Book of Ways

I have been listening to Keith Jarrett’s “Book of Ways” (1989), played on the clavichord. Ninety minutes or so of it, in nineteen improvised tracks. I commend it to anyone who plays the clavichord.

The LP album is obscure and out of print, so far as I know never reissued on CD. Used copies show up on eBay, often at high prices, or you can do as I did and listen on YouTube: here is the track list.

When I built my clavichord from a kit, I was not ready for it, and it was in any event a second choice: I wanted a harpsichord, but could not afford it. I quickly found the clavichord unsuitable for practicing, not even for Bach (J. S., that is, for with the clavichord C. P. E. Bach is almost as important a name as his father). The short keys forced early fingering, of which (at the time, between undergraduate work as a pianist and organ studies later at the Choir College) I knew nothing. The music rack, such as it is – a tiny lip at the base of the lid, across the instrument from the player – was a little too distant to read easily and unwieldy to write fingerings without taking the score from the rack. So I did my practicing on my upright piano, and soon enough at the church where I was beginning to be an organist, digging through John Stainer’s organ method and the Orgelbüchlein, which taught me as it has taught almost every organist for generations.

When I set up the clavichord in my office at my current church, it quickly became a table, piled with many hundreds of octavos – five large filing boxes left to me by my predecessor upon his retirement. Dealing with them took well over a decade, the pile diminishing bit by bit as I had opportunity – and it was never a high priority. Theoretically, I could move them to the floor and play the clavichord, then put them back, but that was enough resistance to guarantee that I didn’t.

What I had not realized was that the clavichord was never as adequate for repertoire as its sister the harpsichord, or the organ and pianoforte. Instead, the clavichord exists for improvisation – of which, like early fingering, I had not the slightest clue back in the days when the instrument was new.

I wish I had known that forty years ago. I wish I had let the instrument teach me.

Nowadays my first music of the day is improvisation on the clavichord. Sometimes it is work-related: playing around with tunes that are in the coming Sunday’s services. Sometimes it is no more than harmonizing scales or simple bass-line patterns. More often by far it is simply playing whatever comes into my head and letting it develop into a little piece.

These little improvisations from Mr. Jarrett are a model to which I aspire. One gets the impression that they developed for him in a similar manner to mine, though surely they went through the sieve of repeated takes, or the playing of many more pieces than the nineteen that made it onto the LP.

I will not try to describe them in detail: this reviewer did much better. It is not clear at first what he is talking about with his numbered list, one to nineteen: these are his attempts at description for each of the tracks. For example:

7. It tickles the feet of our childhood, making us laugh in ways we have since denied.

11. It is a love letter, a heart unfolded into the map of another heart. A dewy pasture that remembers lovelier days when the torturous end of an age was not upon us.

The clavichord can do such things. The organ, for all its differing gifts, cannot. The piano? Maybe, but in a different, more outgoing way.

Be warned: another reviewer (Richard Ginell, quoted in Wikipedia s.v. “Book of Ways”) described it thus: “Sometimes this music is charming; a lot of the time, it gets wearisome.”

I agree that playing the album straight through is not the best way to listen. Better to take one track at a time, perhaps playing it several times if you like it. Better still, then see if it might be a springboard for your own improvisation.
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What then does the organ do best?

It sings.

It sings in ways that none of the stringed keyboards can match. And not just one melody: two, three, four, even five and six melodies at a time. Trio sonatas. Fugues. Counterpoint of all kinds.

Most of all, congregational hymns and songs. Alone, alongside the people, in commentary/dialogue with them (e.g., Paul Manz's organ stanzas between congregational stanzas).

But that is for another essay.