from someone who went straight through from college to seminary to ordination in their mid-twenties.

From page four of the report:

As you can see, Fund performance was somewhat disappointing in last fiscal year [ending 3/31/12], falling behind both the passive benchmark and investment objective [of a 4.5% return in excess of inflation]. It should not be a surprise that the Fund would perform differently from the benchmark given our intentional diversification into private equity and real assets, hedge fund strategies, and non-U.S. equities. (my emphasis)

This reflects a danger encountered by pension funds and endowments pretty much everywhere in the developed world. During the 1980's and 1990's, they came to believe that “a 4.5% return in excess of inflation” was not only reasonable, but safely conservative. It could be achieved with a stable balance of equity and bond investments.

But such a portfolio is not likely to get even a nominal 4.5% long-term return these days. The only way to get the returns they consider necessary is to hand large portions of their money over to the hedge funds and their high-frequency algorithms, and expand into other assets, all of them riskier than the old-time investment grade bonds and blue-chip equities. In the charts on page nine, one sees that these “other assets” amount to some $4.8 billion, nearly half of their total assets. This is a much more volatile portfolio than is traditional for a pension fund. In a good year, they might do fine. But in a bad year, they will probably lose a lot of money. I suspect that the Church Pension Group's movement in this direction is typical of the larger pension fund and endowment community.

As is normal with financial statements, the appendices make the most interesting reading. Pages 14 and 15 provide further detail about their alternative investments, such as “Private equity limited partnerships [which] include strategies focused on venture capital, growth equity and buyout transactions across many industry sectors” [one thinks for example of Mitt Romney's Bain Capital Management (my comment)], and “investments in (1) long/short equity hedge funds, which invest primarily in long and short equity securities, (2) credit/distressed debt securities that are generally rated below investment grade [“junk” bonds (my comment)] with managers that invest in debt or debt related securities or claims associated with companies, assets or sellers whose financial conditions are stressed, distressed or in default, and (3) multi-strategy hedge funds that pursue multiple strategies and capture market opportunities.”

Pages 17 and 18 list the assets at fair market value by “levels,” as is the norm in financial statements. Basically, “Level 1” is a reliable fair market price. “Level 2” is not quite such a reliable figure, as it represents assets for which there is not a regular daily market such as the NYSE. “Level 3” is essentially guesswork, most often representing illiquid assets for which a fair market value cannot easily be estimated. All told, only about $1 billion of the $9.4 billion total pension assets reside in Level 1: $3.8 billion are in Level 2, and $4.5 billion in Level 3.

If one believes their numbers (and the large sum in Level 3 is a caveat), the Fund remains in sound condition, well able to pay anticipated retirement benefits (as detailed on pages 21-22). This puts it in a better situation than many corporate and government pension plans. But these figures make me glad that I am not in the defined benefit plan here described; like most of the Church's lay employees (those who have pension coverage, that is), I am in the defined contribution plan, administered by the Fidelity company. That has its own set of issues, but I can confidently say that almost none of my assets in the plan would be classified as “Level 3,” and none of them are in the tender hands of the hedge fund community.

A footnote: Church Publishing (the official publishing arm of the Church) posted a $2.8 million loss for the year ending 3/31/12. This is an improvement over the $7.6 million loss the previous year, but comes to over $10 million in the red over the past two years. I believe that they are dying.