Just a brief note to tell you that I have posted my recording of Hugo Distler’s Sonata for organ on YouTube. It is from the May 2016 Choral Evensong, but I am only now getting around to preparing it and putting it online.
I am surprised that there are not more recordings of Distler’s organ music on YouTube. So far as I am concerned, he is the finest composer of organ and choral music in the German twentieth century. He did not live long enough to write a lot of music, which makes the things that we have all the more precious.
This work is a trio sonata, modeled more or less on Bach’s six Trio Sonatas (as opposed to, say, the organ sonatas of Mendelssohn, or the Classical era sonatas of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven).
It is an honor for me to play this, and his settings of Wachet auf and Nun komm der heiden Heiland. Most of his choral music is too hard for the choirs I have directed, but we have sung a few things. I would like to do more.
Sunday, August 28, 2016
Thursday, August 18, 2016
Work over your head
“Work over your head,” writes Steven Pressfield in his book “Turning Pro.”
It would be easier to do otherwise. Then, I might not be terrified on Sunday mornings. I cannot recall a Sunday, not in thirty years of playing, without something that was on the edge of going wrong, something that has kept me awake on Saturday night.
Weekly improvisation has made it worse. When we have practiced a written composition sufficiently, there is much that could go wrong, but it is unlikely to entirely fall apart, at least when playing from the score. An improvisation? If it goes badly, it can be memorably awful. There is no limit as to how bad it can be.
Even if it goes well, there are always aspects which could be better. Where are the beautiful lines, the harmonies, the elegance and precision of form that were effortless in practice? Instead, the voice leading is awkward, the transitions are clunky, the phrases and periods are out of proportion, even the tune slips out of control.
Postludes at the organ are the worst. I played one of them on Sunday. [Here is the link, including the closing hymn to put the improvisation into its context.] It was a tune that I do not like, but it was the closing hymn and it needed a big, loud postlude to finish it off.
I was terrified.
Somehow, I got through it more or less in accord with my plan, scribbled on a piece of staff paper: introduction based on the first phrase, going forward with the tune mostly in the pedal, a middle section on the manuals, based mostly on the third phrase with movement through some of the flat keys, a return to the tonic for a mostly straight up play-through of the tune (in the pedals) with imitative work in the manuals.
But how to finish it off? With my piano preludes, I tend toward extended codas, most often at a soft dynamic. That is partly by preference, but I have found the coda to be useful because it is flexible. It can be long, short, or absent without harming the overall form. That allows me to finish the piece precisely at 9:00 a.m. For this postlude, a gentle ending would not do. I consider the final phrase of the hymn tune to be its weakest point, which was all the more reason that the improvisation needed a big ending.
Even the greatest of composers sometimes have difficulty with the big ending -- Bruckner, for one, whose endings can be among the most majestic of all but sometimes (I think) fail to carry off the grandeur of his intent -- but even (once or twice) Beethoven, and perhaps Bach -- I have never been happy with the ending of the Piece d’Orgue, for example. How does one make it sufficiently weighty to finish the piece, without bombast? In my practice this week, the ending was never satisfactory. I focused on it with my Saturday practice, striving to keep it short, and I think that it was still a bit overdone in the actuality on Sunday.
But it could have been worse. There was a chance that it could have been as bad as it was in some of my practicing.
I wish I could do it like Mozart. Earlier this month I had occasion to play his piano sonata, KV 545 in C major, as the prelude for a funeral. It is not a piece that is “big” in any dimension; it is gentle, playful in the closing rondo, but never loud. The endings of the three movements are simple, and absolutely right. When he is working on a larger scale, his endings are no less perfect. It may be that the ensemble that finishes off Act Two of Figaro is the most perfect ending in all of music, not only in itself but in relation to the rest of the opera. [The linked performance here is faulty in some technical respects, but the singers are among the finest, starting with Hermann Prey and Dietrich Fischer-Diskau, with Karl Böhm and the Vienna Philharmonic]
I studied the finale as a project while in graduate school, my admiration increasing all the while. The pacing, the tonal structure, the manner in which one by one all of the characters appear, all the tangled comic threads of plot are brought together, and the buildup of intensity… Oh, to make music like that!
My work will never be at that level. But I would like to make music with integrity on the scale that is appropriate to my place and time, whether it is in performance of music by others, or my improvisations and hymn playing. That will not happen if I play it safe.
Footnote:
I was not kind to the hymntune, which appears in only one hymnal, the Hymnal 1982 of the Episcopal Church – the one we use. I must say more, because the composer, Erik Routley, was one of my teachers, and it was named for another, James Litton.
I wrote of Dr. Routley here, and cannot speak too highly of him. Few people have been more important to me. But I do not think that this tune is among his best. For that, one might look at Augustine, for the George Herbert text “Let all the world in every corner sing” (H-82, number 402) or Woodbury for the Charles Wesley text “Come, O thou Traveler unknown” (H-82, number 639).
It would be easier to do otherwise. Then, I might not be terrified on Sunday mornings. I cannot recall a Sunday, not in thirty years of playing, without something that was on the edge of going wrong, something that has kept me awake on Saturday night.
Weekly improvisation has made it worse. When we have practiced a written composition sufficiently, there is much that could go wrong, but it is unlikely to entirely fall apart, at least when playing from the score. An improvisation? If it goes badly, it can be memorably awful. There is no limit as to how bad it can be.
Even if it goes well, there are always aspects which could be better. Where are the beautiful lines, the harmonies, the elegance and precision of form that were effortless in practice? Instead, the voice leading is awkward, the transitions are clunky, the phrases and periods are out of proportion, even the tune slips out of control.
Postludes at the organ are the worst. I played one of them on Sunday. [Here is the link, including the closing hymn to put the improvisation into its context.] It was a tune that I do not like, but it was the closing hymn and it needed a big, loud postlude to finish it off.
I was terrified.
Somehow, I got through it more or less in accord with my plan, scribbled on a piece of staff paper: introduction based on the first phrase, going forward with the tune mostly in the pedal, a middle section on the manuals, based mostly on the third phrase with movement through some of the flat keys, a return to the tonic for a mostly straight up play-through of the tune (in the pedals) with imitative work in the manuals.
But how to finish it off? With my piano preludes, I tend toward extended codas, most often at a soft dynamic. That is partly by preference, but I have found the coda to be useful because it is flexible. It can be long, short, or absent without harming the overall form. That allows me to finish the piece precisely at 9:00 a.m. For this postlude, a gentle ending would not do. I consider the final phrase of the hymn tune to be its weakest point, which was all the more reason that the improvisation needed a big ending.
Even the greatest of composers sometimes have difficulty with the big ending -- Bruckner, for one, whose endings can be among the most majestic of all but sometimes (I think) fail to carry off the grandeur of his intent -- but even (once or twice) Beethoven, and perhaps Bach -- I have never been happy with the ending of the Piece d’Orgue, for example. How does one make it sufficiently weighty to finish the piece, without bombast? In my practice this week, the ending was never satisfactory. I focused on it with my Saturday practice, striving to keep it short, and I think that it was still a bit overdone in the actuality on Sunday.
But it could have been worse. There was a chance that it could have been as bad as it was in some of my practicing.
I wish I could do it like Mozart. Earlier this month I had occasion to play his piano sonata, KV 545 in C major, as the prelude for a funeral. It is not a piece that is “big” in any dimension; it is gentle, playful in the closing rondo, but never loud. The endings of the three movements are simple, and absolutely right. When he is working on a larger scale, his endings are no less perfect. It may be that the ensemble that finishes off Act Two of Figaro is the most perfect ending in all of music, not only in itself but in relation to the rest of the opera. [The linked performance here is faulty in some technical respects, but the singers are among the finest, starting with Hermann Prey and Dietrich Fischer-Diskau, with Karl Böhm and the Vienna Philharmonic]
I studied the finale as a project while in graduate school, my admiration increasing all the while. The pacing, the tonal structure, the manner in which one by one all of the characters appear, all the tangled comic threads of plot are brought together, and the buildup of intensity… Oh, to make music like that!
In my opinion, each number in Figaro is a miracle; it is totally beyond me how anyone could create anything so perfect; nothing like it was ever done again, not even by Beethoven (Johannes Brahms, quoted in Wikipedia, s.v. “The Marriage of Figaro”)Another example, one that we sang last season, is the “Worthy is the Lamb” which concludes Handel’s Messiah (see Here, and Here). It is enormous (especially the Amen) and it could not be any less without falling short in relation to the oratorio as a whole, to say nothing of its great Subject. When the trumpets come in with the stretto on the final page, the sopranos and trebles singing the final fugal entrance that begins on high A, swooping down an octave and a half to the low D, any listener who is paying attention is carried right up to the heavenly places. Or there is the ending of Bach’s “St. Anne” Fugue, which I played twice for funerals in the last fortnight. The manner in which the voice in the tenor soars up through the alto in the final cadence to finish on the B flat is extraordinary. Every time, it is as if my spirit is soaring up with it into the eternal dance of the Trinity.
My work will never be at that level. But I would like to make music with integrity on the scale that is appropriate to my place and time, whether it is in performance of music by others, or my improvisations and hymn playing. That will not happen if I play it safe.
Footnote:
I was not kind to the hymntune, which appears in only one hymnal, the Hymnal 1982 of the Episcopal Church – the one we use. I must say more, because the composer, Erik Routley, was one of my teachers, and it was named for another, James Litton.
I wrote of Dr. Routley here, and cannot speak too highly of him. Few people have been more important to me. But I do not think that this tune is among his best. For that, one might look at Augustine, for the George Herbert text “Let all the world in every corner sing” (H-82, number 402) or Woodbury for the Charles Wesley text “Come, O thou Traveler unknown” (H-82, number 639).
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