In the year that King Uzziah died

Q. What are the Seven Principal Feasts of the Church?
A. The Seven Principal Feasts are these: Christmas Day, the Epiphany, Easter Day, Ascension Day, The Day of Pentecost (or Whitsunday), Trinity Sunday, and All Saints' Day.

Notice that three of these fall within a span of three weeks.

The church musician certainly notices, if he is taking his work seriously. It is for most of us the end of the choir season, the end of the academic term was several weeks ago, and the operative holiday for the secular society was Memorial Day, the beginning of Summer. But these are three of the Principal Feasts and this last, Trinity Sunday, is the name-day of our parish. For the glory of the ascended Christ, for the honor of the Holy Ghost the Comforter, for the majesty of the holy and undivided Trinity, the musician ought to offer his best, just as much as he hopefully did for Christmas or Easter. For me, and probably for all of us, it is hard.

Today it mostly turned out well. My piano improvisation at the middle service was not so good, despite more preparation than usual. I was pleased that I kept control of St. Patrick's Breastplate in the manner of a fiddle tune; this was what I worked at. I was not pleased that in the coda on Deirdre (Christ be with me), I lost the very simple tune.

At the choral service, the congregation sang the hymns with strength and intelligence; I am tempted to post recordings of them. But instead, I will post the anthem: In the year that King Uzziah died, by David McK. Williams.

I have long considered this 1930's anthem to be a staple of the repertoire. To my surprise, there were no recordings of it on YouTube, until I posted ours earlier today. There is another very interesting anthem with the same title and text, sung by the choir of St. David's Cathedral, Wales here, but it is not the Williams.

Q. Describe the Trinity.
A. [….. the student goes to the organ and plays the Bach E flat prelude and fugue]

It is too simple for words. Fr. Tim had a blog post this week talking about how God is more complex than we can imagine, and He is. But He is equally more simple than we can imagine. We have a glimpse of it now and again: Moses at the bush hearing the Divine Name for the first time and being told that it means “I am.” Being. Simple beyond description. Without beginning or end. Or we have St. John saying “God is love,” a full and complete description (I John 4:8). Or, in John's Gospel account, all of the ways in which Jesus described himself – Good Shepherd, Bread from heaven. Resurrection. Vine-and-branches. Way, Truth, Life. Or in today's Gospel where Jesus speaks of the Spirit and those born of the Spirit (John 3:8).

Today's organ music, the “St. Anne” prelude and fugue that frame the Clavierübung, are a better description than any words though even this falls short. There are obvious Trinitiarian likenesses, such as the three subjects of the fugue, presented in order, the third proceeding from the first two and combined with them even as it is presented, but the inner message, that which cannot be framed in words but is there in the music, is more to the point, and more profound.

Here is my recording, with three paintings that likewise attempt to depict the Trinity. There are obviously a lot of recordings of this work on YouTube [a search gives 218,000 hits], but I think that I play it well enough to add to the collection. Astute readers will recall that I posted another playing of it a few months ago; that one is not public, for it was in memory of my friend G.F. As I wrote there, I often play this at funerals because we are, in Christ, bound up into the Trinity. It remains incomplete in this life – but not in the next, where we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is (I John 3:2).

an Economist, Wikipedia, and the Healing of the Nations

On Sunday evenings, I look forward to completing the day's work (insofar as possible), brewing some herbal tea, eating, and writing these essays. Today, I spent most of my time editing a Wikipedia page.

Dr. John P. Hussman writes a valuable weekly “market comment” on the stock market and other financial topics; he has been doing this for many years, and they can all be found here. I have also seen his name in the annual reports of the Carter Center, which I support. He does too, in a much larger way: this year's report listed him and his wife Terri among those whose lifetime gifts to the Center amount to more than a million dollars, and on top of that, his foundation has given another million (or more). At times, I wondered whether it was the same person; the financial site makes no mention of the foundation, and the foundation makes no mention of the financial work. So tonight, I hunted around a bit and satisfied myself that it is: his Twitter feed identifies him as an “Economist. Realistic optimist widely viewed as prophet of doom. Autism researcher and philanthropist. Musician with recovering chops,” complete with a photo that is clearly the same person as the one at the investment site.

So, I went to Wikipedia, where the article about him was a thoroughly inadequate one-paragraph stub. I added a second paragraph about his philanthropic work, with citations.

That took me about an hour. It would be quicker if I had more experience with such work.

There have been occasions when I have wanted to write to Dr. Hussman and thank him both for his investment writings and his support of the Carter Center. With the former, he is widely vilified at present because his views are contrary to the mainstream, and I wish I could effectively speak or write to support him. My time on Wikipedia tonight is the best I can do; it is not much, but it is something.


Today is Whitsunday, the Day of Pentecost. In choir rehearsal this morning, we touched on the implications of this Day for the environment. As our antiphon to Psalm 104 said, “Send forth your spirit, O Lord, and renew the face of the earth.” Romans 8 describes the brokenness of creation that has resulted from our sin – a brokenness to which we add daily: “The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now” (v. 22).

It is, I think, on Whitsunday that the “healing of the nations” began, and not just the humans. We read of this at Matins in Isaiah 11, the great passage that begins “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb.”

Dr. Hussman is engaged in this work by means of his foundation and other activities. I hope that my music is a small part of this healing, as well. In that spirit, here is this morning's piano improvisation, on the tune Down Ampney:

Come down, O Love divine,
seek thou this soul of mine,
and visit it with thine own ardor glowing:
O Comforter, draw near,
within my heart appear,
and kindle it, thy holy flame bestowing.
(Bianco da Siena, tr. R. Littledale)

I noted that the two halves of the tune combine with one another, so I began with this. About halfway through, I sought to imitate one of the things that Vaughan Williams (the composer of Down Ampney) did in his Fantasia on a Theme of Tallis: the echo effects between large ensemble and small. And the ending was explicitly in homage to that great work, one that has changed my life as much as any piece of music can.

Of Trees, Guerrilla Gardening, and Bach

Not long ago, I compared the organ or piano prelude to the opera overture. It can introduce music that will be heard later, but most of all it is the first voice speaking into the silence, establishing the spiritual framework. In the liturgy, the prelude has a major role in telling the people where they are in the church year.

Today, the Seventh Sunday of Easter and the Sunday after Ascension Day, is a gentle day that is filled with joy, and the Bach prelude that I offered captures the spirit of the day. It is a trio, and I find such music extremely difficult. But working on it makes me a better organist (I hope!).

Bach: Chorale Prelude on Herr Jesu Christ, dich zu uns wend (BWV 655)

I will also post our Anthem, which was a setting of verses from Psalm 1 by the composer Amy Scurria: And he shall be like a tree

Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. But his delight is in the law of the Lord; and in his law doth he meditate date and night. And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper. (Psalm 1:1-3)

There appears to be only one other YouTube performance of this anthem, and ours is quite different from the other: sufficient reason to post it.


Several times during the day, I passed a lonely seedling in its plastic starter container. It was on a table in the undercroft, where someone must have forgotten it.”Lavender,” the little plastic stick said, and the leaves had its distinctive aroma. The little thing was perhaps two inches tall. No one (except me, and some of the jazz students) will likely come that way until next weekend. Without water, without light... I could not leave it to die.

So, after Compline and organ practice, I took it into the church courtyard as night fell, found a trowel, and planted it, watering it from an empty lemonade bottle. I chose a place where I hope it can get established before The Powers That Be discover it. They might rip it out and destroy it; I would not be at all surprised. But I have given it a chance.

There was a time when I gardened. Today was the first time I have set a seedling into the ground for better than fifteen years. That is something I have sacrificed to be here. For a while I hoped that we could someday retire to The Farm, back in the mountains. I daydreamed of planting chestnuts on the hills where they were once the dominant tree, taking a part in the restoration of Castanea dentata to its proper place in the forest. The years have passed, and with it any realistic possibility of doing such things.

But “we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory.” (Aragorn son of Arathorn).

St. Francis, and the End of the World

Piano improvisation on the tune Llanfair (Hail the day that sees him rise)

Lord, beyond our mortal sight,
raise our hearts to reach thy height,
there thy face unclouded see,
find our heaven of heavens in thee.

William Mathias (1934-92)

I am not sure that he is a great composer, but he was very good, a solid and productive craftsman, and I always enjoy his music. This “Postlude” (played in today's service) is typical – it is cheerful, to the point, and remains as delightful today as it was when he wrote it fifty-plus years ago – probably on commission from his publisher for their “Album of Postludes” by various composers. It is the only piece from this Album that I still play.

One summer towards the end of his life, Dr. Mathias was the music director for the Montreat Worship and Music Conference. I and about six hundred others in the adult choir sang with him for a week; much of what we did was his own music. We did his most famous choral work, “Let the people praise thee, O God,” which was written for the Royal Wedding (no, not William and Kate; the other one, William's parents in 1981); we sang “As truly as God is our Father,” and quite a few others.

I will also link here to his anthem “The doctrine of wisdom,” which I described in last Sunday's essay.

He was a marvelously prolific composer. In this essay by his daughter Rhiannon (from which the photographs in the YouTube clip are taken), she recounts that he would go to his studio and work every night after supper until the wee hours. One of the photos depicts this: Mathias hard at work, piles of music and papers all around him.

During that week at Montreat, I had only one opportunity to speak to him in a receiving line, and all I could do was stammer a few words of appreciation. I wish I could have found better words to thank him. He had the misfortune to live and work at a time when classical music was supposed to be arcane, dissonant, ugly – and he wrote in a manner that people could readily comprehend, with tunes and common-practice triads and infectiously delightful rhythms. So, I think that many of his academic colleagues misunderstood him and dismissed his work. There are few composers of the 1970's and 80's whose work I would now listen to: Messiaen, Howells, Kenneth Leighton, Mathias – and that is about it. Of the four, Messiaen is certainly the greatest – but Mathias is the most approachable.

Finish then thy new creation

One more clip from last Sunday: the piano improvisation from the middle service.

It is based on two of the hymns from the service, both of them by Charles Wesley:

Love divine, all loves excelling,
joy of heav'n, to earth come down,
fix in us thy humble dwelling,
all thy faithful mercies crown.
Jesus, thou art all compassion,
pure, unbounded love thou art;
visit us with thy salvation,
enter ev'ry trembling heart.

And the second:

Come away to the skies,
my beloved, arise
and rejoice in the day thou wast born;
on this festival day,
come exulting away,
and with singing to Zion return.

I think it turned out pretty well – better in its way than the Bach Toccata that I played at the evensong. The latter is of course much greater music, but was perhaps more than I should have attempted.

Still, we press on, strengthened by Hope that we will one day be completed, our songs no longer prone to failures of every sort.

Finish then thy new creation;
pure and spotless let us be;
let us see thy great salvation
perfectly revealed in thee:
changed from glory into glory,
till in heav'n we take our place,
till we cast our crowns before thee,
lost in wonder, love, and praise.

Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue

As organist, my last opportunity to make a musical statement about the Resurrection of Christ was at the Great Vigil, when I played the Pièce d'Orgue. I had hoped to learn and play the Bach Prelude and Fugue in D major for the May 3 Evensong, but that did not come anywhere close to happening; I did not even get it fingered. So I did the next best thing that I could: the Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C major, BWV 564, which Hermann Keller describes as “stylistically one of the most remarkable, and technically one of the most brilliant works by Bach.”

I played this in 2011, so it had a fairly good fingering – though I found a few more places this time where I could get the thumbs off the black notes. That led to one mistake in the fugue, highlighting the rule “Drill for skill, because under stress you regress” (I have heard this attributed to the football coach Vince Lombardi, but I cannot confirm it. Whatever its source, it is certainly true.) For one measure about halfway through the fugue; I found that a revised fingering made the passage easier to play by getting the thumb on a white note instead of the black. I rehearsed it that way every time in my preparation – but in the playing of it for the liturgy, I fell back into the old fingering from 2011. Of course, I had not practiced that fingering, so I could not play the passage! But enough of that; the other errors (there are many) are plain ordinary Wrong Notes.

If the Pièce d'Orgue reflects Bach's mastery of the French musical idiom of the day, the Toccata, Adagio and Fugue reflects his familiarity with both the North German and Italian styles. As Keller said, I do not think that there is another composition of Bach that is quite like this one. In some respects, the Italian Concerto (BWV 971, for harpsichord) comes close, but great as that piece is, I prefer the Toccata, Adagio and Fugue.

The artwork for the YouTube clip: two works from the Orthodox tradition. First, The Son of God (Viktor Vasnetsov, 1848-1926)
Notice the four Living Creatures (Revelation 4:6-8 and following)

Icon of the Mother of God (Yov Kondzelevych, 1705)
I love the expressions, especially the Child's, and it is interesting to see one of the most traditional of Icons expressed in a baroque idiom.

Trust in the Lord with all thine heart

Once a year, our Youth Choir joins the Adult Choir for Choral Evensong. It is, in my opinion, the most musically important service of the year, for it is always a first introduction to Choral Evensong for some of the choristers – this year, ten of them, almost half of the Youth Choir and more than half of the trebles. I wrote of this at considerable length last year after the equivalent service,so I will not repeat myself.

Instead, I will say that I am very proud of them – the first-year choristers for making it through the service (which any practitioner of Evensong knows is not a trivial accomplishment), and the more experienced choristers for their leadership. Several times I saw them help the new singers find the next piece when they lost their place, and musically, it is these second-and-third year (and beyond) choristers who carry the sound and make it possible for us to sing this music.

And the adults. On this night, we had one adult tenor, joined by Max from the youth choir; two adult basses plus Tom (from the youth choir), four altos (and the Smith Responses are alto divisi), three adult sopranos. Their patience with this work – dare I say, their delight in doing it alongside their younger companions – also makes it possible.

And Jean L., who directed about half of the choral music and played the organ on the other half. She is a terrific musician and it is a pleasure and honor to work with her. And Rev'd Judith for her fine sermon, five minutes or so in length and thoroughly appropriate to the occasion and the hearers, many of them young.

I write this two days later, on Tuesday; I can still hardly bring myself to move on with preparations for next Sunday, for my heart is still in the Evensong.


There are several musical items from Sunday that are worth posting; my organ prelude for the Evensong went well, and for those who follow my piano improvisations, I will post that also. I might post the voluntaries and perhaps a hymn from Sunday morning's choral service. And I want to post the Psalm from evensong, which merits some consideration on its own account [Edit: I decided to not post the Psalm. But Psalm 18 does merit discussion someday]. But for today, I have two items from the choral music, each with its reason.

First, the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis: the setting in A major by Herbert Sumsion. There are rough edges, for sure; but in my thoroughly biased opinion, once one gets past that, one can hear the Music. I hope that you will hear the choir's enthusiastic commitment to the sound.

One reason I post this would be that there are surprisingly few versions of it on YouTube. Here is one of the few, for an example of how it sounds with an excellent choir: Guildford Cathedral in a 1959 performance directed by a twenty-five year old Barry Rose, who later went from Guildford to St. Paul's, London for ten years, and much other significant work since then.

As for the other, it is our anthem: “The Doctrine of Wisdom,” by William Mathias.

I cannot find any recordings of this on YouTube, which is sufficient reason for us to remedy that. It was difficult for our choir, and (again) there are rough edges throughout. But I was determined that we sing it; the text fit the first of the Evensong lessons (Wisdom of Solomon 7:22—8:1), and I wanted very much for the choristers to know this verse, for times when they will need it later on:

Trust in the Lord with all thine heart;
and lean not unto thine own understanding.
In all thy ways acknowledge him,
and he shall direct thy paths.

“Mr. Cassie, were you crying?” one of the choristers asked me at the reception. When they got to these verses, I was indeed.

[The photos in the clip are from last year's choir, for I do not have any pictures of this year's group. There are fewer adults nowadays, and many more trebles.]


Two footnotes:

I welcome Thomas Radnai and Judith Crossett as subscribers to the YouTube channel. Judith is my friend and fellow choral singer at RSCM courses for many years, as well as a Deacon in our parish and in my opinion the best preacher of any of our clergy.

Thomas Radnai is an organist in Hungary, and he has his own channel devoted to organ music, to which I have linked a few times in these pages. I encourage you to visit it.

I am old enough to be amazed by the manner in which the internet has brought people together from around the world. I do not speak or read Hungarian, and I do not know if Thomas speaks English. But we share a love of music, the King of Instruments, and especially the music of Bach.

Secondly: I have sometimes puzzled over why Choral Evensong is so important, and means more to me than (say) choral concerts, as wonderful as they may be, or even the Holy Eucharist, which by rights should be the most important of liturgies. Worries about this year's RSCM course have brought these thoughts to the foreground; our repertoire packet does not include settings of the Preces and Responses or the Canticles. I understand and accept that we are not by any means all Episcopalians – more than half of those who attend the Course are from other faith traditions, and these specifically Episcopal/Anglican items are of little practical use to them. So perhaps it is time for us to do something else at the evening service on Saturday, and that may be the direction we are headed this year. This is only a guess, based on the repertoire list (which is excellent; there is plenty of music that will be a joy to sing).

But I think it is precisely because of the Preces and Responses, the Psalmody, and the Canticles that Evensong is special, and why it is such a challenge to a choir, which in turn makes them a better choir than they would otherwise be. I will say more on this soon when I post Psalm 18, but for now, I note that these things require a high degree of concentration (the Psalmody most of all), attentive listening to one another, and spiritual focus – all in ways that concert music does not, nor the Eucharist.