He who would valiant be

He who would valiant be
‘gainst all disaster,
let him in constancy
follow the Master.
There’s no discouragement
shall make him once relent
his first avowed intent
to be a pilgrim.
(John Bunyan, adapted by Percy Dearmer)

Having played Bach for all of my organ voluntaries for the four weeks ending with Trinity Sunday, I determined to improvise all voluntaries for the summer at both the 9:00 and 11:00 services: piano and organ. I hoped that sustained effort might result in some skill development, sorely lacking at the organ and still much needed at the piano.

The prospect of this work scares me about as much as anything I have attempted musically. How am I going to practice? How can I improvise this much and not drive away the 11:00 congregation? Are they going to put up with my learning curve, which will doubtless be steep? How dare I put my music ahead of the likes of JSB, or Paul Manz, or Kenton Coe, or John Stanley (whose voluntaries would be much easier to prepare for a summer Sunday than improvisations)?

Well. Nothing for it but to give it a try.

Week I, ending with June 18

On this first week, my practice time is limited by preparations for Saturday’s Gay Pride Parade, in which our parish has a float. On the float: the Palm Sunday Marching Band in its second public appearance, having expanded its repertoire well beyond “All glory, laud, and honor.”

For the uninitiated, the PSMB is a group of (mostly) middle-school bandswomen and men. Our group this time consisted of three clarinets, oboe, alto saxophone, trombone, and a band/choir mother walking alongside the float playing recorder. For safety’s sake, we play everything in unison, though that puts the alto sax in a not-so-comfortable tessiatura.

The parade was terrific fun. People cheered, many sang along with us.

But I was not as prepared for Sunday as I would have liked, especially for this first Sunday of my summer’s work. The piano prelude at 9:00 went well; it is here on SoundCloud.

The organ? Not so much. For a prelude, I improvised on the fine tune East Acklam (“For the fruit of all creation, thanks be to God”). It was thoroughly conventional. Dull. And too long for what little imagination there was in it. At least it was soft and hopefully inoffensive. The postlude was better, based on Paderborn (“Ye servants of God, your Master proclaim”). It was lively and had some good moments, though the big ending that was the direction it wanted was about four bars too long. Still, it was a start: big endings are notoriously difficult – certainly for me, but even the Real Composers sometimes have problems.

Week II, ending with June 25

Well. How does one practice?

On the face of it, no problem: I have described my improvisation practicing here, complete with YouTube example. But how does that work out when this sort of practice is all that I am doing, all week – for that matter, all summer?

His eye is on the sparrow:

I sing because I’m happy,
I sing because I’m free,
For his eye is on the sparrow,
And I know he watches me.
(Civilla D. Martin)

This is the piano prelude, for we are singing this fine old Gospel song at both services. It gives me another opportunity to Play the Changes, this time with a longer and more challenging chord structure.

Perversely, the improvisation seems to want the key of G flat major. I try playing it from the printed version (C major, a fully written out SATB hymnal version with chord symbols) and stumble along with it all week, until in exasperation I write out a lead sheet version in G flat. To make it more fun, I use alto clef, because the tune fits the staff better that way. If nothing else, the week has taught me the value of lead sheets. The written harmony parts are a distraction for this sort of work, and as much as I like the Roman numeral chord designations (I, IV, V, etc.), the letter-name chord symbols are less subject to error in this context. I even discover why the jazzmen often make enharmonic changes that seem strange to a classically-trained player, for I quickly replace the IV chord (C flat major) with B major, totally foreign to the key but something I’m more likely to play correctly on the fly.

After Matins on Saturday, I give it the T. Monk treatment – just shy of two hours. At first it remains cheesy, the sort of backgroundish Baptist communion music that I once could play well. At about the one-hour mark, it becomes more interesting. I find myself in what is almost a bop version, a four-against-three walking bass line with syncopated melody. This is fun, so I stay with it for several variations, but my chops are definitely not ready to do this in public. From there it gets slow and much more dissonant. I find that I can pretend the alto clef is treble and play the tune as C mixolydian, while still playing the G flat chord pattern (well, mostly). Thinking of how much other work lies ahead, I round it off with a final play-through of the tune, soft and meditative. It is good; I hope I can find this place on Sunday morning.

That is one of the problems for the improviser. You find the magic, the unexpected insights into the tune, but the gold is mixed with the dross. How can you get to it when the congregation is not going to patiently listen to you stumble around for an hour or more? How can you play the good stuff and not any of the bad stuff?

The best I can say is that this sort of long-form practicing puts enough material into the Cauldron of Song (with homage to JRRT’s Cauldron of Story) so that the unconscious can work with it through the week – I suspect much of this work occurs as we sleep – and on Sunday we can perhaps be sufficiently transparent so that the Holy Spirit can use us for Her divine purposes.

Another problem is that some of the more bizarre material (such as the bitonal variations) would not make sense to listeners who had not walked the long path to that point in the music. I do not yet see how to get there in the time frame of a service prelude. Perhaps the value of it for practice is that it builds confidence that no matter how strange the material you stumble into, you can do something with it, and that something might be more worthwhile than all the rest of the piece.

My almost-two-hours complete, I am exhausted. “We come to practice as warriors,” says Steven Pressfield. It is time for an Alexander lay-down exercise. A re-exposure to the Alexander Technique by means of an AGO chapter program this spring and the book I read after that taught me the importance of the exercise at this point, after practice. The authors say to practice twenty minutes, then do the lay-down for twenty minutes. I have trouble imagining any professional musician with enough time for that, but I have this spring and summer made it habitual to do a five or ten minute lay-down after each hour of work. Or in this case, longer – that is part of why I am so tired.

On this day, I make it a full twenty-minute laydown, followed by Second Breakfast, a hobbitish custom I happily embrace. It is well over an hour before I am ready for another round.

He who would valiant be:

This week’s hymnody puts the question to my premise. There is a fine setting by Leo Sowerby of St. Dunstan’s (“He who would valiant be,” the opening hymn at 11:00) which I could play for a prelude, and it would be superior to anything I could possibly improvise. Worse still, the closing hymn is Ein feste Burg (“A mighty fortress”). That one puts me in competition with the whole array of German Lutheran composers, up to unplayable (for me) masterpieces such as Max Reger’s fantasia on this tune. More practically, there is a setting by Michael Praetorius that I have played many times. It likewise is superior to anything I could improvise. Right up to the bulletin deadline, I ask myself: Am I really going to do this? Shouldn’t I give up, and play the repertoire based on these tunes? That would put me right back to where I have been all these years – scrambling from one week to the next to prepare repertoire, always wanting to improve but never having sufficient practice time for something that is clearly optional to my work.

This fortnight, I have applied the same improvisatory practice techniques to these hymn tunes at the organ, but it became quickly evident that the music must go in a different direction from what it would be at the piano. The organ seems to demand more counterpoint. It is coloristic, more perhaps than the piano but in quite a different manner. One thing that is requiring work is to think ahead about registrations. I find myself playing with one hand while setting a registration on the other manual for music that has not yet come into existence – that is, I have only a vague notion as to what I might play for the next bit. But the registration helps create it when the time comes. That too is a surprising insight.

After initial work early in the week on each tune separately, I am finding that on the final days it is well to simply work through the 11:00 service, beginning to end. This Saturday, I improvise on St. Dunstan’s for a half-hour or so, then recall that I was intending – and had practiced and intended all week – to work Wer nun den lieben Gott (“If thou but suffer God to guide thee”) into the prelude as a contrasting theme, so I do – in this case as a coda of about twenty minutes.

After all that, playing St. Dunstan’s as the opening hymn is easy; I need only stay in the printed key and keep the tempo slow, probably much slower than I am thinking of it for improvisation.

Following a brief Alexander break, I work through the other hymns and service music, experimenting with an improvised introduction to Wer nun den lieben Gott. That too becomes easy after having worked with the tune at length through the week.

I finish the “pretended-service” with the congregational version of Ein feste Burg, and launch into improvisation on it. Again, the good stuff does not arrive for about twenty minutes.

June 25 - Sunday Scorecard:

The piano improvisation on “His eye is on the sparrow” is here.

Some of it is pretty good. I particularly like the “bass” solo on one of the stanzas, and the final time fully through the tune, taking a lot more time with it. As with last Sunday, I should have stopped four bars sooner.

Perhaps the real benefit of working on this one tune so much, probably four or five hours this week, came not at the 9:00 service where I improvised on it, but at 11:00. I lost count of the stanzas (a constant danger, especially for hymns that finish with a refrain or chorus) and kept playing after the congregation was done. It became clear that I should continue, as a coda of sorts. People started humming along, and it was absolutely right, the thing that was needed for that moment in the liturgy. I would not have played it as well without the practicing.

Both of the organ improvisations went well. I kept them fairly simple, conservative and brief, and they were more interesting than the ones from last week, though a bit sloppy in places. I will take “sloppy” over “dull” (e.g., last Sunday’s prelude) any day. Here is a SoundCloud clip combining the prelude and postlude.

[a technical footnote: There is a brand-new computer in the music office, running Windows 10. But Microsoft has done away with Windows Movie Maker, which I used to make MP4 clips to post on YouTube. I do not know how to work around this, so my YouTube channel may be finished. It is for now, anyway.]


Four insights:

1. This work will make me a better organist. After a mere fortnight, there is considerable improvement. Were I to practice every hymn in this manner, every week, my hymn playing would be transformed.

2. Improvising is not a shortcut. Yes, I can sit down at the organ or piano and play something without preparation. The results are not dissimilar from what would happen if I sight-read my normal preludes and postludes without working out fingerings and practicing them.

3. It pleases me that I managed to play the two organ pieces without sounding – well, like anyone that I can think of. There is certainly influence from a great many sources in these things. But I cannot readily say “This sounds like [fill in the blank].”

4. I have little sense as to where this will lead.

The Three Practices

What is a practice anyway?

To “have a practice” in yoga, say, or tai chi, or calligraphy, is to follow a rigorous, prescribed regimen with the intention of elevating the mind and the spirit to a higher level.

A practice implies engagement in a ritual. A practice may be defined as the dedicated, daily exercise of commitment, will, and focused intention aimed, on one level at the achievement of mastery in a field but, on a loftier level, intended to produce a communion with a power greater than ourselves…
[Steven Pressfield: “Turning Pro” (Black Irish Books, 2012), p. 120]

I observe three practices. They define and structure my days. Other work is important and at times pushes one or more practice to the sidelines – but not entirely off the field of play. At my best, the practices take precedence and other work flows around them. They are: Physical, Spiritual, Musical.

Physical Practice

The physical leads to the spiritual. The humble produces the sublime. (ibid., p. 116)

Without attention to the physical, I cannot for long continue my musical work, or (for that matter) life. This means adequate sleep, exercise, healthy food and water. The details of my practice are not important, and will certainly differ from yours. What matters is to do something, pretty much every day. Walk. Lift weights. Do yoga or Pilates. Play outdoor games and sports (indoor sports, too). Swim. Cycle. Dig a garden bed. Climb a mountain. I am old, and my physical practice is rather more modest than most of these things. But it is daily.

I am indebted to my fellow-laborer in Christ (and yoga instructor) Nora, for the insight that exercise and other aspects of the physical can be a spiritual practice. Movement and breath open spiritual doors that are perhaps impossible to unlock in other ways.

Spiritual Practice

Operi Dei nihil praeponatur. Prefer nothing ahead of the Work of God.
(Rule of St. Benedict: Opus Dei, the Work of God, was the term Benedict used for the cycle of prayer that comprises the Daily Office.)

The foundation and framework of spiritual practice is the Daily Office. In the Anglican/Episcopal tradition, the cornerstones are Matins (Morning Prayer) and Evensong (Evening Prayer), with the Little Hours: Midday Prayer and Compline. All of these services are near the front of the Book of Common Prayer.

The Daily Office is too much; at times it seems to set too high of a standard to pray all of these services, every day, and many people might not find them helpful at all. At the same time, the Office is not enough. St. Benedict emphasized in his Rule that they can exist only in the context of work: Ora et labora, Prayer and Work. And community: spiritual practice may have a strong solitary element, but cannot survive without connection to the wider Church – for example, the Holy Eucharist on Sundays and participation in congregational life, mission, and service.

There are other paths to spiritual practice, more paths than one could explore in a lifetime. Whatever form a spiritual practice might take, it seems important that it include prayer and the reading of Holy Scripture, with generous helpings of both elements. It should also lead to Conversion of Life, another Benedictine concept. Continual exposure to prayer and Scripture with a willing heart and mind almost of necessity will result in some changes in one’s life, bringing one slowly, almost imperceptibly, closer to the Image of Christ, the fullness of being for which God created us. It is very much like the result of physical practice – steady attention to healthy diet and exercise over time changes who we are.

I would commend physical and spiritual practice to everyone. The third practice is a part of my specific vocation; there are obviously many other callings. I suspect that most any of them can be undertaken as a path toward spiritual wholeness, but I can speak for only the one I have walked:


Musical Practice

Practice makes perfect.

As with the others, the details of my musical practice are not important (except to me), and I have written of them elsewhere.

What matters for music is strikingly similar to the other practices: do something pretty much every day. Work in an orderly manner. Be patient, for progress will be slow, perhaps imperceptible. And for music to be a spiritual path, simply be open to the possibility as you work at it. Much of the time, you might not sense any spiritual connection – you might be too busy being a conduit for spiritual healing to those who hear you. But there will likely be times when it is so strong that you cannot miss it.

A musical practice cannot happen without the other two. Without the physical, the instrument (you, that is) falls apart in short order: physical or mental breakdown, repetitive motion injuries. Without the spiritual, the music quickly becomes about oneself, about pride and applause and getting one’s way, and it ceases to be real music that can bring healing to the universe. In the same manner, spiritual practice is strengthened by music: “he who sings prays twice,” as Augustine said. Many forms of physical practice are amenable to music, which can make a hard workout more enjoyable or a meditative workout more open to the Spirit.

Most aspects of these three practices are simple. But they are not easy. They demand a lot of time, and the Adversary (Hebrew: Ha-Satan) always has things for us that seem more important, more urgent. More fun. And easier, with the instant gratification that no genuine practice can offer. “Wide is the gate, and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat.” (Matthew 7:13)


Three thoughts that might help:

Habits – build specific times into your day and week for these things. Do them every day, whether you feel like it or not. After a few months, you will have a compulsion to do the practice at the time when you normally do it. Rejoice and be glad in this.

Placeholders – if you don’t feel like doing it, or have something else you must do, try to keep a toehold in the practice. If you cannot face an hour of exercise, do just one thing, maybe five minutes. The same goes for other practices – if you can’t pray Matins, see if you can say the Lord’s Prayer at the time when you would habitually pray. If you can’t countenance two or three hours at the organ and piano, do five minutes of scales or improvisation. The placeholder keeps the practice habit where it belongs, and very often, once you can get started, you find that you can keep going after all.

When you fall down, get back up – Even with strong habitual practices, we fail. We miss a day. And another. Maybe a whole week. Or more, perhaps a lot more. The longer we are absent from a practice, the harder it is to get back into it, but so long as life lasts, it is not impossible. The secret is to start over again. Today. Now. If we have once established a practice, it will come back to us, like riding a bicycle after many years. The Church builds in two seasons especially for this purpose: Advent and Lent. Both of them are occasions to rebuild what has fallen down, to shake off the dust and get moving again. They last long enough to establish – or re-establish – a good habit. But we can do this at any time, and must do it as often as we fall.

Part Four: Whitsunday

Learning is nonlinear.

My intention of learning to “play the changes” in jazz style on “As the wind song in the trees” ran aground on the hard reality of Sunday morning, which arrived well before I had mastered the skill. But it is all right; I did learn from the week’s work. In some respects, it is better than all right; parts of this morning’s improvisation were indeed “playing the changes” – improvised lines over the chords of “As the wind song.” These parts were incorporated into a larger whole that made for a better piece of music than it would have been had I been strict about staying with the changes.

Here is a link to the improvisation, on SoundCloud.

Even my work on Song of the Holy Spirit bore fruit; I did not use it in the improvisation, but it made my accompaniment of the congregation’s singing more interesting than it would have otherwise been. So was “As the wind song,” when it came time for everyone to sing it.

What did sneak in was Veni, Creator Spiritus, which was not part of this service. But we had sung it at Matins upstairs in the chapel and it came to mind when it came time to begin the improvisation and seemed to make a good introduction.

And then there was Bach. At the later service, I played the two organ settings of Komm, heiliger Geist which begin the Leipzig Chorales, and both of them went pretty well – better than they would have been without all the time I have spent listening and thinking about Keith Jarrett and jazz ballads and playing the changes. I have played these chorale settings many times over the years – and never so well as I did today.

I sense that I have been stuck at about the same level with my playing for a while, both at the piano and the organ. In the past few weeks, both have been in more of a flux, and I think I am making progress. Not in a linear manner, to be sure, and with setbacks. But discernible progress: yes, I think so.

Soli Deo Gloria.

Here is the link to one of the organ settings, the soft trio version of Komm, heiliger Geist, BWV 652. I am posting this rather than the BWV 651 toccata because there are many more settings of the latter than the former on YouTube. I might as well improve the balance.

Part Three: A multitude of Angels

Friday: The Martyrs of Lyon – Blandina and her Companions
In this day’s mail: Keith Jarrett’s 4-CD album “A multitude of angels.” In 1996, weakened and discouraged by a then-undiagnosed ailment, he played four solo improvisatory concerts in Italy over the span of a week: Modena, Ferrara, Torino, Genova. These four concerts would be the last, and he knew it.

The past fortnight has shown me that I needed more of Jarrett’s music. There is much on YouTube, including many of his more famous solo concerts from Vienna, Paris, Tokyo. I hesitated to spend $40, but from what I read of them, I was drawn to this album, not least by the title. I wanted to see what the twenty years since the Köln Concert – the only one of his albums that I know well – had taught him.

“A multitude of angels” was not released in 1996, or any time thereafter – not until last summer, 2016, another twenty years down the road. The best I can tell, Jarrett, unable to play the piano at all in the aftermath of these concerts, could not until fairly recently bring himself to listen to the recordings, which he had made himself on a DAT recorder.

I began with the first CD, the concert at Modena. Immediately it was clear that he had grown quite a lot. The first half, some thirty minutes of continuous music, was a clear descendant of Köln and his other concerts of the 1970’s, but more mature and focused. More classically-oriented, as well, perhaps from all of the Bach and Handel and Mozart he had performed over the intervening years.

But it was the second half, after intermission, that floored me. It begins in a spiky, energetic mode – precisely the sort of thing I sought the other day, taken to a much higher level. Some of the critics probably called it “atonal,” as they do with this style when he plays it; it did not seem so to me in the strict Schoenbergian sense, for it was more pan-diatonic and felt like it related to a key center, but its home was very much in the twentieth/twenty-first century classical music language with only an occasional hint of jazz in the rhythms. Astringent non-triadic lines and sonorities, all at breakneck pace and energy. And he builds it up for fifteen minutes and more. Gradually it becomes a bit more “major-keyish.” And triumphant; it is as if he has fought his way through to something neither he nor the audience could have foreseen. And then it becomes a hymn. There is no other word for it. It ends in peace, on a soft tonic chord repeated several times in the low register.

No wonder he could not go on after something like this! He managed to get himself back on the bench for an encore: a heartfelt and gentle playing of “Danny Boy.”

Even now, writing this the following day, I cannot get over it. I do not think I have heard such ferocious Connection between soul and music anywhere else. I am almost afraid to listen to the Modena CD again, much less the other three. For he went on to Ferrara and somehow found the energy to play again, two days later. He attributes it to the “angels” who were with him.

Yes, it has been done before. I wonder if Liszt’s improvisations were on this order – I think of something like the “Weinen, Klagen” that I played at the organ, ending likewise with a hymn. Or whatever it was that Bruckner improvised in London as a full-length concert at the organ (perhaps along the lines of one of his symphonies), the crowd carrying him from the hall on its shoulders when he finished?

But nobody, including Jarrett himself, is doing this now, not so far as I know. I listened on YouTube to the Carnegie Hall concert, played quite a bit more recently as a solo piano event, but broken into multiple shorter improvisations. It seems to me that the magic is gone.

Perhaps where it can be found for Jarrett now, or so it seems to me, is when he plays with his friends – the album “Jasmine” (2010, recorded in 2007) with his old friend and bassist Charlie Haden, and many concerts and recordings with his trio – the one I have purchased is a live concert “Somewhere” (2013, recorded in 2009). These are all treatments of jazz standards, “American Songbook” pieces, and they are wonderful.

My guess is that among his “angels” were these his musical colleagues. It may have been their support that made it possible for him to figure out how he could once again play the piano. But most of all, it was his wife, who stuck with him through the dark days. He writes in the liner notes:

I swear: the angels were there.
One reason I know this is because, after waiting twenty years to give these concerts a serious listen again, there is no other reason I can give for the unbelievable experience I re-entered. They took theiur places aside of me and urged me, gently, to go on. After these concerts were over, I couldn’t play at all for two years and, without the support of the one angel in my house, I may never have played again.

It saddened me quite a lot to learn from his Wikipedia biography that they divorced in 2010, after thirty years of marriage.

I bought the “Multitude of Angels” album plus "Jasmine" and "Somewhere" in hopes of learning from Jarrett. Perhaps they will bear fruit in that way, though the Modena concert is so far beyond me that it is like the Bach pieces I am playing this weekend. As I have written in these pages, I have in my practicing played little “etudes” in imitation of Vaughan Williams and Howells and others, and have learned much from them. But never Bach.

The other day I said in passing that I wish I could play like Jarrett. I must make that more precise; I do not want to be an imitation Jarrett. The thing that I wish for in playing “like” him is to play with his Connection and intelligence and skill, in whatever manner is appropriate for me given my place and time and background.

On my office door are pictures of two musicians: J. S. Bach for obvious reasons, and Anton Bruckner, seated at a piano – partly for love of his music, partly for the example of his perseverance and for his devout Catholic faith which shines through every phrase. This weekend, I have added a third: Keith Jarrett.

I have added him to my daily prayers as well. It is a little thing, for I cannot do any great thing for him. But he is a spiritual man and would perhaps welcome such energies as might come to him through the prayers of others. I hope so.

[Added later:] Not for the first time, I marvel that it is a pianist who blows me away with the quality of his playing and musicianship, and the intensity of his Connection. Not an organist. For that matter, not a classical pianist.

I do not like most of the organ playing I hear (including my own). I can think of some people from a slightly earlier generation for whom my admiration approached what I have here expressed about Mr. Jarrett - David Craighead for one, and Del Disselhorst, my friend, with his playing of Bach. John Ferguson and Paul Manz with their hymn playing. Not many others.

But no one from my generation. And most of the younger players, the ones whose publicity photos grace the American Organist and who play for the conventions, leave me completely cold.

The answer to that is simple: Be that person. Play with such intensity that you become a fully transparent window into the heavenly places.

Jesu, juva.

Playing the Changes - Part Two

It is better to play one tune for twenty-four hours than twenty-four tunes in an hour. (Bill Evans, quoted by Dave Frank)

Wednesday: the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary to St. Elizabeth
For several years, I worked in my office a couple of mornings a week, eavesdropping on the Beginning Jazz Improvisation class next door in the music room. That is now bearing fruit, for most of the concepts I am learning this week are not entirely new to me.

In those days, I heard a lot of the tune “Summertime, and the livin’ is easy” – every week for a semester, and again the next year, and the year after that. Each fall, the new class was given the assignment of learning the tune and improvising on it. Each week, they would do it in a new key. In the class sessions, they would go around the room, each player/singer taking a four or eight bar phrase as a “solo.”

With that in mind plus my experience that in “learning” a tune, it is not your own until you can play it in other keys, I took the “Wind song” tune into E flat this morning. Sure enough, the initial struggles to control the chord progression returned with added intensity – I found it necessary to explicitly write out the chord progression in the new key – but once I got past that, it opened some doors that I would not have found staying in G major. I think I can work it into my Sunday improvisation; I could start in E flat, and the move to G later on would be refreshing. It was for me, at least.

There was no opportunity for the extended work I gave to it on Tuesday, beyond my usual half-hour at the piano before Matins; it was fifteen minutes here, twenty there. But on the whole, it was a day of considerable progress; I have advanced to sounding like a cliché-ridden pop pianist playing soupy background music.

Thursday: The Feast of Justin Martyr

Lots of Bach today; the two settings of Komm, heiliger Geist from the Leipzig Chorales on Sunday. Keith Jarrett talks somewhere about the difficulty of shifting between the classical and jazz mindsets; he said (I think) that he would never attempt both in the same program. I see his point, certainly, but I suspect he might agree with me that the two mindsets help one another. In my specific case, the perfection and compositional intensity of Bach stands in judgement at my poor improvisatory efforts, a reminder as to how far I have to go.

Mike Garson said in his videos something to this effect: “When I was young, I thought I understood maybe eighty percent of what there is to know about music. Now [he is around 70] I feel like what I understand is more like three percent. And less every year.” Amen to that.

Later in the day, I had a solid session at the piano; ninety minutes or so. I continued work on the “wind song” tune, and started considering more seriously how it might fit into a Sunday improvisation. I played a sample piece with introduction in G major, the tune in E flat, modulating to G, coda.

It is too quiet. Monochromatic. Boring.

I played around with Abbot’s Leigh, which is in the service and could be a contrasting tune. It didn’t seem to fit. Near the end of my session, I felt the need to play Song of the Holy Spirit (“A mighty sound from heaven,” 230 in the Hymnal 1982), which is the opening hymn on Sunday. I know that tune well, having struggled with it for past Whitsundays. It was a considerable relief to play something spiky and loud, so I stayed with it for about twenty minutes, taking the tune through six or eight keys. None of this careful work with a fixed chord progression, not for this. I reveled in alternate harmonies, most of them dissonant, definitely non-triadic.

I am left with a jumble, and no clear sense as to what I will play on Sunday. But now I have some materials at hand. And (if I go with Song of the Holy Spirit as part of what I play) it will not be soupy background music. What it will be remains to be seen.