folk songs from Appalachia and Africa, Bach, and worries about Work

“I suppose you will have some time off now,” a parishioner said this morning. “It is summer, and things will slow down.”

That would be nice. I count on the summer to plan the next season, because there is no time to think beyond the next Wednesday and Sunday from mid-August through at least the Sunday of the Resurrection. And this year, a complicated funeral on Saturday of Easter Week chewed up such time as I have sometimes had that week to start planning. Then, we were into student concert season, as I have recounted: the university students, then the studios of local teachers with their younger musicians in late May. That concluded with two recitals on the afternoon of Trinity Sunday, a week ago. Along the way, I attended to music for the three Principal Feasts that I described in last Sunday's essay.

So here I am, June 7, with no hymns selected beyond next Sunday, June 14. I have contemplated this day all week with hopes of finally pressing onward, but it was not to be. I got caught up in a long after-church conversation that was necessary, but took most of an hour. Then (after dinner) I had to cut and paste a lot of music into the middle service bulletin for June 14 – that was another ninety minutes, plus a half-hour for work on the other two June 14 bulletins.

After that, I spent most of two hours copying fingerings for the Bach prelude that I hope to play a fortnight from now, the magnificent Adagio setting of Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr (BWV 662, in the Leipzig Chorales). It is one of the many pieces that I play from what I call the “Blue Dover,” that publisher's inexpensive one-volume collection of many of the important Bach chorale preludes. The copy that was my first purchased organ music and from which I worked through the Orgelbüchlein has fallen to pieces. I bought a replacement copy from Eble Music before they went under, and have been transferring fingerings from old to new as needed. It takes time.

And I worked at my IN box. Not so long ago, I cleared it to the bottom. But yesterday's AGO board meeting dumped a depressingly large pile of materials into it, to go with the two boxes of archival materials that came to me as chapter secretary within the last fortnight. I stayed with the task until it was almost too dark to pray Evensong outdoors in the courtyard – as it was, I could barely read the collects by the end of the service. It was just me and the lightning bugs, sotto voce. As I have described here, I love to sing the Offices. But I contracted a cold some three weeks ago which took away my voice. The cold is mostly gone, but my voice is not really back, not enough to get through the service. It is a helpful reminder that even music is optional; it is the thoughts and intents of the heart to which God mostly attends.

Another Sunday is past, the one day in which I can sometimes make progress on a large project – and the day did not include any planning work. Eleven Sundays remain before the first choral rehearsals in late August. Four of those Sundays are entirely taken up with events of various sorts (an ordination service, the RSCM Course, a trip to visit my sister). The other seven will have to be more productive than today. Jesu, juva.
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At the aforementioned AGO board meeting yesterday, I spoke with one of my Episcopal colleagues. He is at what amounts to our sister parish in a nearby city, similar in size to ours. I am employed full-time by the parish (the only full-time musician in the diocese); he is half-time. I think that he was envious.

Such encounters remind me that my predecessor as organist was likewise part-time, though there was also a graduate student position as children's choir director, and they make me guilty. What justification is there for the parish paying me a full-time salary with benefits?

Well... my predecessor only had one Sunday service to play. I have two. He did nothing on the bulletins, I have done quite a bit. He was onsite Wednesday evenings, Saturdays, and Sunday mornings (he had a Real Job which kept him fully occupied the rest of the time), plus their once-a-month staff meetings (we now meet every Tuesday); I am at the parish about fifty hours a week on average. He did not have the jazz department to deal with, nor did he act as house manager for other peoples' concerts -- in those days, they didn't host student recitals, and I gather that any time the church needed to be open in the evenings for an event, it was the Rector who took care of it, certainly not the part-time organist/choirmaster.

One of the things that has added itself to my work is the regular preparation of preludes for the middle service. With a fifteen-minute change in its start time last fall, there was suddenly enough space that it seemed to demand that I play something. At that service, organ literature would be out of the question; it would not fit the ethos of what the congregation wants or expects. I toyed with the idea of playing piano literature (e.g., Chopin, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven) – that would not fit, either. So, it has become my bounden duty to improvise a prelude every week. I can prepare for it and possibly play well, or not prepare and probably play badly, but either way, I must play something. It is good for me, though it has squeezed my time even further, and it has forced me to improve my skills.

My work flow has settled into a routine of devoting all the time I can spare early in the week to the organ voluntaries and anthem accompaniments for the choral service, followed by a frantic scramble to prepare the improvisation mostly on Saturday and Sunday morning (in a good week, I get some work done with it on Friday, which improves the results); all told, three or maybe four hours of preparation. I have described it elsewhere; the first and essential step is to Know the Tune(s), and such formal structure as the music has most often grows organically from that.

This time, I wanted to play Land of Rest, which we were to sing with the words “Jerusalem, my happy home.” It is an Appalachian tune, collected in Southwest Virginia not far from where I was born and raised, and in part I wanted to play it to honor Jean Ritchie, who passed away this week. (Here is the Wikipedia article about her, and here is a brief homage from my friend Fr. Tim.)


I also wanted to include the South African folk hymn with which the service would begin, Haleluya, Pelo tsa rona. I tried to put it first, with Land of Rest in the middle and Pelo tsa rona returning for an ABA form; it refused to go that way. So at the end of my Saturday work time, I ended up with a simple AB form – Land of Rest, then Pelo tsa rona, with (as it turned out this morning) just a hint of Land of Rest as a coda. Here is the piece.

I learned a useful technique to end a piece or a section from the Arnold Schoenberg book Fundamentals of Musical Composition, which I described here. I forget what he called it, but in essence you take an element from the latter part of the material and “dissolve” it (that may have been his term, now that I think of it) – repeat it with some of the aspects of it going away. Today's improvisation is a good illustration; I “dissolve” the last phrase of Land of Rest down to a six-note fragment, and finally to a two-chord cadence (about 4:34 to 4:53 in the clip), and then finish Pelo tsa rona by quickly dissolving it into its final two-chord cadence – the same two chords that ended Land of Rest (5:55 to 6:04, with the chords echoing a few more times after that).


Also, I have posted the organ piece from the choral service, the large setting of Aus tiefer Not from the Clavierübung of Bach (it is here). It is a six-voice chorale fugue: each phrase of the chorale is treated contrapuntally, with four voices in the hands, a fifth voice in the pedal – and then a sixth voice also in the pedal, as a tenor, in augmentation (note values twice as long as in the other voices). This winds up, and the next phrase receives the same treatment. It is monumentally impressive. And it is a piece where you always wish there were another big pedal stop to make the tune soar out even more. On the Pilcher, I limited the sound in the manuals to the Great plenum uncoupled, and put everything else that the organ has (Swell to pedal, and almost all of the pedal stops) onto the pedal. It is not enough. But I checked a few of the other recordings on YouTube, and I don't like any of their registrations either.

The chorale is Martin Luther's metrical setting of Psalm 130, which was part of this day's liturgy.