organ voluntaries

Much of this week has been spent on the organ bench. The main task was to do first and second workouts on the June 1 evensong prelude: the trio setting by Bach of Allein Gott from the Clavierübung (BWV 676). That took about ten hours, for a piece that runs about six minutes in performance. And many hours will be needed on it next week, too.

That meant that I have postponed my work on tomorrow's voluntaries to the end of yesterday (about a half-hour) and today. When working up a piece in one day, I must make myself pretend that the one day is two days. The first workout (about four hours, with a good fingering already in place) was mostly this morning, then I had dinner and worked on the hymns and service music, then returned to the voluntaries for a second workout (about an hour). I think they will be fine, but I wish I had one more day. I believe that overnight, the subconscious processes the music in a way that allows it to be more settled the next day.


I recently finished reading a book: “Hymn Playing: A Modern Colloquium” (edited by Stuart Forster, MorningStar Music Publishers, 2013). The bulk of the book is drawn from interviews with eleven organists known for their hymn playing, including several players for whom I have high regard (John Ferguson, David Cherwien, Bruce Neswick), plus some others I know only by reputation (e.g., John Scott). It was a fine book, and I recommend it to any organists who may read this essay.

But one of the messages of the book is that hymn playing must be the top priority; the playing of organ literature is, some of them imply, a form of “showing off.” For example, Bruce Neswick had this to say about organ students at Westminster Choir College:

I was getting frustrated... with the general lack of awareness or ability in playing hymns.... We all want to play our great party pieces, but when it comes right down to it, what's really going to connect us to our workplaces and to our communities more than the way we play services? (p. 282-283)

I do not spend enough time on the hymnody. Nor do I spend enough time on my preparation for choral rehearsals. And I certainly do not spend enough time on office work. But neither do I spend enough time on the voluntaries, my “party pieces” as Neswick would call them - not enough time to play them as cleanly as they deserve.

Over my career, two clergy who have supervised me have said as much in my annual performance reviews. I am, in their view, “self-indulgent” to spend so much time on the organ bench. The last time this came up, I tried to obey: I started keeping a practice log with the idea of limiting myself to eight hours a week, which would include work on anthem accompaniments and hymnody as well as whatever time was left for the voluntaries. And I found that I simply could not do it. I could not allow the great festivals of the church to go by with cheesy half-prepared “easy” voluntaries.

My artistic and liturgical sense is that good organ music matters, and is worth the time it takes to prepare it. My example is J. S. Bach, who did far more than the minimum, and ignored those who would rather he paid closer attention to his duties as Latin Master at the school. I cannot produce music like his cantatas and Passions; I can barely play the organ music he wrote out for us. But within my time and place and the skills given me, I can try. I can at least put some time and effort into it.

Why am I playing the Allein Gott next week? It is the Sunday after Ascension Day, and if we are in tune with the liturgical year, we, like the apostles, are filled with “great joy” (St. Luke 24:52) at the victory of our great King, his ascension to the right hand of the Father, and his continued presence with us. The Allein Gott trio expresses these things as much as any music can do. So does the “9/8” C Major prelude and fugue, which will be the voluntary for that morning, and the two settings of Komm, heiliger Geist that begin the Eighteen Leipzig Chorales (for the Day of Pentecost), and the “St. Anne” prelude and fugue in E flat for Trinity Sunday. None of these pieces happen without some time on the bench.

First, there is tomorrow. I am playing two pieces from the Twenty-four pieces in free style by Louis Vierne. Here is the Carillon, which will be the postlude (Lord willing).

Ben Myers: On children's participation in the Liturgy

Here is an essay from the conservative theologian Ben Myers about his six-year-old son's experience of the Great Vigil of Easter, which in their case began in the pre-dawn hours:

Somehow we all got out of our pyjamas into clothes and shoes, and a few minutes later we staggered bleary-eyed off to church for the five-thirty Easter vigil.

In our parish, several of us had made efforts to encourage families to bring their children to the Great Vigil. For the most part, these efforts failed. Still, I think that we were on the right track. Myers again:

As far as I can tell, it's not that the liturgy is inherently inhospitable to smaller people. The great symbols of our worship are things that children instinctively love and understand. Indeed, they are such good honest things that even adults can understand them: water, bread, book, flame.

Is it too hard to imagine that children could be encouraged to participate not in some sanctified playgroup in a back room, but in these same symbols, as glorious for their simplicity as for their depth? When my son held his candle on Easter morning and bellowed out the church's great "Amen" after every reading, was he just experiencing a child-friendly version of the real thing? Was his rapt waxy-fingered attention anything less than genuine worship, since even with his limited understanding he was able to draw upon the symbols of faith and to make himself at home within their world of meaning?

A month later, I still feel the warm stifling closeness of our Parish Hall, crammed with people and candlelight, as we heard the Nine Lessons and sang the Psalmody as best we could. It was in truth beyond us, and under-rehearsed despite my efforts in the preceding rehearsals and despite our extra time in the warmup rehearsal. But I am not sure that our level of musical performance mattered that much. What did matter was the experience of sharing the Story among these our brethren and friends in what amounted to a cave around firelight.

And then the exuberance of going from that place to the Church, all the lights on as bright as they will go (much brighter than we normally use for Sunday mornings), the large expansive space with its beautiful acoustic, the cool fresh air of Easter Morning. And the Music.

One family, a mother and her two adult children, hated it. They left as soon as they could. They hated being in the Parish Hall instead of the Church as we had been in the past. They hated the long boring expanse of nine lessons and psalmody. They did not stay for Easter, so they missed the part that caused it all to make sense. And they assure us that they will never return to the Vigil.

We have much to do. And I do not know what direction that should take. But I do know that it is important.

From the encyclical letter Lumen Fidei, begun by Benedict XVI and completed by Francis I in June 2013:

The light of Christ shines, as in a mirror, upon the face of Christians; as it spreads, it comes down to us, so that we too can share in that vision and reflect that light to others, in the same way that, in the Easter liturgy, the light of the paschal candle lights countless other candles. Faith is passed on, we might say, by contact, from one person to another, just as one candle is lighted from another. Christians, in their poverty, plant a seed so rich that it becomes a great tree, capable of filling the world with its fruit. (section 37)

Alleluia. Christ is risen.
The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia.

Wounds of Love

When encountering music as listener or performer, there are occasions when everything is right, as I have attempted to describe in the previous essays. The music is so perfect, so beautiful and strong, that for a moment it is as if we have passed from this life into the heavenly places; we have been pierced by a joy too intense for mortal flesh. And then, the moment is gone.

We may also encounter such moments of illumination elsewhere -- in Nature, in the fine arts, poetry, and literature, in human interactions where we are surprised by love and grace, and in the Divine Liturgy, especially in the Holy Eucharist (cf. St. Luke 24:30-32) and Choral Evensong. We would, like St. Peter, build tabernacles and dwell forever in these places (St. Mark 9:5). And we cannot. The performance ends, or comes unglued, or we lose connection with it.

We make recordings, seeking to capture the moment. But a recording is no more than a snapshot, a flower dried and pressed in a book. Music is a living thing and cannot be captured. By its nature, live music is gone as soon as it has sounded. And even though the recording is always the same, we are not; we never hear it again in the same way.

The great spiritual doctor St. John of the Cross warned us to cling to nothing of this earth. When I began reading his writings this spring, his calls to intense mortifications of the flesh and spirit struck me as wrong. It seems ungrateful to take no pleasure in the gifts of God. But in his “Spiritual Canticle,” he described these good gifts -- and most of all, these moments of illumination and delight which one finds in music, nature, and elsewhere -- as “wounds of love,” for they point us toward their Maker:

In the vivid contemplation and knowledge of created things the soul beholds such a multiplicity of graces, powers, and beauty with which God has endowed them, that they seem to it to be clothed with admirable beauty and supernatural virtue derived from the infinite supernatural beauty of the face of God.... Hence, the soul wounded with love of that beauty of the Beloved... sings as in the following stanza:

“Oh! Who can heal me?
Give me perfectly yourself,
Send me no more
A messenger
Who cannot tell me what I wish.”
(from “A Spiritual Canticle of the Soul and the Bridegroom Christ,” Stanzas V and VI)

When we are deeply moved by a musical performance, or anything else, we must cling not to it, but to Him of whom the music is but a distant echo. If we insist on clinging to the music in itself, it becomes like the leftover manna, which “bred worms and stank” (Exodus 16:20).

The Moment passes. But if we receive it aright, we emerge from the cloud of glory and see Jesus only (St. Mark 9:8). And as we grow in grace, we may come to realize that the Moment has not passed from us at all; we see Him everywhere. He remains with us as He promised: “And lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world” (St. Matthew 28:20).

Great Performances

I could not sleep last night, for replaying the Bach in my mind. Tim Cuffman's performance of the Partita has changed the way in which I hear the piece and will probably improve my own playing of Bach. We musicians are a fellowship, and we must constantly learn from one another -- and more, I think, from those who play instruments different from ours.

Last night's recital put me in mind of other performances that have changed me. It is not a long list.

- a piano recital by Elaine Pao, a fellow student at the Choir College in the early 1980's. I do not now recall exactly what she played; Chopin, perhaps one of the Scherzos or Ballades. What I do remember is the exuberant joy of her playing.

- a series of performances by the Johnson City Symphony Orchestra in the later 1980's, directed in those days by Antonia Joy Wilson. She had the notion of taking this mostly-amateur community orchestra through the Beethoven Symphonies. I think that they made it through the first eight; the Ninth was beyond them, in part because of insufficient choral resources.

- a performance of the B Minor Mass by a choral society in Mobile, Alabama at an AGO regional convention, probably in the 1990's. I believe that John Gearhart was the director.

- later in the 1990's, a girls' choir from our city's sister community in Siberia visited through the good work of the local Rotary Club. They performed in our church, which had a good acoustic for them. I will never forget that night: these girls, none of whom had ever been out of Siberia and were more than a little intimidated by what they saw of the U.S., their clothes shabby (and probably the best that they had), not a scrap of printed music available to them -- I learned that they sang from mimeographs prepared by their conductor -- sang for almost two hours, all of it Znamenny Chant and folksong.

- more recently, Sam Stapleton and three graduate student colleagues performed the Quartet for the End of Time, our parish church lit by candlelight and their four music stand lights. I later heard a faculty quartet play the same work in the same room; it was excellent, but did not have the hair-raising electricity of Stapleton and his friends.

- about the same time, there was a D.M.A. piano recital that included an incandescent performance of the Liszt Sonata. The artist was an Asian woman whom I had not met and never saw again. I do not recall her name, but I will never forget her Liszt. Playing our dear old Steinway (years before its renovation, in the condition the rebuilder labelled "not suitable for serious work"), she made it sound like ten or twenty pianos, pouring forth a torrent of sound -- then whispering at the edge of audibility, as that piano did so well. Many who played the piano in those days did not understand how to draw Music from it; she did. The audience consisted of the following: a boyfriend (spouse?), her teacher and faculty committee, me.

- a few years ago, Carrie Beissler played the Franck Violin Sonata. She, like Tim Cuffman, was in the studio of Scott Conklin. Her playing left me speechless, in tears, and I will never approach the Franck organ music in quite the same way as before.

None of these people were famous, though Ms. Pao and Ms. Wilson have gone on to distinguished - though not "super-star" - careers. Elaine heads a music school in her native Malaysia and concertizes in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. Antonia directs an orchestra on the West Coast and has a long list of accolades and awards for her work. Mr. Stapleton now directs his own chamber orchestra and is prospering. Ms. Beissler is, I think, still a graduate student somewhere.

For many of these musicians, especially the players from the JCSO and the singers in Mobile -- and perhaps the girls from Siberia -- there was a sense that they would never again have an opportunity to perform as they were that night (or in that series, with the Beethoven). They sang and played from the heart in a manner that jaded professionals rarely achieve. I recall, for example, the end of the Beethoven Third, the Eroica. As the horns (who, I gather, had struggled mightily) played the fanfares in the final bars - nailing it, flawlessly - there was a palpable sense from the orchestra that "WE MADE IT!!!!!" One would never hear this in the work of, say, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the players going through the motions as they play the Erioca for the umpteenth time.

And none of these musicians who have changed my life with their performances were Organists.
I have ideas as to why that is so, but I will leave it there for now.

I omit from this list all the music that I have experienced as part of the Sacred Liturgy. Such music differs in so many ways that comparison is impossible, and sacred music properly draws much of its strength from its role and placement in the Liturgy. I cannot list the scores, probably hundreds, of times that the hymn singing of our parish church, or Hymn Society conferences, has changed me every bit as much as the performances I have listed. Nor can I describe the choral music I have experienced as singer or conductor -- Choral Evensongs at the RSCM Courses and in our own parish church, some of the music from our Advent Lessons and Carols services, some of the occasions when our combined youth and adult choirs have sung together, the plain ordinary week-to-week Psalmody that we sing. Even last night, before Mr. Cuffman's recital, we had sung Choral Evensong. There were some rough edges, but there were moments that were transcendent -- parts of the Smith Responses, the Howells "St. John's" Magnificat -- sung by the nine singers that we had on hand. It was amazing.

Nor can I assess my own playing. I think that I have played well at times; I hope that it has had a positive effect on some of the listeners. I keep trying, and I continue to learn.

Tim Cuffman, violinist

Just now, I did a Yahoo search on Tim Cuffman, and found almost nothing. In a few years, that will change.

He played a violin recital at our church this evening, and he may become one of the great musicians of our time.

Tim is a graduate student in violin at the University of Iowa, a student of Scott Conklin. His program tonight consisted of two pieces:

- Partita No. 2, in D minor (BWV 1004) - J. S. Bach
- Sonata No. 1, in G major (Op. 78) - J. Brahms

The Brahms was elegant and full of dignity, especially the beautiful and gentle ending of the final movement. But it was the Bach that amazed me.

This is the Partita that includes the famous Chaconne, a staple of the literature. It is the violinist's equivalent of the organ Passacaglia that I played at last month's Evensong. I have played a lot of Bach, and heard a lot of Bach performances. I do not think that I have ever heard one to equal tonight's -- not just on violin, but by any instrument, any ensemble. Cuffman played with a firm and individual grasp of this mighty work, in places very unlike the interpretations one commonly hears -- not simply different from the way others play it, but better, with more clarity of line, of formal structure. It was clear at every moment just how each phrase, each note, fit into the overall structure. This sort of playing is hard enough at the organ, as I well know. It is even harder in the solo violin and violoncello works, where all the counterpoint must be carried by the one instrument.

I could say more; his intonation was splendid, even in some of the passages that are notoriously challenging to play in tune. His tone was rich and warm, filling the room. His demeanor as a performer was terrific -- no microphones, no recording, no histrionics, no showmanship, no talking between pieces. Just a young man coming out with his violin, standing before the audience, and playing with intensity.

At the end of the Chaconne, I made a fool of myself, shouting "Bravo!!!!" like it was the greatest performance I had ever heard -- and, as I write this several hours later, I think that it was. Often at the student recitals, I chafe at the long intermissions -- tonight, I needed it. I had to go outside for a few minutes to breathe the night air.

I must say that Cuffman is not yet a finished musician. He is early in his doctoral studies, and will learn much in the coming years. I wished that the Brahms had been more passionate in places. It had the intellectual clarity of the Bach, which is indeed a critical element in Brahms, but Cuffman needs to continue his work with Brahms, and probably the other Romantics. I would love to hear him play some Beethoven; I think he would be outstanding in this repertoire. And if I were his teacher, I would turn him loose with composers like Paganini and Kreisler, to develop other sides of his musical personality. Maybe he does these things already; I would love to find out.

But even if he were to become a Bach specialist and never play anything else, he would be an artist of the first rank. I simply think that with time, and with the further growth as a musician that I am certain he will attain, he will play the major works of the repertoire, of all styles, with the intelligence and passion that we heard tonight in the Bach.

Pope Francis: Paschal Homily

Here is the Holy Father's homily for the Great Vigil of Easter.

First, it is short. One page. I would estimate it at about five minutes, maybe more like two or three minutes.

Second, he saw the same thing that struck me from St. Matthew's account of the resurrection: "He goes ahead of you into Galilee."

Third, this homily is evangelical. In this, it is a lesson for those of us who call ourselves Anglo-Catholics. The Holy Father constantly speaks and writes about our personal encounter with Jesus, and sharing this Good News with everyone.

“To go to Galilee” means something beautiful, it means rediscovering our baptism as a living fountainhead, drawing new energy from the sources of our faith and our Christian experience. To return to Galilee means above all to return to that blazing light with which God’s grace touched me at the start of the journey. From that flame I can light a fire for today and every day, and bring heat and light to my brothers and sisters...

[It means a renewal of] the experience of a personal encounter with Jesus Christ who called me to follow him and to share in his mission. In this sense, returning to Galilee means treasuring in my heart the living memory of that call, when Jesus passed my way, gazed at me with mercy and asked me to follow him. To return there means reviving the memory of that moment when his eyes met mine, the moment when he made me realize that he loved me.

We Anglo-Catholics tend to emphasize the sacramental life of the Church at the expense of personal encounter with Christ, and at the expense of telling others about it. Francis reminds us that some of the greatest missionaries of all time were Roman Catholics -- one thinks of St. Francis Xavier, for example.

We must do better. And that begins with what Francis describes, remembering "the moment when his eyes met mine, the moment when he made me realize that he loved me."