Playing the Changes - part one

We come to practice with humility. (Steven Pressfield)

This Sunday’s songs include “As the wind-song through the trees,” a marvelous text by Shirley Erena Murray with tune by Swee Hong Lim. It is what amounts to a ballad, complete with written-in chords, one to a bar.

It is perfect for “playing the changes,” a skill I want to learn. Normally I work from the other direction, starting with the tune and seeing what develops from it; in jazz and pop improvisation (blues also), the tune is certainly in mind, but you are working with a fixed chord progression (the “changes” as they call it) – especially if you are in an ensemble, where the other people will be playing the chords and you can’t go wandering off in your own direction. Improvisations tend to start with the changes, and the right hand makes a new melody that fits them. This is done by working within the appropriate scale for the progression. More advanced players add chromatics and all sorts of other things, but the scale remains the foundation.

So, to work. For this, I needed Dave Frank’s beginning lessons, the first of which is here. I watched the first and second lessons over my second breakfast, and took the song upstairs. I set the metronome at 60 to a quarter note and took off.

It was horrible. And that was a good thing.

The musician must never fear making a fool of himself. That is the only way you can learn anything new. But it remains painful to stumble around. My work for the week is not even as complex as what Mr. Frank is doing on his videos; it is a simple song in G major with six chords. Triads, mind you, not even seventh chords (though it is easy enough to add the sevenths to them). No key changes – “Planet G” as Mr. Frank would say, beginning to end.

Play the chords to a steady rhythm in the left hand – for a while at first, this was all I attempted, no right hand at all – then play any notes from the G major scale in the right hand, in eighth notes with some “swing.” Stay with the groove. Make phrases with clear-cut endings and a breath before the next phrase. Two-bar phrases. Four-bar phrases. Nothing fancy.

I did this for about twenty minutes, stopping for staff meeting. Later on I did it for another hour, all on the same tune, the same set of chord changes with the metronome. It got better, a little. After a while I expanded beyond eighth notes to some triplets and syncopations and “straight” eighth notes mixed in, and a bit of countermelody in the inner voices. There were a few stretches where it sounded fairly decent. Then I would lose control of the chords and play something outside of the given progression. Or a chromatic note outside of G major would slip into the right hand. I kept going.

My goal: “play the changes” on this tune on Sunday for the middle service piano improvisation. If I can find one or two hours a day, I might make it to a fairly acceptable standard. Any musician who happens to hear it – such as the professor of jazz from the university, who often attends that service – will find all sorts of mistakes. At best, it will sound like a third-rate cocktail lounge pianist on a bad day. I will certainly feel like a bumbling unmusical idiot when I am finished.

The thing is, I could improvise on this tune in my usual manner with little difficulty; I have done so on past Sundays, several times. It would be better than what I am likely to give the people (and my Lord and Teacher) on Sunday.

But my sense is that I need to give this a try.

Paying my Dues, Making Mistakes

I have worked through the Mike Garson video masterclass, as I described here. At this distance, the most valuable lesson he taught me was how to practice improvisation, working from two directions: short etudes, as little as fifteen or thirty seconds, and extended “playing around” with a tune, an idea he learned from Thelonious Monk. That, and Garson’s attitude toward music as a gift from a higher power, and the responsibility that entails: gratitude, humility, helping and healing others with our music.

Recently, I found another “teacher” – Dave Frank, whose “school of jazz” is here. He has a series of free “masterclass” videos; I have watched two so far. They are enjoyable, and I got some ideas from both of them.

One of them was on the playing of Keith Jarrett, whom Frank calls “the greatest pianist of the recorded era.” As he explains, we cannot compare Jarrett’s improvisations with Bach’s, or Beethoven’s, or Chopin’s, for they made no recordings. But he is the best that we have had since it became possible to make recordings, in any genre – jazz, classical, whatever.

I am not prepared to agree with that, though Frank presents a convincing argument. But Jarrett is definitely one of the best. In some respects, his LP “Köln Concert” (the highest-selling solo piano recording of all time, over 2 million copies) planted the seed for what I attempt in my little piano improvisations. [Here is a YouTube version, one of many: this one includes a transcription of the first twenty-five minutes – the first side of the two LPs]

Jarrett’s improvisations were on the grandest of scale, and these concerts established his fame beyond the narrow circles of jazz enthusiasts. I purchased the album in the 1970’s when it first came out, and I pretty much wore it out. I still have it. I had never heard anything like it; Mike Garson’s “Now” music comes closest, and perhaps closer to what I do, for Jarrett explicitly quotes no pre-existing tunes and I do, always, for my work can exist only in the context of the Divine Liturgy and its music.

Yes, I would love to play like Keith Jarrett. Or like Mike Garson. So would a lot of other pianists. But there is a problem; I haven’t paid my dues. In this documentary, Jarrett said that the place where he learned most of his jazz tunes was the club in the Poconos where he played in his early teens. No one was listening, so he would learn tune after tune. Garson played a lot of club gigs, too, with few listeners and minimal pay, before he connected with David Bowie.

I haven’t done that. I do not know the jazz standards or the styles – which would take years of careful listening and imitation – and I will never be able to play in that manner.

But, as I considered these things, I realized that yes, I have paid some dues. This morning, the parish presented me with a certificate because I had mentioned to a friend that this is my fortieth year of working with choirs. More to the point, the youth choir sang me a song with lyrics they had written for the occasion.

Forty years. That is somewhere above two thousand Sundays. Plus weddings, funerals, revival meetings, Holy Weeks, Christmas Eves. And the practicing that goes with it.

That counts as “dues.” They are simply in a different school than the jazz club or the rock-and-roll band. I don’t know the jazz standards or the pop tunes, but I have learned a few hymn tunes along the way. I have not played in combos, which is where jazz skills are really developed (so far as I can tell), but I have been a part of a great many choral rehearsals, and I have collaborated with first-rate musicians and learned much from them, most recently Jean Littlejohn.

My Sunday morning piano improvisations are a continuing school, and the daily preparations for them the “homework.” I am grateful for my teachers, very glad to learn from these my fellow musicians, near and far.

Here is where I am on the journey:

All things bright and beautiful: Rogation Sunday 2017 (this morning).

I have put this on Soundcloud as an experiment. There are advantages – it is strictly audio, which saves me the most troublesome part of preparing a YouTube clip, which is locating pictures. I can post under a Creative Commons License. And you can download it, listen to it offline, put it on a CD, whatever you want to do with it. [Edited to add: I changed my profile name over there to "T. Andrew Hicks," because a Soundcloud search turns up a long list of other "Andrew Hickses", most of whom appear to be much younger than I, and who have a wide variety of musical interests.]

There will surely be disadvantages: I am limited to three hours of music without upgrading to a paid account. I note that as soon as I finished playing my track, it jumped immediately to another, by a pop musician named Travis Scott who appears to be “trending,” as they like to say. His work has no relation whatsoever to mine and I found the transition rather jarring. Clearly, Soundcloud would rather you listen to him than to me.

So it goes. As I read this week, “If you aren’t paying anything, you are not the customer. You are the product.”

In any event, my tentative plan is to put a few piano improvisations on Soundcloud, and leave other sorts of music (choral, organ) on YouTube. I want to be absolutely certain that no one can claim copyright on my Soundcloud material – as YouTube regularly does on any organ music I post, especially (for some reason) my playing of Bach. That lets someone else make money from ads. I do not like this.

Toward the end of today’s work on “All things,” I had a bit of extra “instruction” in the School of Improvisation. While moving my left hand up the piano, I accidentally struck an F natural (you can hear it at the 11’30” mark). In the key of D major.

Keith Jarrett said in the documentary that this is one of the hardest aspects of solo improvisations: whatever notes or ideas you play, you have to respond to them. I think the fear of such moments is what keeps many people from learning to improvise.

Well, you just go ahead and respond. I was limited by time, for I had to finish up within another minute or so, but I think I brought it around well enough. In retrospect, an analyst could say that it echoes the section earlier in the piece where I was in D minor. I can only say that I absolutely had no intention of doing that. And I can say that it made the ending more interesting – and better – than what I had intended. It does not always turn out that way – last week’s improvisation had some good music in places, but the bitonal direction the improvisation took in the middle was too jarring, and on the whole it proved to be not so good.

How do you learn to deal with such things? It comes in the practice sessions, when you are playing the tune for a half hour or longer at a time.

I had much trouble controlling this tune, so I was diligent this week, and made lots of “mistakes” along the way – and thus practiced working my way out of them.

I can well imagine young Keith Jarrett in that Poconos club making “mistakes” on new tunes as he learned them and working through them – in public – even though most of the public was paying no attention. That developed the skill and courage it took for him to walk onstage at places like Carnegie Hall, or the Royal Albert Hall, or La Scala with no preconception as to what he would do. Just him and the piano; sit down and play. For thirty or forty minutes, or an hour. An intermission, and a second improvisation. With a capacity audience, most of them enthusiasts who paid a lot for tickets, perhaps travelled far, expecting something miraculous like the Köln Concert. And the critics, who were often unkind to him.

I write in the past tense, for I learned that Jarrett no longer does extended concert improvisations of this sort. He had a physical/nervous breakdown in the late 1990’s, diagnosed as “chronic fatigue syndrome,” because these things were so hard on him. He took two years off entirely, and returned to the stage doing shorter-form pieces, jazz standards, etc.

Jarrett paid his classical dues as well, with a strong background in that area as a child prodigy, studying with Eleanor Sokoloff and others at the Curtis Institute before he got into jazz. He performed as a classical pianist for nearly thirty years alongside his other music-making.

I think I would like him. He is reclusive, living in an old farmhouse in New Jersey, the barn converted to a music studio. His life away from the piano is disciplined, simple, because he is all about the music. As I wish to be. What he would think of me is another matter; by most accounts he is notoriously prickly, and in general has a low opinion of classical musicians, probably lower still of church musicians, if he thinks of us at all.

It might be that we could find a point of contact in Bach. He has recorded the Goldberg Variations; I have performed them at least. He has likewise recorded both volumes of the Well-Tempered Clavier, plus the French and English Suites and other music. I have played quite a bit of the organ music, some of it this morning at the third service and more to come over the next two Sundays. He wrote in a liner note that "Bach is about ideas, not grand flourishes." I agree.

There are worse places to find common ground.

A day with Howells

Make that three days. And more to come.

Sunday, May 14
The choir is to sing the Howells anthem “Let God arise.” (Here is a performance by the choir of Chichester Cathedral)
A setting of verses from Psalm 68, it fits the Sunday after the Ascension in Year A, which is May 28. We have been rehearsing it for several weeks now (with a degree of grumbling from the choir over its difficulty, and the prospect of attempting it on Memorial Day weekend), but I have not properly worked out the accompaniment. Now is the time: three hours this evening, sufficient to do the fingering for about two-thirds of it.

I know the sacred choral music of Howells fairly well, but had not encountered this anthem. It was in the pile of choral octavos left by my predecessor when he retired in 2000. Over the years, I have nibbled the disordered collection of single copies, mostly gathered by him at workshops and AAM conventions, from five filing boxes to one stack of less than two feet. One reason I have not simply recycled it all is that I occasionally find something like this: an anthem by Howells that is new to me. Reading through it a few months ago, I thought of the Sunday at the end of May, penciled it in, and ordered the copies.

It replaces a composition of my own, a setting of the enormous Genevan Psalter tune for Psalm 68, in my opinion perhaps the most magnificent of that Psalter and a favorite of the early Calvinists with its warlike ferocity. It is the one thing I have written that got a bit of play; through a chain of circumstances, it was performed at the inauguration of the president of the New Brunswick Theological Seminary, a place where the Genevan Psalter remained important, at least on that day many years ago. But the Howells is far better than anything I could write.

Howells, writing during the early days of the Second World War, knew about warlike ferocity all too well. He captures the antidote in the middle section of the anthem:

He is a Father of the fatherless, and defendeth the cause of the widows, even God in his holy habitation. He is the God that maketh men to be of one mind in an house; and bringeth the prisoners out of captivity.

Tuesday, May 16
A day mostly filled with meetings. I find ninety minutes to finish the fingering, my only music-related work of the day beyond a bit of improvisation at the piano.

Wednesday, May 17
My reaction to a first exposure to the music of Herbert Howells was akin to his reaction to the music of Vaughan Williams. It was not until graduate school – his name was not mentioned at all in my undergraduate music history courses, nor theory and composition. Nor, for that matter, was Vaughan Williams; it was as if British music ceased to exist after Purcell and Handel. But at the Choir College, I was able to hear the Choir of Men, Boys, and Girls at Trinity Church, Princeton – and they sang “Like as the hart.” I could not sleep that night, not after such music.

“What is this?” I thought. “How have I missed out on this, all these years?” It was as if it were from another world, a place of beauty and longing and aching remembrance of ages past.

I have since played some of his organ music – quite a bit of it, actually – and have been able to teach and direct a few of his anthems and service settings. For a while, I was a member of the Herbert Howells Society, my only foray into a professional society focused on the music of one composer. I was part of a rather short list of American members, most of them leaders in the musical world – people like Gerre Hancock and Bruce Neswick, with whom I did not properly belong. But I shared with them a love for this man’s musical voice.

And now, a fine large anthem to learn and teach. I spend two hours at the organ, working out registrations; it is ready for tonight’s rehearsal.

But it is not the only Howells of the day, for today we begin rehearsal on the Collegium Regale Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis for the RSCM Course. I had worried much over this, in combination with Britten’s “Rejoice in the Lamb” – will the two pieces (along with the rest of the list, including some shorter pieces that will be challenging) be too much for the Course? And with the large group we are bringing from our parish comes large responsibility – will these choristers, my own choristers whom I love and have sought to train, will they be up to the challenge? I spend another hour or so studying the score over midday dinner, learning it in order to teach it.

At the afternoon rehearsal, we begin with the Gloria. They sing through it with ease. We work through the rest of the Magnificat, backwards to the front, finishing with a straight sing-through. It is glorious.

It brought back another memory of the choir at Trinity Church, Princeton. One sunny January afternoon, I observed a Girls’ Choir rehearsal as they sight-read part of the Mozart Requiem. I so wanted to someday work with a choir like that.

Well, I do.

Today’s work, these dozen or so choristers standing around the piano and singing Howells, was the equal to what I remembered from that January day.

Soli Deo Gloria.

Afterword
We did not rehearse "Let God arise" with the organ after all; a severe thunderstorm kept the youth choir and others downstairs for a long while, a half-hour into the time scheduled for the adult rehearsal, and kept most of the adult choir away. We contented ourselves with work at the piano.

That leaves one rehearsal; next Wednesday. I am no longer worried about the Collegium Regale; now I am worried about "Let God arise." We shall see what happens.

C. H. Lloyd (1849-1919)

Here are the second and third movements of Lloyd’s Sonata in D minor, played at choral evensong this past Sunday, May 7. The finale has some problems (including mistakes I made initially, and again when the passage repeated!), but I have posted it because Lloyd appears to have a very limited presence on YouTube.

He does, however, have a good biography at Wikipedia, and he was a distinguished musician in his generation. He succeeded Samuel Sebastian Wesley as organist of Gloucester Cathedral, where he taught Herbert Brewer, his successor (who in turn taught Herbert Howells), with later positions at Christ Church, Oxford, the Royal College of Music, and organist of the Chapel Royal. He was a close friend of Hubert Parry. According to Wikipedia, he enjoyed figure skating, cycling, boating, and golf.

Lloyd died “very suddenly” [Wikipedia] on his seventieth birthday in 1919. May he rest in peace.