Some inspiration from Howells

Saturday afternoon arrived, and in the press of the week's duties I had done nothing about Sunday's prelude improvisation. In the half-hour remaining before my bus, I learned the Tune (Langham, number 573 in the H-82, “Father eternal, ruler of creation”). It is a big sprawling tune in C minor. I chose a key for the improvisation: E minor, to relate well with the tune when it is sung as the opening hymn. I played around with it for the few minutes that were available and went home.

Today's Eucharist was not in the morning because of a city event that closed the streets near the church, so I had the day ahead – but a lot of office work to fill it. I was becoming a little panicky about it. Still, I wanted to stay with the morning routines that I seek to make habitual – Matins, some brief study of the book “Group Vocal Technique,” sight-singing – and the Anthem Box.

My predecessor left me five large fileboxes of single copies of choral music. Fourteen years later, I am down to one. There has been enough good music in these boxes, which he collected over his career in church music, to keep me from tossing this final box in the recycling bin. I seek to nibble at the box every working day, and today it paid off handsomely.

The piece that was on top was the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis from the Howells Collegium Regale service. Here is a live performance from Grace Cathedral, San Francisco. It is already in my personal single-copy library, but I read through it anyway, thinking in part of the Te Deum and Jubilate from the same Service that we are to sing next Sunday.

In recent years as I have sought to learn how to improvise, I have tried to consider how a composer achieves his purposes, and Howells is someone whom I most fervently would like to emulate. In the Magnificat, I noted the the scale, which is G natural minor with much borrowing of G major triads at cadences, and use of the F major triad rather than the F sharp leading tone of harmonic minor. He also uses the D major dominant chord (with its F sharp), and frequently naturals the E to make it lean towards G Dorian rather than minor.

I took it to the piano and tried some of the progressions in “my” key of the day, E minor. This provided the spark; I rushed upstairs to the organ and worked, spending about an hour developing a Plan and a registration scheme.

And that was all. I had hoped for more time in the afternoon, but I was bogged down with next Sunday's bulletins and other duties, including the warmup at the organ for the hymns and service music that I normally do on Sunday morning.

Here is the improvisation, with the opening hymn on which it was based. There is not so much Howells in here as I had hoped, but some of the progressions near the end perhaps echo his style a little.

My point: it is very instructive to work in this manner. Take a passage of music that you find effective, preferably just a phrase or a cadence or a short pattern, consider how the composer made it so, and see if you can do something similar. As a first step, it helps to take the material out of the composer's key. That seems to help me make it my own. A similar approach can be used with any aspect of a composition: form, harmonic language, contrapuntal work, tone color.

I don't do this type of work as often as I should.