The teacher was a classical saxophonist in the doctoral program; he graduated a few years ago, after years of the saxophone quartet that he headed rehearsing here at the church. This afternoon’s event was his spring studio recital. After the students had left and I had locked the doors, he got out his own instrument and played in the church. I stood outside in the courtyard, singing Evensong with the fireflies, the light streaming through the stained glass from inside the church. The last daylight faded, the first stars appeared.
Eventually, he found me and, like the pianist, shook my hand and thanked me. “This place is so beautiful,” he said, looking back at the church. “There isn’t another acoustic like this anywhere around.”
Ascension, Whitsunday, Trinity Sunday – all past. The choirs are on summer holiday, after one final gathering this past Wednesday. This week, since Trinity, remained full, thanks to yesterday’s wedding. This afternoon, I finished the 2015-16 planning cycle, pencilling the last voluntaries into my planning book, ordering the choral music for the youth choir’s fall season.
One of our adult choristers has moved to Virginia; he was back today, here for the weekend to load his possessions into a U-Haul. He has joined the choir of a big-time Episcopal church. And he said “the choir out there is larger. But we sing just as well as they do, and better on the Anglican chant.”
I resist the thought that somehow, this choir in this Midwestern town could possibly become a “big-time” program, the sort of place that I have always looked to for an example of how to Do It Right. We don’t have the paid singers that a major league choir would have; we have some choristers who would not pass an audition. We have an overworked organist/director who cannot devote enough time to either part of his job. The youth choir has just one rehearsal a week when all the articles in the journals say that you must have at least two, and that they must sing for church every Sunday. And half of our choristers aren’t even there for the whole rehearsal – they have other activities, and I often think that choir comes last on their list.
I cannot see how we could be an example to anyone; there must be better examples wherever one might want to find them. But here we are. If nothing else, we might be an example of working within what is possible, and allowing the music of this place to develop in its own direction – that would include my own work as an organist and pianist. I never expected that I would be improvising piano preludes every Sunday, and finding it one of the most challenging and satisfying parts of my work.
And I never dared hope that I could have a rehearsal like this past Wednesday. The choristers who are going to this summer’s RSCM course gathered for an afternoon read-through of the music. They sailed through it all, finding none of it particularly difficult. Five of them: three teen girls, a changing-voice alto (maybe; he might still be a second treble in July), a young tenor. The alto said “After the Handel Amen, this stuff isn’t so hard.” That was not at all to look down on the course music; they loved it, and recognized what it would take to prepare it. But they were not intimidated by it.
They refused to take a break; they wanted to keep on singing, seeing the time slip away. And they asked for another rehearsal.
The rehearsal ended, and I walked with friends over to the Mill (the local venue for Good Music), where youth choir families and some of the adult choir were gathering for an end-of-year celebration, eating and drinking and listening to the local bluegrass band. Some of the young choristers took to the dance floor alongside the elderly couples, one lady (probably in her eighties) in her red spangled blouse that has probably been her dancing outfit for fifty years, she and her husband having as much fun as the children. We stayed for hours, sitting and talking and enjoying the evening. I love these people; they are like family to me.
Cantare amantis est.
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The selection of music for upcoming weeks and months is the first part of a trinity, a “sub-creation” that is in its limited way a mirror, an icon of the Maker of all things in whose image we are made. I quoted this from Dorothy Sayers just a few weeks ago, after having noted it here:
For every work [or act] of creation is threefold, an earthly trinity to match the heavenly.
First [not in time, but merely in order of enumeration] there is the Creative Idea, passionless, timeless, beholding the whole work complete at once, the end in the beginning: and this is the image of the Father.
Second, there is the Creative Energy [or Activity] begotten of that idea, working in time from the beginning to the end, with sweat and passion, being incarnate in the bonds of matter: and this is the image of the Word.
Third, there is the Creative Power, the meaning of the work and its response in the lively soul: and this is the image of the indwelling Spirit.
And these three are one, each equally in itself the whole work, whereof none can exist without other: and this is the image of the Trinity.
The selection of music is the Creative Idea. And most years, there are a few points where the insight of what will work on a given Sunday overwhelms me, every bit as much as it actual performance might.
For today’s work, it was the Fourth Sunday of Advent, Year A: December 18, 2016. Chapter one of the Gospel according to St. Matthew, with supporting lessons from Isaiah and Romans, and Psalm 80. I needed something for the youth choir to sing that day, for that is the one day in Advent that will work for their schedule. I was thinking small, what with Christmas Eve around the corner – until it hit me: “O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion…”
They could sing the alto “solo.” I took it to the piano and sang it through myself; some of it is a little low for trebles, but I am guessing that we will have boys for whom this will be ideal, and with them singing up in the alto/falsetto range alongside the girls and treble boys, it will be a beautiful and unique sound, a bit like the male alto in the linked recording. And then the adults can join them on the SATB section at the end.
It will be just right, exactly what needs to be said at that point in the liturgy, in the year, and in the development of these choirs and the life of this parish. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I wrote it into the planning calendar, “beholding the whole work complete at once.”
Arise, shine, for thy light is come.
And the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.
It is a Gift to live in the Creative Idea for an afternoon, most of it working with organ voluntaries (for the adult schedule, hymnody, and psalmody are already in place; all that remained were the voluntaries and the youth choir). There are other moments where the Idea was overwhelming: the Stanford Te Deum in B flat with the adults for the Sunday in October when we have Choral Matins, the youth choir in September singing Alice Parker’s arrangement of “Be thou my vision” with (I hope) the string players drawn from the choir itself. And quite a few things in the organ music.
Now I, and all of us, will have to learn these things. It will take work, lots of it, “with sweat and passion, being incarnate in the bonds of matter. And this is the image of the Word.”
And then the Creative Power, the effect of this music in the hearts of those who hear it, as well as those who sing it.
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