The Evensong was at the Chapel of Duke University, a place I once knew well. I had intended to listen to a few minutes of it as I worked in the office. That intention lasted through the organ preludes – two of them, one on each of the big instruments in that room. Then came the procession, to an organ improvisation. Watching the choristers come down the aisle was overwhelming; I was an emotional wreck, and they had not even begun to sing.
For many years, I took girls to this Course when it was at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta with services at St. Phillip’s Cathedral. We would load up in the church’s fifteen-passenger Blue Van, an old Ford that had seen its better days, and off we would go down the highway and over the mountains. Among all of these accomplished choristers (and directors), we felt like country bumpkins, for our little program back in Tennessee was not at the standard of places like St. Phillip’s, or some of the other churches who sent choristers. Many of the churches from those days are represented at this year’s course, though not the place where I served. One of the first acts of my successors was to dismantle the RSCM program and replace it with a more traditional graded-choir program. Nonetheless, three of my girls went to the next summer’s Atlanta course on their own, and sent me a photo. I still have it.
I learned a lot at this Course, and its companion Course for boys at Christ Church, Charlotte. It was in these weeks that I became a real Choirmaster, from the example of the music directors and choristers in their work together. I took copious notes – I still have these, too. I went home with my girls and boys and we all tried to live up to the standard of what we had experienced. Year by year, little by little, we became a better choir.
That remains my experience, and I think that of our choristers here in Iowa. And year by year, little by little, we are becoming a better choir.
Three weeks from now, it is our turn: Choral Evensong at First Presbyterian Church, Kirkwood on Saturday, July 23 and Mass at the Basilica of Saint Louis the next morning.
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Tomorrow is July 4, Independence Day for this country. One year at the Atlanta Course, which has always been pretty much at this time of the summer, Independence Day was near the end of the week. There at Agnes Scott, we had an outdoor barbecue for the occasion. It was relaxed, one of those long summer evenings in Georgia which are like nothing else under the sun. The girls were carrying on like choristers do at every Course, having a great time. One of the teenagers was telling her friends how she had sung the National Anthem at an Atlanta Braves baseball game a few weeks before. She talked about how scared she was, vomiting in the bathroom shortly before she went out to sing, just her by herself in front of all those thousands of people, unaccompanied. “It went like this,” she said, and she started to sing…
O, say can you seeEveryone became quiet as they realized what was happening, some of us standing up, then all of us. She was no longer simply hanging out with her friends; it was suddenly Real. We all listened as she sang, her clear voice ringing through the courtyard.
By the dawn’s early light…
It is hard to be patriotic. Most of the time, for most of us, July 4 is little more than a day for a cookout and some fireworks, a day off from work. But there is something more to it. That evening in Atlanta, we all felt it.
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave?
Today we had a service of readings and hymns for Independence Day. I was not looking forward to it; coming back from a vacation, I ended up with one day’s preparation, and even for that, I had trouble dragging myself upstairs to the bench to do the work. Worst of all, I had committed to improvising a prelude.
Nothing would come. Partly, it was rustiness from the time off, but partly, my heart was not in it. I did not want to do any of these hymns; I did not want to even show up for church the next day.
But this morning found me on the bench, bright and early. After practicing the hymns, I worked at the organ for an hour or so on the improvisation, searching for ideas. People started to arrive, so I moved downstairs to the piano in the choir room. Still, I had nothing more than a vague plan: “America the beautiful” (which was the opening hymn) in G dorian/minor moving to major. But it was going a little better at the piano than it had at the organ.
It was not until I was upstairs, putting on my organ shoes, that I knew what to do; I went to the piano instead of the organ.
I began to play. And I began to think of what I had seen over the last fortnight -- the places I had visited out East, and in Springfield, Illinois… I thought of Mr. Lincoln, sitting in the telegraph office at the White House brooding over the casualty lists coming in from places like Chickamauga and the Wilderness and Cold Harbor. I thought of Mr. Lee, resting in his tomb down at Lexington. I thought of the soldiers at the Chosin Reservoir that December of 1950, the temperatures more than thirty below zero, outnumbered four to one as the “volunteers” from the People’s Liberation Army came at them in human wave assaults.
Most Americans have forgotten that war, which may be the finest and noblest thing that we have done as a nation, fighting alongside the South Koreans and our United Nations allies -- the British, the Canadians, the Australians, many others -- a brigade from Turkey played a key role at Chosin. But this day, I remembered. This was for them, and for Mr. Lincoln, and Mr. Lee, and all those men of both sides at Chickamauga and the Wilderness and Cold Harbor, and all the others, right down to the present. They cared about this country, and we ought to care a little bit, too.
It is not a great recording; the microphone was positioned by the organ instead of underneath the piano as it usually is for the pieces that I post. But here it is.
I hope that it evidences one of the lessons I learned from RSCM Courses, more from the choristers than the directors and adults – connection. I heard it this afternoon in the singing of the choristers at the Duke Chapel, and I felt it this morning in the improvisation, a lot more than I expected. Connection does not always communicate to the listeners, but a lack of connection certainly will.
One of the photos on the YouTube track is obvious. The other will not be to most: It is Lt. Col. Don Carlos Faith, Jr., commanding the unit RCT-31 in the Chosin Reservoir campaign (after his superior officer had been killed). I like it that after being presented with a Silver Star on the battlefield after days of heavy fighting, he threw it into the snow in disgust upon being ordered to continue the offensive. And then he went on and kept his unit intact though surrounded by six Chinese regiments. He died at Hill 1221, leading an assault on a Chinese position blocking their only possible escape route. But RCT-31 did finally get through, complete with their hundreds of wounded, a point on which Faith was most insistent. He was presented with a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor.
Improvisation on “Materna”
July 3, 2016
Photos: Lincoln Memorial
Lt. Col. Don C. Faith, Jr.
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