Guard my first springs of thought and will

Lord, I my vows to thee renew;
disperse my sins as morning dew;
guard my first springs of thought and will,
and with thyself my spirit fill.
(Thomas Ken, “Awake my soul, and with the sun” [Hymnal 1982 number 11])

Beginnings are important. I continue to work at making my mornings habitual and automatic, for I know how weak I am. There are many days where the thing I want is to go back to bed for a couple more hours. Or stop at one of the three purveyors of donuts along my drive to the church. If I pass that gauntlet, there is the restaurant/coffee shop/grocery less than a block from the church with the most scrumptious pastries. I dare not set foot in that place before noon, except when accompanied by the Brotherhood for our Saturday breakfast once a month. There is strength in numbers.

Or, safely arrived at my office, I want to sit down at the computer and watch YouTube videos and spend all morning eating and drinking tea. Or reading blogs. Or writing for this blog. I hope that the Music Box has been helpful to some people, but many of the best essays in here were written at times when I should have been doing other things, most especially practicing. There is a reason why few people have successfully combined the vocations of Writer and Musician. [Footnote: There have been some: Robert Schumann and Camille Saint-Saens come to mind, also Virgil Thomson. But not many.]

Much of the above is Resistance, for these things are not what I really want, once I get underneath what St. Paul calls the “flesh,” the appetites that are common to us all, both man and beast. My true desire is to be a good and faithful servant, applying himself to “all such good works as [He hath] prepared for us to walk in” (BCP p. 339, the traditional Post-Communion Prayer) in hopes that I might in some small way be of encouragement to others and a witness to the Resurrection. And that involves getting my lazy old carcass onto the organ bench, the piano bench too.

But it also involves e-mail. And office work. And “Getting Things Done” (see Afterword). And none of it is going to amount to anything without the Officium, the Daily Office and the sanctification of the day with prayer and psalmody and Holy Scripture.

There have been long stretches of time when I have heeded what seems to be the majority advice to do the important thing first, and to do your creative work first while you are fresh. For a while I was improvising at the Steinway up in the church before Matins, back when it was a supposedly public service of worship at a fixed hour. Those were some of the happiest times of my life, upstairs in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament with the first light of dawn shining through the church windows, and I made a lot of progress in my playing in those sessions.

But I found that when I did that, I ended up spending most of the day practicing. That is fine for a short while, but soon enough the office work piled into such a backlog that I would then spend many days doing only that, and no practicing at all.

It is not simply majority advice to practice every day; it is universally acknowledged fact. The reason I added the pianist Nathan Carterette’s picture to my “door,” right beside JSB whom he so loves (and plays so well) is a comment he made to my young student HMB about practicing every day. I think his minimum is three hours. And I have a baseball commemorating Cal Ripken, Jr. for the same reason. Show up every day, do the work at a professional level. As recently as the first quarter of this year I was not doing that. I was mired in office work, some weeks hardly practicing at all, and thoroughly discouraged with my playing. [Footnote: Yes, practice every day – except one. “Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.” Even from the sheerly practical level of best results, I find it necessary to have that full day, twenty-four hours of it, with not a note of music. In the long run, I play better when I do this. I find the truth of it most of all at times such as Holy Week – or this week, with the chamber music festival and the ordination of a friend – when I violate this Commandment and work every day. And in fact I normally have two days off, one which I seek to observe as a Sabbath and the other as a day of reminder that I am not just an Organist, but also a Husband, with duties at home and many errands and tasks therewith.]

Somehow there must be a balance. For now, it seems to work this way for me on a typical weekday:

- The morning at home (feed the cats and myself, do other things necessary to get out the door).
- Drive to church
- Physical practice
- Matins, with the Great Litany on Wednesdays and Fridays
- Improvise at the Clavichord.
As I recently wrote, the clavichord was my life preserver through the bad times this winter, on many days the only playing that I did.

- Set an Alarm for practicing so I don’t get stuck in the following
- Turn on the computers.
- Tea Ceremony (some of my friends, or anyone who visits my office at certain hours, know what I mean)
- During this, clear the decks. Process any handwritten notes from overnight about things to do, get the physical and e-mail IN boxes to zero. (see footnote, shortly)
- Go upstairs and practice the organ for at least one hour, again setting an alarm to make me stop at that point.

The addition of the Alarm before booting the computers has proven to be the key. That way, I commit to practicing, even if I have not succeeded in clearing the decks when it rings. And I can convince myself to leave the office with the thought “Just one hour. I can come back to this stuff then,” and many days I do precisely that.

[Footnote: Clearing the IN boxes does not at all mean doing everything that is there. I had to learn this from the “Getting Things Done” method. But you take every item, every e-mail, and process it. If it can be properly dealt with in less than two or three minutes, do it immediately. If it prompts a longer TBD, get it on the TBD list or into the “Action” folder of the e-mail. If appropriate, put it in the “Wait for” folder. If it is the “camel’s nose under the edge of the tent” and is going to become a full-fledged Project, start a folder for it. Eventually you deal with the Action items and TBDs, and if the Tea Ceremony has enough time before the practice alarm, I can make some progress on these things. But not until the main IN boxes are completely clear.]

From then on, the day is more fluid. On good days, there is more practicing, possibly a lot more. On other days, the rest of it is consumed with other work.

But the above plan of action is not perfect. Today I arrived several hours late, having been at the church well into the previous two evenings with the festival rehearsals. I chose to get a full seven hours of sleep instead of pressing on as I have in past years during the chamber music week. At the church, I managed only Matins and Litany, then it was nearly time for the television people to arrive to set up their equipment for the concerts, so I skipped the clavichord and office work, and went straight upstairs. While I waited for them, I improvised on the Steinway, mostly on the chant Veni Creator Spiritus, with thoughts of the impending ordination service and improvising a prelude on an organ I have never played. They were late, so I got about 45 minutes of work on the tune, and it was a delight, from the initial work with the unison tune in several keys to the places where that led. I so wish that I could start every day in this manner. But I cannot; I have tried that and it does not work, not for me.

I hope that the bit of improvisatory work was productive as well, for I do indeed have the improvisation ahead. Veni Creator Spiritus scares me, especially having played part of the Duruflé setting on Whitsunday. There is no way I can approach what he did with the tune, or what JSB did with its variant Komm, heiliger Geist. There is nothing else to say after what these (and other) composers did with it.

And yet… I find the Great Tunes, of which Veni Creator is one, to be the easiest on which to improvise. Nettleton. Ein feste Burg. Wondrous Love. New Britain. Old Hundredth. Hyfrydol. The Third Tune (Tallis). Once you get started, the ideas flow more easily than they do with some of the lesser tunes. In working with such tunes over what is now several years of regular improvisation, I have come to greater understanding of why the jazzmen and women keep playing the Old Standards. You can return to such tunes and still find something new to say; they are inexhaustible.

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Afterword: I several times above mentioned “Getting Things Done” (“GTD” for short) thinking that I had written of it in the Music Box. I find that I haven’t, except for this which was written before I encountered the book of that name by David Allen. Since reading the book about a year and a half ago, it has considerably improved my workflow. I keep two of Mr. Allen’s charts on my Door, one Xeroxed from his book and the other considerably adapted to reflect my vocation and purposes. Here is his website. There are also many YouTube videos about aspects of GTD, some better than others.

The book is readily available in most libraries – the one near the church had I think seven copies when I checked one out to read it. He has followed up with sequels, including most recently an adaptation of GTD for teenagers. I have not read it [for one thing, it is still pre-release, not yet published], but I commend it to my readers who are in that stage of life. I wish I had known of these principles in high school and college.

Yet another Afterword (June 23) I would be a hypocrite were I to omit mention of this day's work, or rather the undisciplined lack thereof. Being weary from too many days in a row, it was too easy to sit in my office in front of the computer, not setting an alarm to go upstairs and practice, and after I had done plenty of that, more-or-less working (online reading of the journal "The American Organist" as I ate a leisurely second breakfast with tea) I found a link to this:
Anthony Bourdain's "Parts Unknown" - a visit to West Virginia

And not just West Virginia: McDowell County in the southern part of the state, a place that I love. My recent vacation did not take me to McDowell County, but I did spend time in some of the neighboring counties of Southwest Virginia, places like Coeburn, Norton, and Big Stone Gap. We still own land in another part of southern West Virginia, but I do not see how we could ever go back there to live. I have been away too long; I have become entirely foreign to that culture and my wife has never been part of it.

I should have been working; I should have watched it later. But I am glad that I took the hour to see this sympathetic portrait of the people and culture of the coalfields. I commend it to you.

I had never heard of Mr. Bourdain until he died a few weeks ago. My ignorance of him is my loss; his untimely death by suicide is a loss for all of us. May he rest in peace.