Church Music: an essay

A lot of young church musicians do not survive the transition from school to church. Some of the fault is with the way organists and choral musicians are trained. They are schooled almost exclusively toward the goal of becoming the finest performers possible at the organ, and toward working with highly skilled young adult choristers, all of them with fabulous voices and quick and active minds. They sing and play only the finest literature; the pipe organs at their disposal are of the highest quality. They work at minutiae to bring their work to the highest possible standard. Unless they are very fortunate, they learn very little about working with children, or with teenagers, or with amateur adult singers of all ages, more elderly than otherwise. They learn nothing about "contemporary music" (meaning “anything with guitars”) except that it is to be avoided at all costs. They learn nothing about working with difficult clergy or parishioners, which probably is the downfall of more young church musicians than any other factor.

****

You graduate. You get a part-time position in a typical parish. The organ is a Baldwin electronic, circa 1970, with several of the pedal contacts corroded into dysfunction. The choir is, well, a typical parish choir: let's say eight persons, one of whom is under the age of sixty. There is one baritone who can sing tenor, sort of, in a pinch -- but he works every other Sunday morning. There is one other bass, age seventy-six, who has had three heart attacks and now has a large, wobbly voice because his cardiovascular fitness is barely enough to allow him to walk into the choir room. And he does not see very well. The other six are women. One of them played clarinet in her high school band (that was in the 1950's), so she reads music, sort of. The others all sing "by ear." Sort of.

A variety of vocal and other problems are in evidence; "white" tone, bleaty vibratos, no head voice. One woman has vocal nodules (as it proved) which she got, she tells you, from when she was in a mental hospital after her husband died "and I screamed, night and day." Another woman (the one who is under sixty) is epileptic, and more likely to have a seizure when she is stressed -- like, for example, in the middle of the anthem during the Christmas Eve service the previous year.

Since you have never worked with any singer who has any vocal problems whatsoever, you are at a loss. You want the choir to sound like your college choir, which had sung the B Minor Mass that spring before graduation. You want to do music like that: Bach and Palestrina and Schutz and Byrd and Tallis and all the rest. But the music library consists entirely of illegal Xeroxes, and one of your first moves is a day of carting it all off to the recycling depot.

"We would like a children's choir." That is what they told you in the interview, and is one of the reasons you accepted the position, for you studied the RSCM method at college and observed the excellent choral program at the local Episcopal parish near the campus. They neglected to mention that there are currently no children in the parish. None. There is not one soul in the parish under the age of thirty-five. And the community, a small Pennsylvania town, is dying; unemployment is near twenty percent, and anyone who was able moved away years ago, so there is not a plethora of children anywhere in town.

"Hmmm.... I guess I'll have to put that on the back burner, for now."

And here comes Sunday morning with that Baldwin. You have never played an electronic organ, much less one of that vintage -- early transistor/printed circuit, where every "stop" sounds pretty much the same, and pushing down a whole row of stop tabs does little to change the sound, either in volume or timbre. You pull out the Bach Orgelbuchlein; it sounds horrible. You try a Mendelssohn sonata movement: ditto.

You are, again, at a loss.

I will spare you a discussion of the Vicar, who is entirely innocent of any sound training or experience in liturgy, homiletics, or, most of all, music -- though he considers himself an expert in all of these fields. His idea of good church music is "On Eagles' Wings." His idea of good liturgy is when he "improvises" the Eucharistic prayer, or "paraphrases" the Gospel reading from memory, leaving out some of the important bits. The first words spoken in the liturgy each Sunday are a cheerful "Good morning!!!!"

But I had best not spare you the Contemporary Service on Sunday evenings. "We have a praise band," they said in the interview. It proves to consist of three Boomer-age lady guitarists (now in their seventies) who think they are the second coming of Joni Mitchell. They know the basic three chords and play with what is commonly called the "Catholic strum." That is all they can do; they cannot handle other chords, or other strumming techniques, or (heaven forbid) finger-picking. You did not take Guitar Methods 101 at school -- indeed, it was not offered -- so, again, you are at a loss. But, being a good soldier, you join them on the electric piano (a twenty-year old Clavinova with a few dead notes), and do your best. You learn the eight songs which are the complete repertoire of the Service. About a dozen people show up on Sunday evenings, mostly ex-Cursillistas. The Vicar is in his element, loving the "casual informality" of the atmosphere.

After a year or so of this, many a young church musician decides that a career in restaurant table service and dishwashing would be more to his liking. Or maybe truck driving.

****

The secret, if there is one, lies in that woman who wants your help in learning how to somehow sing again after screaming her voice away in the mental hospital. And that bass, who has sung in choirs since childhood and loves music and has watched his voice, his strength, and his health disappear, and is just trying to hang on and finish what he has carried thus far, a life which the Psalmist described thus: "I will sing to the LORD as long as I live; I will praise my God while I have my being." And that woman with the epilepsy, who loves God -- indeed, God is her sole reliance -- and wants to sing, and does not want to make a scene this Christmas. But if making a scene is what is going to happen, she is still going to be there, because it her choir, and her parish, and most of all her Lord who was born that night.

Despite yourself, if you are lucky (or better, "blessed"), you care about these people. It is not because you are supposed to (though you are); you just do. You can't help it. You recognize that you have been given the responsibility of helping these individuals grow into the fullness of the stature of Christ. The tools at your disposal, such as the Baldwin and the choral library, are not the best, but they are what you have.

You pray a lot.

There is nothing else for it; you pray so much that you become known for it. You teach the same things over and over, and it appears that it makes no difference -- but, sometimes, after many repetitions, it does. You send cards to your choristers when they are sick; you visit them in the hospital when you can (an aside: this is much harder to do than it used to be, because they often do not permit people like choral directors, who are neither family nor authorized church professionals, to so much as discern what room the person is in, or even if they are in the hospital at all.) I emphasize that this is not because you are supposed to, or with any end in view (such as building your choir); you can't help it.

You figure out how to get the best possible results out of the Baldwin -- a task for which your academic training has given you no preparation whatsoever -- and you play with care and integrity for every service. You learn how to play your eight Cursillo songs with the "Joni Mitchell girls" -- and you find that, despite yourself, you care even about them. And the people who show up at the Sunday evening service. You find that they, with the handful who attend the traditional morning service, are the lifeblood of that little town, fighting to keep it alive.

And, just maybe, the hardest of all, the Vicar. You come to recognize that he is as clueless as you are, and that is the source of much of his bluster. To him, this is a dead-end parish in a dead-end town, and a dead-end for his career. No bishopric or cushy suburban parish for him, because now that he is middle-aged, all of a sudden the ideal bishop is in his forties. His seminary training prepared him for the work of ministry about as well as your conservatory training did for church music, and he has been trying to figure it out "on the job" ever since.

****

Lest you think that this essay is autobiographical, it is not. For one thing, my first post-graduate instrument was an Allen, not a Baldwin. And I have never lived or worked in Pennsylvania. And I had worked as a part-time church musician for some years before going to graduate school; this was of inestimable value. Nonetheless, I made many, many mistakes. I still do. Two of the persons I described are more-or-less based on choristers with whom I had the privilege of working at previous parishes where I have served, and who taught me much by their glorious witness to the power of God.

And I have entirely given up on hospital visits.

****

Perhaps you stay in the parish, despite everything. One day, a vestry member says "Gee, maybe we should think about a pipe organ!" Over time, you assemble a choral library of sorts. Your choir grows from eight to eleven. A family with children moves to town and joins the church; you incorporate the children into the choir (and figure out how to work with them in this setting), and now the choir is fourteen persons. A new Vicar comes, and she is a little easier to work with, partly because she sang in a church choir when she was a child and it was essential to her vocation.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps you play that Baldwin to your dying day. Perhaps the Vicar retires, and the parish cannot afford to hire a replacement. Perhaps they cannot afford to keep you on staff, either. Perhaps the place closes down altogether. Perhaps the whole community closes down.

None of this matters. What matters is each one of those singers, and the people out in the pews, and even that Vicar. Their spiritual growth and welfare matters. On the Day of Doom, the Baldwin, the illegal Xeroxes, the guitars, the vestments, the church building, even the town in which you lived -- all of it will have been calcined to dust. What will remain is the people, your brothers and sisters, standing with you and singing the glories of the Lamb. You are given a small part in preparing them for that Day.

No one said it would be easy.

****
(Adapted slightly from my old LiveJournal, Nov. 25, 2009)

About those wrong notes...

Item: postlude at the All Saints’ Day service (Fantasia on Sine Nomine, by Craig Phillips). I came apart during a passage about three pages from the end.

Item: postlude on November 19 (Toccata: “St. David’s Day”, by Ralph Vaughan Williams). I lost it at the top of the final page.

Item: postlude on Thanksgiving Day (Nun danket alle Gott, by J. S. Bach, from the Leipzig Chorales). I came apart at the top of the final page.

All three of these were serious mishaps, where I lost control of the playing for a measure or more. All were in fairly difficult passages, which I had thoroughly practiced and considered well-prepared. It was the Bach that scares me, for that is a piece I have performed scores of times. After the liturgy, I got back on the bench and played the piece perfectly, with complete comfort. It is always challenging and needs preparation, but I am confident that I can play it.

Until now.

If I were a golfer, I would start muttering about “the yips.” A bit of poking around finds that yes, the condition affects musicians as well as golfers and other athletes. It is described in places as a “focal task-specific dystonia.” It most often affects experienced players who have been doing the same thing for decades. It afflicts 1% to 2% of musicians at some point in their careers, men more than women. One article lists some common triggers, among them “a sudden increase in playing/practice.” That could be it, for I pushed hard through the latter part of October to prepare for the week that included All Saints and Choral Evensong.

There is no cure. Intensified practice, the musician’s (and athlete’s) first impulse when something is not right, is not helpful. There are treatments, such as Botox injections; I am not going there. There are “tricks” of various sorts, some of which I will try. It is going to take some experimentation, maybe a lot of it. And perhaps it is nothing, just a string of wrong notes. But three times in a month seems a bit much, and this feels different from the thousands of wrong notes I have played over the years.

For the present, I think that I will do the following:
- Quit playing repertoire of the sort that has triggered these collapses.
- Probably quit playing Evensong preludes. Excepting the principal feasts, this is the only occasion where I play “big” repertoire. At the least, I have crossed out the “Great” C minor prelude and fugue scheduled for January, a repeat of the Vaughan Williams Prelude and Fugue scheduled for February, and the Mendelssohn Fourth Sonata scheduled for March. I might try improvisations for evensong instead of playing repertoire.
- Avoid difficult music for the Eucharistic voluntaries on routine Sundays.
- Focus more of my practicing on improvisation, and do more of it in service playing.

That leaves some areas of concern: what am I going to do with anthem accompaniments? There are several of them which are difficult for me in the next few weeks, starting with a Michael Haydn anthem for Lessons and Carols, December 3. So far, I have had no problems of this sort with accompaniments, even the difficult ones, so I will hope that my brain considers this enough of a different task so as to be completely separate.

And what about the principal feasts? We’ll have to take them as they come, and lean toward easier music rather than more difficult. For example, I am done with the Phillips piece that I played on All Saints: never again.

I gather that the condition comes and goes unpredictably. That gives reason to occasionally dip my foot back into the deep water and see how it goes.

Steven Pressfield writes: “For the professional, the stakes are high and real.” This is my paid employment, and I am now considerably less fit for it than I was a year ago. “A musician is only as good as his last performance,” as they say. For now, I think that I can still earn my keep; I can play the hymns, train the choirs, do the other parts of my job. When you get down to it, playing organ literature is the least important part of what I do.

For a while now, a photo of Keith Jarrett has been on my “door.” It is there mostly because I seek to emulate his long-form piano improvisations, but now I have another reason: he has overcome a disorder that kept him from playing – even privately, at home – for years.

I have been blessed with good health and no serious injuries or physical problems with my playing. Most everyone who does this professionally runs into one thing or another somewhere along the line. Now it is my turn.

Wachet auf, and a YouTube update

Some while back, I posted a rant about Microsoft and the demise of Movie Maker, which made it easy to prepare MP4 files for YouTube. It turns out that in this instance, my steaming about the Evil Powers at Microsoft was unfounded. One can, with slightly more difficulty, get the job done with another Microsoft product: PowerPoint, at least in its 2016 version (which is what is on my computer). PowerPoint is not something I normally use, which may be part of why it has taken me two months for this idea to occur to me.

As a trial run, I prepared this YouTube clip of my piano improvisation from last Sunday. It is mostly based on the chorale Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, which in turn is based on last Sunday’s Gospel, the story of the Wise and Foolish Virgins (St. Matthew 25:1-13). Because we were to shortly sing another song based on the same story, I included it as well: “Give me oil in my lamp,” starting at about the 6 minute mark in the video.

As for the PowerPoint procedure, here it is – for, in defense of my slowness of mind, I did not find anything along these lines in a Net search for how to do this. Then again, maybe it is so obvious to everyone else that no one has felt it useful to explain it.

• Run PowerPoint.
• In the headings at the top, choose “Insert”
• From the ribbon below the headings, choose “Pictures” (or other things, such as photo albums, or further to the right, Video)
• At the right end of the ribbon, labeled “Media,” choose “Audio.”
• That gives a little drop-down with two items; choose “Audio on My PC” which opens a File Manager box where you can locate the audio file that you want.
• After some few minutes, one ends up with a PPTX file – that is, a PowerPoint presentation – with your chosen Audio file under the photo(s).
• It needs one more tweak: there is an audio control/volume icon in the middle of the picture, which you don’t want in the YouTube file. Right-click on the icon to select it, and choose “Send to Back.” This puts it behind your picture.
• Now you can save the file. Under the “File” heading, choose “Save As,” and in the box that pops up, find “Save as type.” It has a long drop-down list, which includes what we want: MPEG-4 Video (*.mp4). Choose this, give it a filename (which will appear at the beginning of the video) and hit “Save.”
• After another longish while, you now have an MP4 file, which can be uploaded to YouTube.

Despite finding a way to do it, I do not expect that I will often post to YouTube.

A Declaration of Religious Principles

The following was formerly the Declaration of Religious Principles of the American Guild of Organists. The AGO no longer appears to adhere to any religious principles, though many of its members do. This statement is old-fashioned in its language, and perhaps its concepts, and I emphasize that it no longer reflects the “mind and intention” of the AGO in any official way.

I find that this document, at one time available from the AGO as a poster, is not available on the Internet. To remedy that and in hopes that it may be of encouragement to some, here it is:

Soli Deo Gloria
Declaration of Religious Principles

For the greater glory of God, and for the cause of worthy music in this land, we, being severally members of the American Guild of Organists, do declare our mind and intention in the things following:

We believe that the office of music in Divine Worship is a Sacred Oblation before the Most High.

We believe that they who are set as Choir Directors and as Organists in the House of God ought themselves to be people of devout conduct teaching the ways of earnestness to the Choirs committed to their charge.

We believe that the unity of purpose and fellowship of life between Clergy and Choirs should be everywhere established and maintained.

We believe that at all times and in all places it is meet, right, and our bounden duty to work and to pray for the advancement of Divine Worship in the holy gifts of strength and nobleness; to the end that God’s House may be purges of its blemishes, that the minds of all may be instructed, that the honor of that House may be guarded in our time and in the time to come.

Wherefore we do give ourselves with reverence and humility to these endeavors, offering up our works and our lives in the Name of Him, without Whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy. Amen.

Seeing we are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses…

One of my Wednesday morning tasks is setting up the choir room for the afternoon’s Youth Choir rehearsal. It is my custom as I put each chair into place to pray for the young person who will sit there. Mostly, I “hold them to the light” as the Friends say.

On this day, I had an impression so strong and vivid that it might be a vision: two of these young people as Saints. Not just any saint: the big-time people, the sort who have their name on the calendar.

Most likely, it is no more than an overactive imagination on All Saints’ Day, after reading the Epistle for Matins (Hebrews 11:32—12:3), about people being stoned and sawn asunder, destitute, afflicted, tormented. Most of the paths that lead to that kind of sanctity are thoroughly unpleasant (as compared to what most people would consider a "good life"), not infrequently including a gruesome and horrible death. I do not wish this upon my young choristers, no more than Saint Mary wished a crucifixion for her Son (and that was her gruesome and horrible death, the sword piercing through her heart as she stood by him on that day when the sun refused to shine).

But I do wish for all of them to be saints, whatever that involves for them. “And I want to be one, too,” as the song says. On this blessed and high feast, my “vision” (or whatever it was) is a good reminder that it is possible. These two children, or some other child in the choir, or one of the adults I work with, may in the end be so glorious as to put the sun and moon to shame with their brightness. They might walk as equals with Francis and Clare, or Martin Luther, or Julian of Norwich, or Bonhoeffer, or J. S. Bach.

I used to think of the “cloud of witnesses” as the saints in glory, looking down upon us, praying for us, cheering us on as we struggle forward. And that is reason enough to “run with patience the race that is set before us.” That is true enough, but increasingly, I am aware that the witnesses are also these children in the choir, their parents, my wife, my friends, the people who hear me play or sing in my rehearsals, indeed all those with whom I come in contact. They, likewise, are reason enough to “run with patience.”

O God, the King of saints, we praise and magnify thy holy Name for all thy servants who have finished their course in thy faith and fear; for the blessed Virgin Mary; for the holy patriarchs, prophets, apostles, and martyrs; and for all other thy righteous servants, known to us and unknown; and we beseech thee that, encouraged by their examples, aided by their prayers, and strengthened by their fellowship, we also may be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light; through the merits of thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen (BCP p. 489)

A followup: "If you cannot preach like Peter..."

If you cannot preach like Peter,
If you cannot pray like Paul,
You can tell the love of Jesus
And say he died for all.
(from the spiritual “There is a balm in Gilead”)

I hasten to add a corrective to yesterday’s essay about improvisation in the French manner. Namely:

Just start playing.
Improvise. Have fun with it.
Whatever your skill level, do it.

I was giving the impression (and, I must say, Dupré likewise gives the impression in his course) that if you have not devoted a thousand hours or so to high-speed scales in thirds and sixths in all keys, nor gained effortless fluency with instant arpeggiated harmonization of any note in any key, you shouldn’t attempt to improvise.

That impression is possibly the biggest obstacle to improvisation: like I wrote a couple of times in yesterday’s essay, “I will never ever play like that!” That is, of course, absolutely true. I (and presumably you, the reader) will never improvise like Mr. Latry, or Gerre Hancock, or Peter Planyevsky, or Paul Manz. Or Keith Jarrett, or Bill Evans, or Mike Garson.

Such thoughts must not stop me (and you) from playing. Here, now, with the knowledge and technical equipment that we have. Ultimately, such thoughts (or more precisely, the despair that arises from them) are the work of the Adversary. “You will never get it right. You might as well give up.” Such thoughts come to me at times, especially when I have played badly, or failed as a choral director in rehearsal (I did so this past Wednesday, when I got angry at one of the choral sections and was hurtful to these people, whom I love.)

The Adversary says “You must be perfect, or you are worthless.”
The Holy Paraclete says “You are a beloved child of God, and you shall be perfect, when I have completed My work.”

----------------------
Someday I should write about the concept of “Words.” I got the idea from Mike Krzyzewski, who coaches a certain well-known collegiate basketball program, and (as he recommended) I developed my own list of Words. They are among the things on my Door, down below the pictures of composers.

The first three are the Cardinal Virtues, and I think of them a lot. They have been a light in the darkness ever since St. Paul wrote them:

Fides (Faith)
Spes (Hope)
Agape (Charity)

Fides gives us confidence that God has given us what we need – indeed, precisely what we need, no more and no less – to do what He desires of us in our place and time. No, I will never improvise like Olivier Latry. But he has to play at the Cathedral of Notre Dame; I don’t. And I think God may have given me some gifts (or trained me by experience, often unwillingly on my part, to where I can do what He wants done here) that Mr. Latry may lack, because he does not need them.

Spes teaches us that we can grow and learn. One day in fact, we shall be fully formed in the image of Christ. That includes being fully formed in the exercise of our musical gifts.

Agape reminds us that all of this is for the benefit of the people around us, our sisters and brothers. Without Agape, all of it is but “sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.” Cantare amantis est.

Enough of this. Time to practice what I have been preaching.

An improvisation, and a way forward

Last night, I had the pleasure of attending a concert by Olivier Latry, organist of Notre Dame de Paris, professor of organ at the Paris Conservatoire. My respect for him is very great; he is my “go-to” person for his recordings of the complete organ works of Messiaen. Here is one of his Messiaen tracks from YouTube, the final movement of the Livre du Saint-Sacrement. He played no Messiaen in last night’s concert, but there was plenty of other fine music, notably (in my opinion) his playing of Duruflé’s Prelude and Fugue on the name of Alain.

And an improvisation.

I did not time it, but my estimate is that it ran about twenty minutes. It was based on the chant “Dies irae” plus a cheerful triadic tune often played by the local university marching band, as well as polka bands everywhere:

In heaven there is no beer:
That’s why we drink it here.

The envelope containing the tunes was solemnly presented to Mr. Latry; after some difficulty opening it, he set the tunes on the music rack and played them for the audience. After a few moments, off he went, starting with the “In heaven” tune – dark, in minor, low in the tenor/bass register. That proved to be the main theme of the improvisation, complete with a fine large four-voice fugue before a concluding toccata passage. “Dies irae” was in a decidedly secondary role, though it was present as a dark undertone.

In conversation afterwards, my friend Jean and I wondered how he could do such a thing as this. Both of us have heard many improvisations after the French manner, and they often come across as somewhat formulaic. Latry’s piece on this night did not seem that way at all. It seemed more a creation of the moment rather than random tunes pasted into a form.

Some thoughts, and a way forward:

I admit to a twinge of discouragement as I drove home. I will never, ever play like that!

As I have written elsewhere, “Someone is always better. Don’t let that bother you.” That helped, as did the corollary: “Be the best that you can be.” That thought leads to the organ bench, and perhaps renewed intensity to my work on improvisation. At present I am overwhelmed with repertoire and anthem accompaniments to prepare for the next fortnight of services, but at least there are three piano improvisations in the music list to keep me working at the skill.

“Be the best that you can be” also leads me to think more seriously: How did he do that?

Upon a night’s sleep and consideration, I suggest some possibilities. The improvisation was in essence Theme and Variations; he may have had that form in mind before the evening began, at least as one of several possibilities. The key (though not the mode: lots of movement between major and minor, and probably other modes) was that of the two tunes, and I do not recall any significant modulations from the home key, not in the sense of a sonata-allegro form or even an ABA ternary form (staying in the home key is fully appropriate for Theme and Variations). That covers two of the major decisions the player must make.

There was plenty of variety in color and dynamics, plenty of rise and fall of energy level. At one point I noticed how my heart was racing, my palms sweating as he built to an intermediate climax on full organ, and I was grateful for being swept away by the music (as I was, beginning to end). [I will add that Keith Jarrett does this too, at the piano; it is one of the strengths of his long-form improvisations.]

There were elements that I recognized – the fugue, several passages of toccata figuration with the tune in double pedals, a couple of hymnlike variations in homophonic chords (like the one at the very beginning), some unison lines, one of them taking it down to the slow-speaking bottom note of the keyboard on a reed stop that he seemed to particularly like.

Aside from the unteachable genius of the thing, most of the rest was virtuosity of passagework in hands and feet.

That is why the second volume of Dupré’s improvisation course begins with a “Table of daily exercises at the piano” - pages of scales in thirds, sixths, octaves in all major and minor keys, as well as chromatically (adding fourths and tritones to the other intervals). Then arpeggiated chords – triads, seventh chords of all sorts. Discussion of pedal scales and exercises to attain an equal level of virtuosity with the feet. Dupré titles this first chapter: “The Piano, basis of technique at the Organ.”

My eyes glaze over and despair sets in. But at least I can “see in a glass darkly” how this could be done. Mr. Latry has most certainly done these things, and I would suspect that he continues to work at them regularly. I suspect, also, that he knows the two-volume Dupré course intimately as student, performer and teacher, for it has been the foundation of the French manner of improvisation for decades.

Dupré then turns to Harmony in chapter two. He begins with the observation that the player must have a spontaneous, immediate facility with harmonization, a knowledge of every possible chord that could harmonize each note of a melody [the jazzmen say this too, in their own way]. Pages of exercises follow: triads, chords of the seventh and ninth, modulations, “resolution of polytonal aggregations” (p. 23) – or as Mr. Hancock used to say, “Salvation is just a half-step away.” Again, in all major and minor keys, with the goal of the absolute and effortless harmonic control that someone like Mr. Latry demonstrates.

This is a long path.
But it is the path that, I suspect, has brought Mr. Latry to his present level of skill as an improviser.

Dupré eventually gets around to the treatment of Themes and their analysis as to how they can best be presented rhythmically, harmonically, etc. – and contrapuntally, with canon, imitation, ornamented chorale with contrapuntal accompaniment (e.g., after the manner of Bach), fugue. And then, forms: binary, ternary, symphonic forms, many others.

Some of the finest improvisers, after years of work, reach this level. These are the players that Jean and I have heard who play amazingly, and with great effect, but their work has a hint of the formulaic. They have mastered all of Dupré’s formulas.

Mr. Latry (and a handful of others: among the Frenchmen, I put Daniel Roth in this category, and certainly Messiaen when he was still with us) has gone beyond this. He has made all of this work so natural and automatic that he probably does not need to think about it at all. Like Keith Jarrett at the piano, he simply starts to play, with at most some general ideas as to form – which may, in the execution, turn in quite a different direction than it began.

Again: I will never, ever play like that!

[Edited to add: There is another side to this - see the next essay.]
[See also this, from Glenn Osborne's fine improvisation blog, as to his theory of "how do they do this?" -- deeper study of solfege, harmony and counterpoint in the French system than is typical in the American training of organists and other musicians.]

What brought me back down to earth this morning was my humble little clavichord. After Matins I opened it up and improvised for a while, simple four-bar phrases in G major. The clavichord by its nature works against any thoughts of virtuosic display. It rewards quiet, careful playing – at least for me at my elementary stage as a player of this instrument.

Mr. Latry’s improvisation and its ripples this morning have nonetheless brought me to a revelation. Dupré’s course has been on my shelf for decades, ever since Gerre Hancock named it in a workshop as essential – this was in my first years as an organist, when I was self-taught and working toward my Associate certificate (AAGO), before graduate school. Hancock’s own book on improvisation is probably a better starting place now, but he had not then written it.

Back then, I spent much time on the first, “preparatory” volume of Dupré. This work was what got me through the improvisation requirement for the AAGO (barely, with the minimal passing grade). The second volume frightened me so thoroughly that I have hardly touched it. Not least, it is in French; I do not think that it is available in translation. But as Hancock said all those years ago, “Don’t let that put you off. It is easy French.” And it is, most of it musical terminology.

Paging through the book this morning, all of a sudden, without realizing how I have gotten here, I see that I am ready for it.

I will likely never get far up the path – there are too many weeks when there are other more pressing demands on my practice time. I may never get past the first chapter with all its forbidding pages of exercises in thirds and sixths and arpeggios of every sort. But I think that I must take care not to get stuck there. I think that after some work on these things, I could profit much from the rest of the book.

Jesu, juva.

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A YouTube search for “Olivier Latry improvisation” brings many results. Here is one that has not so many views as most of them. I chose this because it shows him at work with something a lot more important than a polka song and a showpiece improvisation in the middle of the U.S. – an improvisation, a defiant statement if you will, for the memorial Mass at Notre Dame for the victims of the three coordinated suicide bombings of November 13, 2015, which killed 128 persons in Paris.

This is why one studies improvisation, or for that matter any kind of music: to have the tools for when it becomes your duty to make a musical statement where no words suffice.

Bach and Stability of Life

In a conversation with a priest about why Rite One (the traditional Anglican language of prayer) has virtually disappeared, she explained that the theology of the Episcopal Church has moved so far from the Rite One texts that it is no longer appropriate to use them.

Not the language, not the “thees” and “thous” and all the rest: the theology. I believe that she is right as to why Rite One is in disfavor with Episcopal clergy. It is more a matter of the Prayer of Humble Access (BCP p. 337):

We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord whose property is always to have mercy. Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us. Amen.

Or the Post-Communion Prayer (BCP p. 339), one of the most magnificent paragraphs in the English language:

Almighty and everlasting God, we most heartily thank thee for that thou dost feed us, in these holy mysteries, with the spiritual food of the most precious Body and Blood of thy Son our Savior Jesus Christ; and dost assure us thereby of thy favor and goodness towards us; and that we are very members incorporate in the mystical body of thy Son, the blessed company of all faithful people; and are also heirs, through hope, of thy everlasting kingdom. And we humbly beseech thee, O heavenly Father, so to assist us with thy grace, that we may continue in that holy fellowship, and do all such good works as thou hast prepared for us to walk in; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with thee and the Holy Ghost, be all honor and glory, world without end. Amen.

I expect that I shall never hear either of these passages again in public worship. Thoroughly Modern Episcopalians do not believe these things.

But I do.

It is a very different church from the one I entered by means of the laying on of hands in the Sacrament of Confirmation in the 1980’s. Back then, the liturgy, the theology (e.g., Richard Hooker), and especially the language of liturgy were compelling reasons to be Episcopal. No longer. If it were not for the music, I would see no reason to remain.

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Following a suggestion from Daniel Coyle’s “Talent Code,” I have a “wall” (in my case, a “door”) bearing photos and paintings of musicians whom I humbly seek to emulate (“we feebly struggle, they in glory shine”): Keith Jarrett. Anton Bruckner. Joseph Haydn (I added him this week, for reasons I may describe someday).

And at the top, J. S. Bach.

A non-musician visited my office recently. He commented “All the musicians revere Bach. I don’t understand it.” I tried to explain, failing miserably; the only way to communicate his importance is by playing or singing his music. I am reminded every time I play his music that I must be serious about my work, and do it more diligently. I must always commit all of it to the Lord Christ who helps us, and to the great glory of God. “S.D.G.” he would write on his scores: Soli Deo Gloria.

Because of his picture on my door, Bach had a surprise for me after my conversation with the priest about Rite One: a lesson in Stability of Life.

By the 1730’s and 40’s, the Lutheran Church was not the one into which he was baptized back there in Eisenach in 1685, just downhill from the Wartburg Castle where Luther had translated the Holy Scriptures. The clergy with whom Bach served in Leipzig were full of Enlightenment ideas, totally foreign to Bach’s solid Lutheran orthodoxy.

And he stayed at his post.

He wrote things like the St. Matthew Passion, when there was no one who either desired or expected such a thing. And motets, and cantatas. And the Third Part of the Clavierübung, framing his musical exposition of the Lutheran Catechism with the E flat prelude and fugue. And the Canonic Variations on Luther’s Christmas hymn “Vom Himmel hoch.”

Forgotten now, because the musical scores remain and the people have come and gone, but he taught several generations of choristers and surely influenced them. Just as surely, he must have been a light in the darkness for those in Leipzig who shared Bach’s dismay at the confusing new ideas, so bereft of spiritual substance. He remains a light in our darkness; how can one play or sing his music without believing? At least for a moment, at least as long as the music lasts.

It would be unimaginable for Old Bach to be anything other than a Lutheran. He is the very essence of Lutheranism.

Would that I were such a saint. From now on, when I look at his picture on my door, I will hear him say something I heard recently as a word of prophecy from another source:

“You still have work to do.”

Jesu, juva.

My Clavichord

Most people who visit my office at the church think that I have a work table to the left of the computer. Few people know that it is a clavichord.

I built it from a kit which was sold by the Burton Harpsichord company, which I think no longer exists. This was in the late 1970’s, when I lived in my grandfather’s old farm house and for the only time in my life had a fine large workshop. I thought that I would be there for the remainder of this mortal life, and that the clavichord would be a fine addition to the old upright piano that was my other instrument. The kit cost around $200 as I recall, which was a huge sum for me in those days.

I have never played the clavichord as much as I would have liked, partly because I did not stay in that house long. When I left a few years later to go to the Choir College, I packed it into a crate and put it in storage, for I was headed for a dormitory room. After that, I worked in the Caribbean, and left the clavichord and my furniture and most of my books in the storage warehouse until I could get properly settled. It was good that I did, for my path soon took me to Tennessee. At that point, many years after going into storage, I set up the instrument in our basement at home.

I played it some, but we lived across the street from my church, so it was generally more productive to go over there and practice on the piano and organ. It had suffered from its years in storage; the frame warped somewhat (which I gather is common for the instrument), causing the soundboard to develop a large crack, decreasing its already small resonance.

Two moves later, it landed in its current location, even worse in condition from its travels. I soon piled it high with things to be done, most notably the five boxes of single-copy anthem octavos left by my predecessor. It has taken me seventeen years to work through them and finally clear the top of the instrument.

I did play it occasionally, an undertaking that required moving the boxes and piles of music from the clavichord lid to the floor. That was enough resistance to make my playing very occasional, indeed. Sometimes years would pass without the lid being opened.

As mentioned, I finally dealt with the thousands of octavos, quite a few of them finding a home in my own octavo file on the shelves. But there was still resistance to playing the instrument. There was a broken string. Many of the notes did not play properly. It was badly out of tune. I put it on my task list, but I could not justify a high priority; it was a “someday/maybe” task, labeled “low priority” to make it even less likely to be done.

Today, out of the blue, I had the right energy to deal with it. I repaired the string. I adjusted the tangents (see below) so that all of the notes played properly. I tuned it – to B flat equals 440, a half-step low, to protect its forty-year old brass strings from breaking. All told, it was the work of about two hours, a task of such small size that I should have done it years ago – as I should have finished dealing with all the music on top of it.

What, you may ask, is a “tangent”?

The clavichord is not the oldest of keyboard instruments – that honor goes to the pipe organ – but it is the simplest. The keys are simple levers. Towards the back of each key, there is a short piece of brass rod, filed to a dull knife-edge at top – this is the tangent. When the key is pressed, the back end rises and the knife-edged top of the tangent contacts the string, which vibrates and makes a soft sound. When the key is released, the sound stops. That is it. No complicated mechanism as there is for the modern piano, or even the harpsichord – and the organ most of all!

Many of the tangents were out of adjustment because of the case warpage – their relationship to the strings above them was not quite the same as it had been when I built it. When the tangent rose to the string, the string would slip off the front or back of the tangent, or in the worst cases, the tangent would miss the string altogether. The fix is simple: remove the key, bend the tangent (holding it with two pairs of pliers so as not to split the wooden key), put it back in, try it and see if it works properly. If not, repeat until it does.

It is not difficult at all, though it does take some patience.

The result: I think it sounds pretty good. Obviously it would sound better were I to disassemble the whole thing, true up the case framework so it is square, replace the soundboard, and restring it with new wire. Perhaps in my retirement; certainly not before.

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I could learn much from playing the clavichord. It demands (and, I suspect, teaches) a most gentle and even touch. The slightest movement of a finger produces a sound, and the slightest difference in pressure from one note to the next is noticeable in the sound. It teaches careful listening to the shaping of phrases, to balance between multiple notes in a chord, or contrapuntal lines.

In a way, I have not been ready to attempt the instrument until now; I needed to make a beginning with improvisation first, for the clavichord is a magnificent instrument for the improvisatory art, perhaps the best of all.

We shall see where this leads. I have made a note in my task management system to improvise at the clavichord at least twice a week – perhaps by candlelight on Wednesday and Sunday nights when my other work is done. I think that this might be the best setting for it.

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Here is a YouTube demonstration of a Clavichord by Han Ding, a playing of the Aria from the Goldberg Variations on his modern instrument. I chose it over the other YouTube clips that came up in a quick search because it gives a more realistic impression of the volume – that is, very soft.

My instrument is not so handsome as the one in the clip, but is similar in layout. It is most decidedly inferior in every way to the instrument in the next clip, a playing of the same piece on an historic instrument at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is a good example of how a clavichord can look – notice that the inside of the lid is a fine oil painting; this was not uncommon in the old days. But for the recording, the instrument is miked very close and loud; you can get a sense of this from how loud the action noise is, such as when he lifts his hands from the keys at the end. It does not give as good of an impression of what it actually sounds like as the previous clip.

Keith Jarrett did an LP recording of improvisations on the clavichord: “The Book of Ways.” I do not think it is his best work (and like most of the clavichord recordings on the Net, it is mastered far too loud!), but I should continue to listen to it for guidance. Some of the LP tracks are on YouTube; here is one that I like.

This sort of playing is what I would like to do with the clavichord. I doubt that I will ever advance sufficiently to play Bach effectively on it, but improvisation at a sufficient level to please myself might be possible. I think that this work may help my playing of the piano and organ and my general musicianship. It may prove worthwhile for its own sake.

James Chisholm, Priest

Fr. Chisholm departed this life on September 15, 1855 and is commemorated today on the current Episcopal Calendar. Until this morning, he was unknown to me, just a name on the calendar.

You may read about him here. Or (mostly) in his own words at considerably more length (200-plus pages) here, in his memoirs.

Chisholm was from Old Virginia, where he served St. John’s Episcopal Church in Portsmouth, down in the flat Tidewater region of the state, a graduate of the Virginia Theological Seminary. By the accounts that we have, he was not an impressive person: bashful, delicate of constitution, weak.

When the yellow fever came to that part of Virginia in the summer of 1855, most of the clergy and physicians fled, along with the rich planters. But Fr. Chisholm stayed, alongside the Roman Catholic priest, Francis Devlin. The two of them did their best to care for the sick people, all of them poor, many of them Irish immigrants and black slaves, finding food for them, even digging their graves at times. About a quarter of the original population of Portsmouth died by the time it was over, above three thousand persons. That number included Fr. Chisholm, worn out from his work and not quite forty years old.

I have spent a while skimming parts of his daily journal during the fever; near the beginning, as it became clear what was happening and everyone who could fled the town, he wrote “Such a day of mortal panic and flight as today has been, I desire never to see again” (p. 100). It proved to be the last day that anyone was allowed in or out of the town. About this point he abandoned the journal; what remains after that is personal letters. In one of them, he writes:

My present condition surprises myself. I trust that I more than ever realize that ‘Eternal God is my refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.’ I am in His hands, to do with me what seemeth Him good. (p. 133)

What is most striking to me is that his work is not that of general benevolence, of the somewhat anonymous care for the sick and needy one finds after natural disasters, as important as that is. It is the care of people he knows well by name, children whom he baptized as infants, members of his parish, with “parish” defined in its proper state-church sense to include everyone living in the community, churchgoers or not, including the Roman Catholics. It is especially the suffering and death of the children than is grievous to him, as it would be to any pastor.

It is also striking that it never seems to have occurred to him that leaving his parish was a possibility. Never mind the other clergy doing exactly that; the idea of walking away from his people when they were in need was unthinkable. There is no hint that he felt at all courageous or special for staying in place.

The condition of our town is awful beyond conception. The eye must see; the ear must hear; the fancy can not furnish the deep, dark shadows of the picture. On Sunday, thirty-two deaths in Portsmouth; on Monday, twenty-one; yesterday, thirteen; today, by eleven o’clock, seventeen. The heartless language of the undertaker from whom I obtained this morning’s report, was, almost in a tone of exultation: “Oh! We’ll get it up to twenty before sunset!” (p. 132)

In February of that year, his wife had died, leaving him with two young boys. At the beginning of the pestilence, he had sent them away to stay with his brother, hoping for their safety. It was not to be: September 5 was the darkest of days for Chisholm. In short order that morning he received a letter from his brother with the news that one of the boys was dead. He began writing a letter in response, called away before he could finish to officiate at the burial of a young girl from his parish. While pronouncing the Committal by the open grave of the little girl, he was seized with the sudden chill that was the first sign of the disease. For some people, it proves to be a minor infection, over within a few days. For others, it enters a toxic phase as it did for Chisholm and so many of his parishioners; high fever, bleeding from mouth, eyes and nose, black vomit, severe dehydration, liver failure and jaundice (thus the “yellow” – the Spanish name is Vómito negro, “black vomit.")

In a final letter to his brother, he wrote (p. 145):

I look back upon my past life with sorrow and shame, when I remember how unworthily and unfaithfully it has been spent… my convictions, and emotions, and hopes, in approaching Him, as my refuge against the accusations of conscience, and the fear of death and judgement, find expression in the words of that hymn whose first and final stanzas are these:

‘Just as I am! Without one plea,
Save that Thy blood was shed for me,
And that Thou biddst me come to thee,
O Lamb of God! I come.

Just as I am! Thy love unknown,
Has broken every barrier down:
Now to be thine, and thine alone,
O Lamb of God! I come.’

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Collect from the Common of Saints: Of a Pastor

O heavenly Father, Shepherd of thy people, we give thee thanks for thy servant James Chisholm, who was faithful in the care and nurture of thy flock, even unto death; and we pray that, following his example and the teaching of his holy life, we may by thy grace grow into the stature of the fullness of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (BCP p. 196)

I have long revered Constance and her Companions, whose feast day was this past Saturday, September 9. Like Chisholm, they cared for the victims of a yellow fever epidemic, theirs in Memphis, Tennessee (1878). And like Chisholm, they died from the disease.

I do not know it as a fact, but I would suspect that Constance knew of Chisholm’s example. It may be that it strengthened her.

It may be that their examples may strengthen us.

Finish then thy new creation

“Play softly,” they told me. “Quiet background music,” while people prayed. Some for healing, back in the side chapel where a line of people formed; a dozen or so at the baptismal font with the priest, renewing their commitment to Christ. Some, sitting in the church, listening, praying. Many in other parts of the building and outdoors; one-on-one prayer with the bishop, walking a labyrinth, mindful coloring, writing of prayers.

For twenty minutes I was to play. Or twenty-five. Or more. However long it took. I was terrified. I could easily play random soft chords in a new-ageish manner and fill the time. But could I do better than that?

I came to view it as an examination. I have improvised preludes and postludes all summer and devoted all of my practice, such as it was, to this skill; have I made any progress? Sometimes it has gone well this summer; sometimes not so much. Could I now attempt a long-form improvisation in the manner of Mr. Jarrett? Obviously I will never have his virtuosity, but could I do something that would be worthy of the occasion, perhaps a channel of healing and prayer?

Well, I gave it a try. I played variations on Hyfrydol, which was to be the closing hymn a bit later in the service. With that much time, I could go pretty far afield. I consciously tried to avoid any clear statement of the tune, and kept it in minor for much of the piece. I sought to extract motives and work with them.

Always, there was the liturgical constraint: “Quiet background music.” That removed dynamics as a possibility for contrast and development and I had to rein in the ideas several times when they wanted to grow larger than would have been appropriate. The constraint mostly ruled out “fast” as well as “loud.”

I made a recording, but I am not going to post all of it; there is too much noise. That was a clue that I got it right; for most of the first fifteen minutes, the priest speaking quietly with people at the other end of the room from the microphone is louder than my playing. This is a good sign.

There was some good playing in it, and some that was not so good; if it were indeed an examination, I would give myself a C-plus and be content that it was not an F. [Edited 9/13 to add: I listened to the recording two more times; it was not so bad as I thought as I played, nor on first listening. Maybe a B instead of C plus.] (I am grateful to one of the jazzmen who used to work in our choir room, a saxophonist. He told a student: “Any improvisation where you don’t feel like you need to put a bag over your head and sneak out the back door is a success.” He is right about that.) The best part was not me: one of my tasks was to set up the key for the Skipperlings to sing “Long time traveler” after me. That is worth hearing, so I am posting the last eight minutes or so of the improvisation followed by their song. The selection starts softly, just before my return to the improvisation’s tonic of C after a long excursion to G flat and B, but it builds up (finally!) after the bishop returns, my cue that it is time to wrap things up.

And here is the closing hymn, on which the improvisation was based. My intent was for the violinist to play on the final stanza, doubling the descant; instead, he played for all three stanzas. That made the middle stanza, unaccompanied except for the violin, much better than what I had anticipated.

Lessons:
- The summer’s work was not entirely wasted, but there is much still to do. I am unable to convincingly organize twenty-five minutes of improvisation so that it sounds like a unified musical composition. Not for the first time, I am filled with admiration for how Mr. Jarrett can do this so well. The way to get there would be to do many more “practice runs,” with close attention to form. This is not directly useful for my proper duties, so it is unlikely to happen. I am still listening to his four-CD recording “A multitude of angels” and seeking to internalize it.
- There were a few weeks this summer where my organ improvisation was better than my work at the piano; I have posted a couple of these on SoundCloud. This was a goal, and I am happy to have reached it, even if the way I did so was with lame piano playing on said Sundays.
- I survived despair. There was a week when I became convinced that my improvisations were driving people away, keeping them from entering the church from the narthex until my noise-making was done. By “what some would call chance,” that very week I happened on one of Pressfield’s books: “Do the Work,” the sequel to his important book “The War of Art.” I must say that “Do the Work” is not as good of a book, and something of a waste of money – it is short, and mostly repeats material from “War of Art.” But some of the material unique to this book was exactly what I needed to drag me out of the Slough of Despond.
- Possibly the chief benefit of the summer’s work was to my accompaniment of congregational song. Devoting more of my practice time to what I call the “Thelonious Monk method” (play the tune at the organ continuously for an extended period, forty-five minutes or an hour) made me more adventuresome when it came time to sing the hymn on Sunday, and in some cases perhaps more effective.

Now it is back to repertoire and anthem accompaniments. There is much to be done there, too. In fact, this very day I received what I view as a word from the Lord: a trustworthy friend told me that during the service I have been describing, she heard it as a voice: “(my name) has more work to do here.”

I wrote that down and attached it to my door, alongside the pictures of Bach, Bruckner, and Keith Jarrett.

Finish then thy new creation;
Pure and spotless let us be;
Let us see thy great salvation
Perfectly restored in thee;
Changed from glory into glory,
Till in heaven we take our place,
Till we cast our crowns before thee,
Lost in wonder, love, and praise.
(Charles Wesley)

Windows Movie Maker: a Rant

I have a more useful essay to post (perhaps tonight, or in the next few days), but first a Rant.

Not so long ago, Microsoft had a useful program called Windows Movie Maker. I used it for all of my YouTube uploads; so did hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of other people. It was easy to use, and worked fine.

Microsoft has pulled the plug on it. Their current operating system, Windows 10 (which I am using, unwillingly) does not include it, or any equivalent. Win10 has their version of a digital assistant, Cortana, and supposedly you can say “Hey, Cortana!” and get answers to any question. I have found “her” not so useful in general (Wikipedia is a much better starting place), but often fairly useful for specific Windows-related questions.

But not this one. Many people have asked what to do for a Movie Maker equivalent, and the official Microsoft forums carefully dodge the question. There are a number of “apps” available, but a search for one today led me down a two-hour rathole. I installed EZVid, which some sources consider the top choice. But it will not accept audio in WAV form; it accepts only MP3. All of my tracks are WAV. That led to a search for a WAV to MP3 converter. There are many of those; the free ones all seem to install helpful little toolbars and advertisements. Charming.

I gave up. For the tracks that I wanted to upload to support my essay-in-progress, I will use SoundCloud, which does support WAV files. But I am soon going to bump into their size limit for free accounts, and I do not want to commit to a monthly subscription for the rest of my life.

Clearly, the Powers That Be at Microsoft do not want people to do what I do: create music – mind you, not pirated tracks by others; my own creative work – and post it on the Internet to share freely with others.

I gather that this task would be simple and free on Apple products.

O day full of grace (and a recipe)

I have not posted a Recipe for a long while, and this is not really one, just a variation. One of our family favorites is the Middle-Eastern salad called Tabbouleh, made with bulgur wheat, large amounts of fresh parsley and mint, black olives, cucumber, tomato, olive oil and lemon juice, plus other additions ad libitum.

Yesterday when I made our weekly batch, I used Kasha (toasted buckwheat) in place of the bulgur. It adds its own distinctive flavor (sort of nuttish, perhaps a bit like walnuts?) and I think that I prefer it. There is the added advantage that the dish now becomes gluten-free; here is a link discussing that aspect, and noting other nutritional advantages, particularly buckwheat’s high levels of fiber and protein. [Edited to add: My wife does not like this at all. I do. Your experience may vary.]

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On the current Episcopal calendar, this day (Sept. 8) is the feast of two nineteenth century Danish Christians: S. Kirkegaard and N. F. S. Gruntvig. The former is more generally known; the latter is more important to me because of his hymns. Our choir is working on an arrangement of one: “Built on a Rock the Church must stand/even when steeples are falling.” Here is another, which I love even better, as much for its tune Den Signede Dag as for the text: “O Day full of grace, which we behold.”

Most of all, I love the arrangement of this by F. Melius Christiansen for his St. Olaf Choir, especially the way it begins. It is a grand undertaking to sing this, which I once did at a music workshop (Presbyterian Conference on Worship and Music at Montreat, NC – that year, Anton Armstrong, one of Christiansen’s successors at St. Olaf, was the adult choir director and clinician). Here is a recording of the hymn by another fine choir, the Nordic Choir of Luther College.

I recall Mike Wagner’s sermon at the RSCM course this summer, wherein he spoke of the Collegiate Choir at Luther College (in which he sang) and “taking it home,” with “it” being what I call Connection. If one doubts what “it” or “connection” might be, this recording is a fine demonstration. May these young people take “it” with them wherever they go.

Matins: some Considerations

The Holy Eucharist, the principal act of Christian worship on the Lord’s Day and other major Feasts, and Daily Morning and Evening Prayer, as set forth in this Book, are the regular services appointed for public worship in this Church. (Book of Common Prayer p. 13, the first sentence of the Book after its contents, certificate, and preface)

Earlier this summer, I suspended the public weekday observance of Matins (Morning Prayer). There were reasons for this, and reasons why I thought the suspension would be permanent.

For our parish, the story began with Fr. Sanderson in the autumn of 2000 when he arrived as interim priest-in-charge. He was determined to pray Matins and Evensong every day in the parish church as is meet and right, and in obedience to his ordination vows in the Church of England. The Vestry opposed him on this, claiming (with some justification) that the establishment of times for worship was their prerogative. He ignored them, noting that he would open the doors and pray the Office whether they liked it or not and whether they listed the Offices on the calendar as public services or not.

Several parishioners joined Fr. Sanderson for the Daily Office, most of them from the Brotherhood of St. Andrew and Daughters of the King, with the best attendance at daily Evensong which at times ran to five or six persons. Matins settled into a regular gathering of three: Fr. Sanderson, Bill (a member of a neighboring parish who worked in our city at the university), and me.

When Fr. Sanderson departed, several of us took the responsibility of continuing the Office. Charles, Delbert, and Grace (may she rest in peace) led the daily Evensongs; I led Matins, excepting two Saturdays a month when the Brotherhood and DOK prayed the Office and had their meetings. After Bill’s retirement, he no longer came into town for Matins so it was just me, with occasional visitors. One of those was the diocesan Bishop. On Sundays, I am regularly joined by Fr. H., our distinguished retired priest and canon, with (again) occasional visitors.

Evensong has dwindled until the weekday version no longer happens. All that remains is Choral Evensong on the First Sundays of the month during the academic year. And Matins, until this summer.

I was to be out of town for several occasions in July and August, most notably the RSCM Course. Getting the Matins service on to the official printed church listing of events (and website) is complex, as is its removal, so it seemed best to remove it altogether rather than moving it on and off to fit my travels.

And I am tired.

Not of the Offices, mind you; I continued to pray them. But I was tired of doing them at a fixed hour, of being accountable for it no matter how I felt, no matter what else I had to do. I was tired of the responsibility of having the door open to all comers, most often street people who know that I am there at that hour (and no one else) and they can ask for money. Even though it was not every day that anyone showed up, or even every week, the prospect of it has worn me out.

But there are other considerations.

For one thing, those street people, just a few of them in truth. Two of them have been around enough so that they join in the prayers when they show up. Perhaps it makes a difference for them.

For another, this fall’s confirmation class is making a special emphasis on Morning and Evening Prayer. Many of these young people are in our Choir and I have known them since they were small children. How can we tell them “This is important,” but by example say “No, it’s not. We can’t be bothered to have this as a regular service of the church.” It was this consideration that carried the day for me; I cannot put into words how much I want for these young people that they establish the habit of daily prayer and attentive reading/hearing of the Psalms and Holy Scripture. If I can aid them even a little by example, that would be worthwhile.

This morning, I sent a Slack message to the secretary and sexton that we will be starting Matins next week. Three mornings a week, plus Sundays.

We shall see how long I can carry it forward. At most, I have but a few years remaining in this place. Perhaps someone else will pick it up in this parish. Or perhaps not.

But “the voice of prayer is never silent.” In one form or another, liturgical prayer has been offered to our Lord and God every morning and evening since He commanded his servant Moses that it be so, and more informally clear back to when He used to walk in the Garden “in the cool of the day” with Adam and Eve. It was the rupture of this fellowship which signaled that something had gone horribly wrong (Gen. 3:8-19), and it was only His grace that healed the breach.

It is given me to have a small part in this for a while. When I am gone, the prayer will continue. That much is certain.

[Update, Sept. 8: One of the aforementioned street people joined me for Matins this morning. He is struggling with addiction and doing well for now, trying to put his life back together. Among the things he is doing: turning himself in for a short jail sentence in lieu of a fine, which he is unable to pay. "I might as well take care of it," he told me, and came to Matins seeking strength to carry it through.

And here I am, barely willing even to open the door and offer this little service as a public liturgy. Kyrie eleison.]

Charlottesville

Much has been written and said about the white supremacist rally at Charlottesville over the weekend. I am a son of the South; my readers and friends know my respect for the Confederate States of America. Thus, I cannot be silent. Not when the supremacists marched under the Stars and Bars, and made a statue of Robert E. Lee the focus of their Saturday rally. Their actions dishonor the flag and the veterans who served under it. This is far from the worst of it, but it is something that should not be forgotten in the turmoil.

Let me be clear. I absolutely denounce white supremacy. And racism. And the hatred and persecution of Jews. Or anyone, for any reason.

Three observations:
- I have no doubt that Mr. Lee would be angrier than I am, and would disassociate himself from these people. In the months and years after the war, whenever someone would stoke the fires of hatred against the north, he would rebuke them, often heatedly. “We are all Americans now,” he said. I am certain that he would do the same today.
- There were racists among the Confederate soldiers, and more so among the politicians. But I think that the best of them would join Mr. Lee in denouncing the actions of the supremacists in Charlottesville and elsewhere.
- This is the work of our Adversary. Hate and fear are his strongest weapons. But he that is with us is greater than he that is in the world.

After last fall’s election, I wrote:

I suspect that the United States will be a darker, more divided, and more dangerous place in three or four years, most of all for people who are not of white European descent….

I think the stage is set for a genuinely progressive candidate to run against President Trump. By 2020, we will have a good idea what a Trump presidency is like, complete with Republican control of House and Senate and probably the Supreme Court. And I think a great many people by then will be ready for some genuine change.

The trouble is, there are more directions for change than one. The stage may also be set for a more effective candidate from the far right, perhaps a charismatic Iraq/Afghanistan war veteran with a fondness for armbands and torchlight parades. Mr. Trump’s campaign provided a model for how such a person could win an election in the United States. I suspect there are young adults who have been paying attention.

It has only been a few months, and we already have the torchlight parades. God help us.

[Added on Tuesday, August 15, the Assumption of the B.V.M.
I have a large photograph of Mr. Lee in my office. Like the pictures of J. S. Bach and others on the inside of my door, the icon of the Mother of God, the holy cards that lean up against my computer monitor to remind me of the saints, the photo of Mr. Lee is for me an icon, a window into the divine space where he lived his life as a faithful Episcopal layman. He reminds me to be gentle and forbearing with others, to treat everyone with respect, to act as a Christian gentleman no matter what defeats and failures may come, to react with patience and a calm spirit when others are angry. He teaches me to humbly commit all of my intelligence and ability to the tasks that lie before me, and to commit the results to Divine Providence.

I need these lessons now more than ever.

But I have removed his photograph and put it into a manila file. My office is too public and I do not want to provoke trouble. Upon reflection, I concluded that this is what he would do, given the circumstances. Mr. Lee does not need our monuments; he is at rest with the saints in glory.]

The Skipperlings: a Review and an open Letter

The Skipperlings, a vocal and string band, played for the Iowa City Farmers’ Market the other day, Wednesday, July 26. I wrote of them here, but it is time to write some more.

The group is of particular interest to me because all three of them sing in my choir: Caleigh, Greta, Claire. Their “arranger, accompanist, and manager” (as she was introduced; on banjo in the photo above), Jean Littlejohn, is my closest musical friend. In our differing spheres of activity, both of us are committed to getting people to sing. For me, it is the Songs of Zion; for Jean, it is mostly folk music and community singing, especially the choir she founded and directs, the Family Folk Machine. All this is to say: expect no objective detachment in my appraisal.

But that is part of my point. Music at its best grows from community, as I tried to describe in my recent RSCM Reports. It is local, homespun. It is not something reserved for a handful of glamorous superstars; music is meant to be made among friends and family and church congregations. People you know. Children from your church choir. Neighbors. Co-workers. Friends. In this, the Skipperlings are a first-class example.


This was a full-fledged gig: two hours of music. Greta told me during the ten-minute break that they were singing “everything we know, and a few that we don’t know.” Those who are performing musicians know what it means to prepare two hours of music – memorized, all the kinks worked out. It is a lot of hard work, the stuff that separates the pros from the dilettantes. And every song, every last one of them, was solid, their beautiful close-knit harmonies perfect and strong, always sung with strong Connection.

It is not insignificant that the girls were at the RSCM Course. On the one hand, six hours of daily singing put them in top vocal condition; on the other hand, I doubt that they found time for their Skipperlings songs, other than the one they sang at the talent show. They were home two days, and then the gig. That is impressive.

All of them are string players as well as singers: Caleigh on the violin, Claire and Greta on the cello, which they sometimes played as a miniature stand-up bass by extending the end-pin all the way out. They have both learned to sing and play the cello at the same time, which is not elementary. But it ties them to a long tradition, right back to the medieval troubadours and jongleurs, some of whom played the viola da gamba as they sang.

Their presentation was ideally suited to the venue, the local farmers’ market (which to their credit strongly supports local music). People walking around, shopping, eating food from the vendors, lots of noise. Lots of families and children. For most of the people, the Skipperlings were background music, a welcome addition to the market. A few people drifted in and out from the “stage” area (a concrete pad at one end of the parking area-turned-market), listening for a few songs. Maybe twenty or thirty listeners of this sort at any one time, and a few people that stayed for most or all of it.

One of their songs called for Kermit the Frog (a stuffed animal version), whom the girls sat in front of them as they sang. A little boy toddled up, hugged Kermit, and toddled off with him, his mother chasing him – all while the girls sang, giggling a little at what was going on. It was delightful.

It was all low-key, relaxed, fun. The girls bantered among themselves between songs as they tuned. They introduced the songs, sometimes with good-natured disagreement as to what the song was about. Claire encouraged us to visit their Facebook page.

Local music, local food. Both homegrown by people of the community. If there is hope for the United States and beyond, this is part of it.


I do not know what lies ahead for the Skipperlings. As a group, they are not likely to be famous, though they do have a significant local presence and following. Caleigh’s voice and stage presence remind me more than a little of the young Alison Krauss, fiddler and singer and one of my favorite musicians. By Caleigh’s age, Alison had a contract with Rounder Records and was working on a commercial recording, “Too Late to Cry,” released when she was sixteen. Here is an old video of the title song, back from those days.

None of the three Skipperlings are yet at that level as musicians, though I would not rule out one or more of them getting there someday. But that does not matter; Claire, Greta, and Caleigh will walk their own paths which may include some fame, or not. What is certain is that their futures, together and apart, will include lots of quality music-making. And right now, the summer of 2017, is a special time for them, and for all who hear them. One can ask for no more.

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Dear Skipperlings:

You are unexpected.
I do not think that anyone, even Jean, foresaw what you have become by singing together, playing instruments together. Your music brings light and joy to the world. This is no small thing. When you sing at a farmers’ market or Uptown Bill’s or anywhere else in the community, you change the world. Not by very much, mind you; it might be one person who was sad and depressed and you brought them light, at least for a little while as they listened to you. Or it might be a child, like that little toddler with Kermit, who sees and hears you and the seed is planted: “I could do that. I could sing like that someday and be a musician.” The work of music is given to us. But it is not given us to know the results of it, not in this life.

Days will come when you are the one who is sad and depressed, or frightened, or without a clue as to your next step. It is then most of all that you must keep on singing. The light shines in darkness, your own as well as that of the world around you.

There is a purity and innocence to your singing. I hear it in your voices, see it in your onstage demeanor; it is a part of the delight you bring to your audiences. This is partly because you are young. But it need not disappear as you get older; I see and hear some of it (for example) in Jean when she is working with the Folk Machine or playing the organ at church. Jeff Capps and Tara Dutcher have this, too, as do many others. I hope that wherever your paths lead, you continue to carry it with you.

For the best examples, one must look to the saints: Joan of Arc, for one. Cecilia, patron of music. Francis and Clare of Assisi. Most of all, look to the pure and innocent Lamb whom I know you follow and in whom you rejoice. He was pure of heart and soul and entirely innocent right through the Cross and into the pit of Hell. And He can carry us with Him all the way through the worst of it into heaven.

Don’t forget the church songs: the hymns, and the sort of things we sang this summer at the RSCM Course and in our church choir, and the people who sang them. I do not need to tell you what these things mean; you have experienced them for yourselves.

Finally, here is some advice I wrote a few years ago for others; it applies now to you and I hope you will take the time to read it:
Advice for young musicians

Whatever happens, whatever form your music takes, keep on singing and playing your instruments. You are a light in the darkness.

RSCM Report, part three: Taking it Home

I have taken choristers to RSCM courses for upwards of thirty years. Most of those years, it has been just a few young people, a fraction of the choir back home. Where I now work, it began with two little girls entering the fourth grade, the minimum age for the course. They came home with a vision of the possibilities and did all that was in their power to make the parish youth choir better. As did I, year after year.

This year we took fourteen choristers and a proctor. It is almost the entire Youth Choir, plus Tom (who now sings with the adult choir). No longer do we need one or two people to show the others how it is done; they all know, and several of them were among the leading choristers vocally and musically. All of them know what it is like to sing this kind of music well, with connection and intensity and total commitment, among a group where everyone is at that level. All of them surely want to keep singing this way.

It is an opportunity unique to my decades of church music, and unique to the choirs participating in the course this year. I do not think that any of the other directors are returning home to as strong of a group as I will face in our first rehearsals a month from now - not even Mr. Buzard, our course director, who has the task of building a program for young singers from scratch at a distinguished cathedral where there have been choirs, but no young singers for almost a century. I am sure he would love to start with a group such as what we will have back in Iowa City.

It is a test for me. How can I help these choristers maintain the level of work that they have done this week? Here we have six hours or more of rehearsal a day; at home, it amounts to one hour a week, and many of the choristers cannot be there for all of that. That is the issue, a perennial issue for most church choirs of all ages. One rehearsal a week is not sufficient; it is like trying to play the organ by practicing one day a week.

But the choristers (and adults) have busy lives, of which choral music is only a part, and it is right that it be so. On the wider scale, is choral music at a high level going to be solely for the handful of places with choir schools, daily rehearsals, daily choral services, semi-professional and highly trained singers on the ATB parts? Is music at this level a closed door to everyone else?

The answer to that comes down, in microcosm, to what I do with these choristers back home, starting on Wednesday, August 23. We repeat the Bruce Neswick anthem “The Invitation” for a service with the bishop on Friday, September 8. Can we sing that anthem and that service with the intensity we gave to choral evensong at the RSCM? Can we then carry this forward into the fall and winter? We plan to sing the Vaughan Williams setting of “Lord, thou hast been our refuge” on Christ the King; can we make this as strong as the Howells canticles and “Rejoice in the Lamb” at the course? And in doing such things, can we incorporate new first-year choristers and give them a good start?

I can and must do some things at home which are not feasible at the course. Can I do better about teaching them solfege and making them independent musicians? Can I work with our young choirmen? They are not maintaining good posture at all times in rehearsal. Several of them need to open their mouths for a taller vocal space. Can I help them make these things habitual? Many of the choristers, trebles and teens alike, are not marking their scores. That is because I have not taught them to do this, and that is one of the ways in which choristers - or any professional musicians - can remember what they have rehearsed when it has been a week since they last met. Can I help them make music an essential part of their lives for the rest of their days, and beyond that through the ages of eternity? And most of all, can I through the music we sing and rehearse do my part in bringing them into the full maturity of the image of Christ?

And can we do all of this in that one little hour per week? For me, it is now or never. I will be judged on this at the Day of Doom. Will it be recorded in the presence of my Lord and the holy angels that I gave it all that I have, leaning ever on the Holy Paraclete for guidance and strength? Or will the record state that I slacked off, allowed the choristers given into my care to slack off, and squandered the opportunity? “Where much is given, much is required.”

Jesu, juva.

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I acknowledge Mike Wagner for his sermon at one of the weekday evensongs at the Course, which I think he titled “Taking it home.” Mike sings in one of the finest choirs in America (the Nordic Choir of Luther College), and described how another collegiate director said to his director “this choir has ‘it,’” meaning by “it” what I call “connection.” Our RSCM director of a few years ago, Andrew Walker, called it “attitude.”

Back at the Choir College, Dr. Flummerfelt described it as Connection, and I will probably use that word, though Attitude needs less explanation. When singing, are you connected to the text and musical line with all of your being? Or are you going through the motions? It might be possible for instrumentalists to sometimes get away with the latter, but the voice is so thoroughly a window into the soul that it is immediately obvious if the singers are not Connected -- and, if the other basics are in place and the group has done its homework, Connection makes it possible for the song to touch the hearts of the listeners. This will never happen if the hearts of the singers are not likewise touched by the Song and absolutely committed to it.

Whatever we call it, we had it at the Course, and now we must take it home. Tomorrow’s essay will describe an example of how this is done.

RSCM Report, part two: Some thoughts on Renaissance polyphony

In some respects, the most challenging piece in our repertoire was the Ave Maria by Robert Parsons (c. 1530-1570). For the singer, especially in the ATB parts, it is a doorway into another plane of existence. From the outset, we launch into long melismatic lines on the first words, Ave Maria. The tenor (which is what I sang) has twenty-four notes on the syllable “ri”; the other voice parts are similar. The melody goes on, and when you sense that it is nearing a cadence, it goes on some more, far beyond what I can sing in one breath, or even two or three.

Why? For what reason would a composer write such a ravishingly beautiful melody for two words, most of it for one syllable? And then bury it in the middle of the texture, where no one except the tenors will know how beautiful it is?

It is for love of Our Lady. Love even for her name, love overflowing into melody.

And that is not enough, for the basses and the two alto parts are also singing, their melodies equally beautiful, the four lower vocal parts overlapping one another, entwined most wonderfully. And finally, the trebles soar above the texture in long notes. At first, Ave. Just the one word, as if they cannot bear to go on. Then Ave Maria.

The music flows onward, phrase after phrase, each more beautiful than the last. Gratia plena. Benedicta tu. The melismas seek to show how completely full of grace she is, how blessed. Fifteen hundred years and more of painters and sculptors, of architects and poets, have sought to express this; I think that they fall short of the musicians. Perhaps it is because our art is participatory; one experiences it properly only by singing it. The choral art is communal, as well; no person can experience this motet without the other singers. Renaissance polyphony of this sort is one of the clearest expressions of community. The six vocal parts are thoroughly interdependent. As a singer, you focus on your own part, but you are constantly aware of the other parts, all related to one another, but each with its own melodic and rhythmic flow. So it is with the Kingdom of God.

The Parsons is a masterpiece. The Ave verum corpus of William Byrd (c. 1540-1623) is even more of a masterpiece. Three pages, only a few minutes - but every note is exactly what it should be. Offhand, the only thing to which I can compare it in size and perfection is the motet on the same text by W. A. Mozart, one of his finest works -- but the Byrd is its equal. Here, the music expresses devotion to the Real Presence of Christ in the transfigured Bread and Wine - at a time and place when both the theological truth and the Latin language were illegal. As Mr. Buzard told the choristers, this was never sung in public in Byrd’s lifetime; it was probably sung in secret at someone’s house, and probably with one person to a part. It is thus more intimate than the Parsons, each voice part more of an individual outpouring of love, of wonderment at the Sacred Mystery. But it is still four parts, no one complete in itself - still the expression of a community, albeit small. In our rehearsals at home, I told the choristers that the Byrd is a very great masterpiece, and I hoped that they would grow to love it as much as I do. Mr. Buzard said pretty much the same thing to them at the Course.

O dulcis,
O pie,
O Jesu fili Mariae,
Miserere mei.

For the most part, we have shied away from this repertoire at the RSCM courses. It is often challenging to maintain one’s own part with so much going on around it, and I suspect the idea is that it would be a bit much for young choristers to master in one week; also, it is less dramatic than music of later eras and (one might think) less immediately interesting to young singers.

I submit two points: First, it was not the trebles who found either the Parsons or the Byrd to be difficult; it was the ATBs. Second, one would need a heart of stone to remain unmoved in the singing of either of these motets. That is as true of a ten-year old chorister as it is of an old choirmaster like me. I wonder what it is like to experience something like the Byrd for the first time.

We sang these things at the Basilica of Saint Louis. Crowded onto the choral risers behind the Altar, surrounded by these my friends, many of them choristers from our parish, singing these things in such close proximity, the vocal parts interweaving into a whole, was an extraordinary experience. And I think we sang the Byrd with more connection than the Tallis Scholars in the recording linked below, or any of the several other recordings I sampled – perhaps because we had many trebles and teen ATBs for whom this was their first exposure to the piece.

Earlier, I gave short shrift to the visual artists. They are in fact part of this as well; the music needs the gorgeous large acoustic of the Basilica, about seven or eight seconds of reverberation. It is supported by the visual splendor; everywhere one looks in such a building, there are statues, mosaics, paintings, windows -- all pointing toward our Lord Christ. They are beautiful and compelling - but the music breathes life into the room.

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Here are YouTube recordings of the Parsons and the Byrd – not by us; some of our services were live-streamed, but I am not aware of any recordings that remain on the Net.

RSCM report: part one

Rejoice in God, O ye Tongues; give the glory to the Lord, and the Lamb.
Nations and languages, and every Creature, in which is the breath of Life.
Let man and beast appear before him, and magnify his name together.
(Christopher Smart)

This year, I am not writing a detailed account of our RSCM experiences. Were I to make the attempt, I would mostly be repeating what I have written in other years: for example here and here. I content myself with a few observations:

Last year, the trebles began the week sounding tentative, young. This year, the distinctive sound of a strong, confident treble section was present from the first warmups. On the other hand, last year we had an unusually large group of adult tenors and basses. This year, it was one of the smallest adult contingents of recent years. It was our turn to sound tentative in the first rehearsals, for the large majority of the tenors and basses (and one of the male altos) were young men in middle school and high school, some with newly changed voices. These young choirmen are one of the special glories of the St. Louis Course, this year perhaps more than any other. By the end of the week, they sang with distinction.

This year’s music director was Stephen Buzard, who recently moved to St. James Cathedral in Chicago as organist/choirmaster after service at St. Thomas, New York City as assistant and then interim director. It was he who had to carry forward that top-line choral program after the sudden death of John Scott in 2015. Stephen attended the St. Louis Course as a treble; I remember him from those days. That made it a special delight to have him return as the course’s music director - his first time directing an RSCM Course. I expect that it will not be his last. He is every bit the equal of the distinguished musicians we have had in the past, and better than most of them. I grew quite fond of him this week, as did the choristers.

Our repertoire for the week was challenging, featuring the Britten “Rejoice in the Lamb.” One of my choristers, eyeing the forty-page choral score, asked at our first rehearsal back home: “Are we going to sing ALL of this?” Yes. And we did it exceedingly well. As if that weren’t enough, we had the Howells Collegium Regale evening canticles on the same service.

At the Sunday Mass in the Basilica, we sang three of the finest Latin motets, of which I will have more to say in Part Two:
- Parsons: Ave Maria
- Byrd: Ave verum corpus
- Duruflé: Ubi caritas

I hope that the choristers will long remember what it feels like to sing such things in that acoustic, and in the context of a Catholic Mass. I hope also that this music was an icon for those who heard it, a window into the eternal Song. It was a privilege to live intensively with this music for a week, and to sing it with these people whom I love.

That brings me to my final point: my pride in these choristers from our parish, and my affection for them, as well as for many of the adults and choristers from other congregations who have over the years become my friends. Were we to never gather again, it would be a hard thing. But we shall: as I have said many times, it is my hope that we might together make music before the Lord our God through the ages of eternity. My guess is that it might not be that different in essence from the rehearsals and services at the RSCM courses and (sometimes) back home. Then we shall hear the voices of our fellow choristers as they really are, complete in Christ and more glorious than anything we can here imagine (C. S. Lewis wrote of this, frequently).

Looking about the dining hall at meals, the chapel during rehearsals and midweek evensongs, and seeing groups of them singing, talking, laughing, playing, making new friends and renewing old friendships with young people from other choirs, sometimes supporting one another through difficulty, and at the last watching them reunite with their parents after Evensong, I thought my heart would burst for joy.

Almighty God, we entrust all who are dear to us to thy never-failing care and love, for this life and the life to come, knowing that thou art doing better things for them than we can desire or pray for; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (BCP p. 831)

[to be continued]