Easter Week

He is not here: for he is risen, as he said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay. And go quickly, and tell his disciples that he is risen from the dead, and, behold, he goeth before you into Galilee; there shall ye see him. (St. Matthew 28:6-7)

By the time of the Peace at the Great Vigil of Easter, I was as giddy as a child. I was hugging people, giggling, walking on air.

I had poured all of myself into this week, as is my bounden duty. It began with the twenty-eight page service leaflet for the Three Days, the Paschal Triduum. Combining Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Great Vigil into one booklet was the idea of our new Rector, Rev'd L.: “It is a teaching tool; it shows people that these three services are a unity.” That it was, and it took a lot of work from the church staff to make it happen.

And there were the rehearsals. I wish that the Youth Choir could have been part of this, but they weren't; this was a task for the Adult Choir. I am humbled by the dedication they brought to the week – a very intense two hours of rehearsal last Wednesday, then services on three nights plus Sunday morning. There was so much to sing in these Three Days (counting Sunday) that we could not possibly rehearse all of it properly – seven anthems; twelve hymns, lots of service music (some of it new to choir and congregation); a set of plainsong Anthems for the Footwashing that were exquisite, and probably the best singing that the choir did all week; and most of all, twelve Psalms, nine of them during the Office of Lessons at the Vigil. And these choristers did it all with heart, with connection of “body, mind, spirit, voice” (Helen Kemp's phrase). Many of them sacrificed much to be at these services, night after night.

From the beginning on Thursday – a raucous shape-note rendition of “What wondrous love is this” as the processional, to the end of the service for the Sunday of the Resurrection – the Hallelujah Chorus (Handel) sung by the congregation, with continuo and trumpets and the rest of the brass quintet beefing up the tuttis – for in this, our beloved little Pilcher is clearly inadequate – it was a musical and liturgical feast. Or rather, a journey from the Table into the Darkness where the only food was vinegar and gall, and on into the Eighth Day, the New Creation when the Table is opened at last to all the world, to all creation.

The Pilcher did have its moment. For Easter Day, we have brass, but for the Great Vigil, the most important liturgy of the year, we do not – just the organ. Having played poorly on the Passacaglia at the last Evensong, I wanted to do well with this night's postlude, the Pièce d'Orgue (BWV 572). And it did go well. The Pilcher sounds very good on this sort of music, and I was glad to show it off, and glad (always!) to share in Bach's music. Soli Deo Gloria!

So now what?

In one way or another, all four Evangelists tell us: “he goeth before you into Galilee.”

Prevent us, O Lord, in all our doings with thy most gracious favor, and further us with thy continual help; that in all our works begun, continued, and ended in thee, we may glorify thy holy Name, and finally, by thy mercy, obtain everlasting life; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. [BCP p. 832]

The Rector's Sunday sermon spoke of leaving this place, this week's liturgies, and going into the world of “not yet,” where hatred and violence and iniquity still rule (or so it appears). And it is in that very world, right in the middle of it all, that we will see him, that Light that cannot be comprehended (in any sense of the word) by the darkness (cf. St. John 1:5, from the Gospel for Matins on Easter Day).

Or, as it is phrased most simply near the end of St. John's Gospel (21:22):

Follow thou me.

It is the same word that he extended to the Twelve and to many others during his earthly ministry; it is the invitation that he now extends to us all.

But my question remains: So now what? How does this take practical shape in our lives?

My uncle used to have a tattered paper cartoon on the wall of his office. It showed a little boy sitting on the toilet, with the caption: “The job's not over until the paperwork is done.” And that is where we must start the new life of the Resurrection – by doing the simple tasks that lie at hand, one at a time. It begins with cleaning up the loose ends from last week.

Sunday afternoon and evening I puttered around, putting things away. It took all of that time, and more. Tuesday morning, I put a CD on the stereo in the choir room and filed music. And another CD. And a third. One of the recordings (directed by Robert Shaw) included the Victoria “O vos omnes,” which we had sung on Good Friday. I had thought we sang it well, but my first reaction on hearing this recording was shame at how far short we fell of its example. But upon reflection, I realized that (1) Robert Shaw and his singers are not here. (2) We are. (3) If the praise of God is to be universal, that means that it must happen here, and we are the ones God has put here to see to it. (4) I am bound to prepare these people, these singers, few of whom could ever have the skills to make it into a choir directed by the likes of Robert Shaw, for the eternal Song in the heavenly places.

We will make mistakes, we will sing out of tune or with sloppy diction, we will sing with our (mostly) poor quavery thin old-person voices instead of the fine trained young professional voices that Shaw had to work with. And our song will be every bit as genuine as theirs, and specific to us and our place. (See also: this)


So we go on. The music is filed, the new music for the rest of the season through Trinity Sunday is in the folders, we have choral rehearsals today and this evening. And if we have ears to hear His song, He is there, just ahead of us.

pleasing my Teacher

I practiced hard this week, almost all of it on Bach. This morning's voluntaries were the two settings of Aus tiefer Not from the Clavierübung, and the prelude for this evening's Evensong was the Passacaglia.

I played it in the 1980's, but have not done it since. Several times I have scheduled it for a Lenten Evensong, but scrubbed it when I saw that there was not enough time to prepare it. This year, I was determined to do it, even though my intentions of working on it well in advance came to naught. I had a solid fingering from the previous times when the piece was scheduled, and began the First Workout last weekend. Could I get the thing ready in one week?

The answer is: sort of. I think that I gave a reasonably good presentation of it in terms of overall concept, but there were a lot of missed notes. And not a few in the Aus tiefer Not this morning -- the smaller setting (manuals-only) was played cleanly and I think very well; the large six-voice chorale fugue not so much.

I am okay with this. I want to please my Teacher, who was listening. He always is: "He knoweth my sitting down and my rising up; he discerneth my thoughts from afar" (cf Psalm 139:1-2). My Teacher knows how hard I worked this week, how many of my other duties I laid aside for these three pieces. No matter how well I might play, he has heard better - he heard JSB himself play these pieces, and I can never approach that standard.

I know that a teacher - this Teacher - does not want or expect perfection. What the teacher wants is progress. And the teacher knows that it will not be a straight-line journey; there will be setbacks, blind alleys that waste months, perhaps years, many failures. And he is okay with this. What the teacher wants above all is for the student to come to maturity as a musician and as a person, and the teacher is thrilled whenever there is a step along that path. Sometimes a performance with lots of rough edges (like the Passacaglia this evening) is more fruitful in this sense than a spotlessly clean playing of the piece, one that might make the student proud and complacent.

So, what have I learned? I had been feeling some pride in my practice methods, having had some success with them. This time, I pushed too far; no, I am not able to prepare a piece on the scale of the Passacaglia in one week, not even with the fingering in place. If I am to attempt something like this again, I must allow more preparation time. But on the positive side, I had a terrific day on the bench yesterday, seven hours of Bach. Yesterday, and this week's concentrated work, has perhaps made me a Better Organist.

For those who might wish to hear the piece, here is a performance by the late Helmut Walcha, one of the great German organists of the last century. I love his tempo, the registrations, the clarity of this playing.