What wondrous love is this

When I was sinking down, O my soul;
When I was sinking down beneath God’s righteous frown,
Christ laid aside His crown for my soul.

It has been a long while since I have posted a recording online; I think that it was before Advent, and here it is near the end of Lent.

It has been a long while since I have practiced sufficiently, and I am not there yet; just four hours this week, two of them on Saturday. Much of that has been the result of non-musical events, but some (especially of late) has been plain old Resistance.

Resistance’s goal is not to wound or disable. Resistance aims to kill. Its target is the epicenter of our being: our genius, our soul, the unique and priceless gift we were put on earth to give and that no one else has but us. Resistance means business. When we fight it, we are in a war to the death. (Steven Pressfield, “The War of Art,” p. 15)

Maybe it is the three-month lapse in my work, just barely scraping by musically from Sunday to Sunday.
Maybe it is my sense that I am no longer reliable in my playing.
Maybe it is my efforts to work in a different manner, efforts still in their infancy and hindered by lack of practice.

Maybe it is the clavichord, which has been my lifeline. More days than not, my ten or fifteen minutes of improvisation after Matins on the quiet little instrument in my office has been my only time at a keyboard.


Maybe it is a turning point.


I played well today, on those four hours of practice. I played well last week, on five hours, four of them on Saturday. Good solid hymnody, good improvisations, decent playing of repertoire pieces for postludes. No falling apart from the “yips.” My practicing, such as it was, has been careful and good, interspersed with Alexander laydowns.

I am too close to the improvisations to discern accurately whether they are any good. They have recently been quite a ways outside of my past manner of playing, at first not so good but much better the past few weeks. It is scaring me to play them; it is frightening to play anything at all, repertoire pieces or improvisations or even hymn tunes. Not stage fright, and mostly not fear of falling apart in midstream; rather, it is fear of the unexpected directions my music seems to be leading.

And it is not just my work at the organ and piano. A few weeks ago, the youth choir sang the Byrd motet “Ave verum corpus” for the church service. It was amazing. Every one of their rehearsals this spring has been amazing, the adult rehearsals too. Again, this is not my doing.

This process of self-revision and self-correction is so common we don’t even notice. But it’s a miracle. And its implications are staggering. Who’s doing this revising anyway? What force is yanking at our sleeves? (Pressfield, p. 125)

Here is today’s piano improvisation, on the shape-note tune Wondrous Love, posted on SoundCloud.

To God and to the Lamb I will sing,
To God and to the Lamb who is the great I Am,
While millions join the theme, I will sing.