An untidy mess

I began today after Matins by raising the lid on the Steinway, something I almost never do. But the sound is better.

Today, there is an enormous mass of ideas, far too many. I worked at the Steinway for a half-hour or so, and it was good. But now, perversely, the piece wanted to be at the organ. So I took it across the room and tried it. Again, it was good; lots of material, lots of good sounds. Among other things, I found that motives from the two tunes combine in interesting ways.

- Step one of improvisation: Know the Tune. That was yesterday's work.
- Step two: Speak the Language. That was much of today's work.

I need a time like this morning to work around with the thematic material, to harmonize it in many ways, to make counterpoint with and against it, to see what is there, to work with the theme in my musical language, which is of course not mine, but what I have inherited from the Tradition. I find that I must spend some time doing this, without writing anything down or making any plans as to what to do with the material. But that is far from enough. The hardest part of improvisation (and, I suspect, composition) is the discipline of form. Untidy masses of sound are self-indulgent and meaningless. Thus:

- Step three: Work within a Form.

So, what to do with my particular untidy mess? Yesterday I was leaning toward an A-B-A form; today I wondered whether it might be appropriate to use the sonata first-movement form. This frightens me; I have never attempted to improvise a sonata-form movement. I thought about it, and gave it a try: Intercessor as the first theme, in B minor; London New as the second theme in F sharp major, the dominant; development, recapitulation with Intercessor in the home key of B minor and London New in B major, then possibly a coda.

"Be disciplined, Cassie. Don't let it get away from you." With that thought, I turned on my little tape recorder, clicked my stopwatch, and dove in.

The tape recorder is a wonderful invention for the musician. With it, I can review my work and consider how to improve. I made it to the end of my little "sonata" form, the large Happy Ending that eluded me yesterday. The piece finished with a coda that would have made Bruckner blush, combining the two tunes and building to full organ in a triumphant B major.

Umm... a bit over fourteen minutes. That is too long for a church prelude, and the ending was a bit much. No, it was way too much. They are here for church, not a concert.

I took the cassette tape down to the choir room where there is a better playback system and listened to it. Good beginning, very good: soft and intense. The whole first theme grouping (on Intercessor) was good. There was not really a transition to the second group, but a full stop and a new beginning, which can work (and did, it seemed to me), with the London New tune in the dominant major. That went nicely into the development, and there things went awry. It quickly became undisciplined, without a clear direction. I can see that one must be ruthless at this point in a sonata form, and get back to the tonic and the recapitulation. In other words, "Cut it short, Cassie."

The recapitulation on the tape was not nearly as good as the exposition. And the large coda is not how I wanted to finish, though it fit the inner logic of how the piece was going by then; it "wanted" a big triumphal ending (perhaps to balance the over-long development?). But that is not what I want to happen in the context of the liturgy. Can I figure out how to finish the recapitulation with a good bit of energy and use the coda to work down to a quiet ending, and to do it without compromising the inner logic of the piece?

After a couple of hours on this, I was able to lay it aside and move on to other work. Tomorrow is a Sabbath from organ-playing; we shall see where it is on Friday. There is work to do. But now there is a direction. What one does at this point is to focus on the sections that are weak -- for example, play just the development section with the transitions into it and out of it, and consider what aspect of it could be improved. Do it several times. Become comfortable playing development sections. Then put it into the larger context.
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Bonus Recording:
Part of today's work was helping a bride and groom locate music for solo violoncello, and I encountered this.

There is a Yo-Yo Ma recording of the Six Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello by J. S. Bach that is quite good, and has over 2 million views -- thank goodness someone out there is listening to classical music; I was having some doubts. The linked recording of the Six Suites is in my opinion better: Mstislav Rostroprovich playing in a Gothic nave -- not, it appears, the National Cathedral, which would have been convenient for him during his many years in Washington, but someplace with similar acoustics.

I continue to be astonished at the wealth of amazing music on YouTube.