Vierne, Wesley, and Sunday Surprises

When I was getting started at the organ many years ago, Martha L. pointed me in good directions: the American Guild of Organists, and the annual Presbyterian Conference on Worship and Music at the Montreat conference center. More than that, she and her family welcomed me as a young friend, a frequent dinner guest, and helped me in many ways for all of the time I lived in that area. Years later when I was organist/director of a church a few hours’ drive from her, she used to sometimes pick up my mother on the way and bring her down for the Sunday morning service and a visit.

She has remained one of my best friends, though our paths have since led in different directions and we are not regularly in touch – much more my fault than hers.

She has asked that I play the Vierne Final at her funeral. I will certainly do this, in regard for her friendship.

I first heard this at one of the Montreat conferences, in her company, played splendidly by Marilyn Keiser, who was the organist that year. I learned the piece myself, and played it often for many years.

But not recently, not in close to twenty years, and definitely not on the Pilcher, which is not well suited to the piece. Still, I wanted to have it in readiness for the day when I will need to play it for Martha and her family. It needed a careful fingering, and it needed to be almost entirely re-learned.

At the Vigil, it went well. I am hesitant to post it on YouTube because there are thousands of versions already there, but perhaps my version can be an example of making it work on an unlikely instrument. I am encouraged by the second photograph in the clip, which is Vierne playing an instrument similar in size to our little Pilcher. The first photo would be a more suitable instrument for this music; I think it is the Cavaille-Coll at Notre Dame de Paris, where he was organist from 1900 to his death in 1937. Here is the clip.

The anthem for the Vigil was “Blessed be the God and Father” by Samuel Sebastian Wesley. We sang this at last summer’s RSCM Course; we sang it a few years ago at Judith’s ordination; and it has been one of my favorites for many years. I had not considered it an Easter anthem until I thought about the text: of course it is!

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which according to his abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. (I Peter 1:3)

Listening to the recording, it is not so good as I had thought at the time, not as good as we did it at the RSCM Course. But it is still very good, perhaps as good as we can do it with the choir watching their organist/conductor through a little mirror. Here it is.

There is a whopper of a mistake by the organist (me) at the transition to the final section, the big B flat dominant seventh chord. I played it on the Swell instead of the Great! Dumb, unforced error. I made the best of it and played the chord again on the Great, and off we went with the fughetta: “The Word of the Lord endureth forever.”

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I do not like Easter Day. No, that is not quite true, for I love Easter Matins, when we get Psalms 148, 149, and 150, the “Christ our Passover” invitatory, the return of the Te Deum, and the Prologue to the Gospel according to St. John. And, above almost any other service of the year, Easter Evensong, when we get the account of the Road to Emmaus, and one can at last have a relaxed and prayerful time, for the first time since Last Epiphany.

But the three morning Eucharists? Not so much. It is more a matter of getting through them without disaster.

On this one Sunday of the year, I play hymns for the 7:45 Eucharist, which is normally a spoken “Eight O’Clock” service. I took communion with these people, whom I love and rarely see.

And I found myself with an unexpected bit of Music. Instead of the service bumping up against the 9:00, there was almost a half-hour in between. Enough time for a prelude, which I had not planned to play. I was at the organ, to more properly play the opening hymn (Jesus Christ is risen today), so I improvised on it. It is better if I prepare for improvisations, as I have described in these pages, but one of the reasons for preparing improvisations is to develop enough facility to play when one is not prepared, beyond Knowing the Tune (and I certainly know Easter Hymn, the tune for Jesus Christ is risen today). That went well, and I found myself enjoying the service after all – as with the Vigil, I was drawn into it in spite of myself. Here, it was the people. I looked out and saw many of our choristers and their families, including some who are no longer in the choir and who rarely come to church. And it was my privilege to help them sing the Easter hymns and rejoice in the resurrection of our mighty Lord and God.

At the 11:00, there came the moment I had feared – something had dropped between the cracks. The Eucharistic Prayer was underway, and I saw that I did not have the accompaniment for the Fraction Anthem, a setting of “Christ our Passover” by Jeffrey Rickard. I knew exactly where it was – in the stack of music from the Great Vigil (where we had sung it), sitting on my clavichord downstairs. But I was boxed in at the organ, with violoncello and bass to my left, and could go downstairs only by walking across the chancel in front of the Altar, with Eucharistic Prayer in full flight. And there was probably not time for that. The melody was in the bulletin, so I harmonized it from that.

There were other interesting moments, such as discovering that I was playing “The strife is o’er” in D major while the brass had it in E flat – we ran out of time in the warmup and did not run that one. I played merrily along, sensing only that things were slightly out of round, while the brass players whispered among themselves and managed to transpose their parts for the final two stanzas. It was ultimately my mistake, not only for not rehearsing it, but for my forgetting that I had done the parts that way to put it in a more graceful key for brass, intending to play it in E flat at the organ.

We sang the hymns, we finished (as always) with the congregation singing the Hallelujah Chorus, and it was Done.


Footnotes (Wednesday morning):
This is the four hundred and first post at the Music Box. There have been some 39,000 page views, which surprises me. I send my grateful thanks to those of you who read these pages, and prayers for God’s blessings.

Another thing dropped through the cracks – the RSCM scholarship check. I had it in hand on Maundy Thursday, but it got buried on my desk (despite my work last Wednesday to sort things into priorities). And the deadline of April 1 seemed sufficiently distant to not worry too much about it – until the registrar’s e-mail showed up this morning reminding people of the deadline. I took the check to the Mailboxes place (the USPS having closed its downtown office) to see about next day delivery. That would be somewhere over $40. I settled for Priority Mail, with expected delivery on April 1, not guaranteed. That was $8.95, money that I would have saved if I had been more diligent.

I hope there are no more things of this sort Out There. I did get the quarterly ASCAP report in, and I am reasonably prepared for tonight’s rehearsals. Things are more or less back to normal.

But it is a “new normal,” perhaps. It may be that some of the disciplines I have learned this Lent (mostly from William Law) might carry over. It may be that the ten pounds I have lost since Shrove Tuesday might mostly stay off – eating a bag of Matt’s Chocolate Chip Cookies in three days is not a good start on that, but we shall see.

It may be that despite all appearances, our Lord Christ is loose in the world, making all things new. [a thank-you to Fr. Tim for this idea, in his Easter sermon]:

... there’s one more thing we need to say about what the resurrection means to us: it means that Jesus is on the loose.

They tried to nail Jesus down, but they couldn’t do it. Love is stronger than death. The power of God is stronger than all the hatred of human beings. And the risen Jesus has not abandoned us; he is still at work in the lives of people who follow him.
But you can’t summon him up like a genie in a bottle. He’s not under our control, so that we can produce him like a conjuror’s trick. When we read the stories of the risen Jesus in the gospels and the Book of Acts, it’s quite clear that no one really knew when he was going to show up. People could call on his name, but they could not make him answer. He was the one who was going to take the initiative. He was the one who would decide what he was going to do.

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