Concert tuning

It is the annual week-long chamber music festival, for which our parish is the venue. Most years they don’t use a piano, but this time they are. It is our beloved Steinway Model L six-foot grand, the one the rebuilder once said was “unsuitable for serious work.” Last night it was on stage for a professional concert.

When I worked as a piano technician, I tuned spinets and old uprights. It was a rural area and few people had much money; none of them had high-end grand pianos. The best piano I serviced in those days was a Wurlitzer baby grand; a few of the older uprights were good, as well. But no concert tunings, other than preparing the church's upright for a couple of recitals of my own.

In a sense the concert tuning started two weeks ago. The piano had gone sharp with the damp weather, so I brought it back down to A=440, retuned it from its slightly unequal temperament to Equal Temperament just like they taught me in school, and spent several hours doing a careful job, knowing that I would nonetheless have to come back to it. I had to rush the tuning of the bottom octaves because of an impending evening church service, but I felt good about the rest of the piano.

A fortnight passed. This past Sunday afternoon, I tuned it again. It is much easier to work with a piano that is already at pitch and basically in tune, but I still spent an hour or so on it, this time devoting the patient care to the low end that it deserves. As is my custom, I finished with end-to-end slow arpeggios to enjoy the beautiful sound, stopping to improve a few notes. This is a really good piano, in a good acoustic.

Tuesday morning before the players arrived, I checked it again. I had expected to need only a few minutes; it took about an hour, getting the high treble right and cleaning up unisons here and there. Again, the slow arpeggios. I love this piano, and this room.

Wednesday morning, after it had done a hard day’s work on Tuesday: another touch-up, this time just a few unisons, fifteen or twenty minutes. Wednesday afternoon in the brief interval between their rehearsal and the evening Eucharist, with concert on its heels: a final check. Three unisons were slightly off, and the highest G needed retuning; I had left it a little flat. The old piano was ready for showtime, maybe the best she has ever sounded. I closed the lid, gave it a caress and said “play well.”

It did: a Shostakovich piano trio that pushed the piano to its limits, the other instruments as well. As someone commented afterwards, “it felt like the room was shaking.”

Thursday morning: another touch-up before the players arrive, with another concert tonight that includes the Franck violin sonata. Again, the work was simply the cleaning up of a few unisons, about twenty minutes. I was pleased that the tuning held up so well after the pounding it received last night.

When the paths of Piano Technician and Church Musician diverged in my late twenties, I took the other path, away from professional piano work. It surprises me that here, almost at the end of my musical career, a Concert Tuning has come my way.

Sitting in the audience for the concert, it was like having a student on stage. I was attentive to the clear high octaves in the Shostakovich, listening for unisons or “off” notes, happy when the piano sounded so well, delighted with how well she performed.

It was, of course, not just the piano who played well. Dominic Cheli was the guest artist; here is his website, where one can find recordings of his work, including his two commercial CDs. He is a fine young pianist, winner of the 2017 Concert Artists Guild competition. In light of my current topic, this quote from one of his reviews is appropriate: “Mr. Cheli’s performance of Prokofiev’s 2nd Piano Concerto ‘roared like a locomotive, shot firebrands of energy this way and that, while the piano strained to keep in one piece under the thrall of Cheli’s glorious technique.’”

Wednesday night’s Shostakovich was cut from the same cloth, and our old piano took it all in stride. I am so proud of her.

How I practice: an addendum

I last described my practice methods here, in 2017, complete with a YouTube demonstration.

As described here, I began experiencing what golfers would call the “yips.”

I continue to experiment, and I continue to have problems from time to time; today’s playing was clean, but some of last Sunday’s was not.

I have had a degree of success from what I consider an important modification to my practice methods, and have updated the 2017 posting. In short, I start more gently. On the first day’s work with a new piece (or an old one, returned to after months or years), I begin with three slow play-throughs of a short segment, typically two to four measures.

And for that phrase, I call it a day and move on.

The rhythmic work which is at the heart of my practicing waits for the second day. I suspect that pressing on with it on the first day, before the mind has had time to process the slow play-throughs, created a level of tension that ultimately led to difficulties.
---------------
After a long hiatus, I have posted a recording to YouTube; it is the choir's rendition of the Preces and Responses by Richard Sanderson, as sung for the Feast of the Epiphany 2019. It can be found here.

A good idea, and a life in church music

“You should start a reference file,” he told us. John S. C. Kemp, that is, in his church music class at the Choir College, long ago. “Any time you run across a piece of choral music that you think might be useful, keep it. You will be glad you did.”

He was right.

I puzzled briefly over how to organize it, deciding to follow the system used by the Choir College, which in those days had what must have been one of the finest collections of choral octavos in the world, filling most of a room. The first accession is number one, the next one is number two, with all of them hole-punched and kept in ring binders. They had a card catalogue for searches of the collection by composer or title.

I had a few dozen things in a bulging file folder from my days as a fledgling church musician before graduate school, so I began with those, choosing one at random: an arrangement of “The King of love my Shepherd is” by John Ness Beck, number 0001 in my collection. It remains a useful, straightforward arrangement of this hymn and I have used it with two choirs over the years.

Like the Choir College, I began with a card file as index. Not many years later, I designed a database on my new Commodore 128 computer, adding many other search fields. In due time, I was able to move the database and other files that were important to me over to the new MS-DOS computer in the church office where (by that time) I was working. DOS 6.0, I think it was. None of this Windows stuff, not yet. I remain thankful for a long-obsolete bit of software: the Big Blue Reader, by SOGWAP (the company’s name, an acronym for “Son of God with all Power,” Romans 1:4). It allowed the user to read and write DOS-readable diskettes from the C-128 diskette drive.

Eventually, my database ended up in Lotus Approach, part of their excellent office software package, which is still what I use by preference: Lotus Word Pro, Lotus Organizer, Lotus 1-2-3. The database retains some limitations from the C-128 days when such matters as field length and file size were important, but it has served its purpose.

The latest item in the collection is number 2090, “Rejoice in the Lamb” by Benjamin Britten, following hard on the heels of #2089, the Collegium Regale evening canticles by Herbert Howells. Both were from a RSCM Course, as is much of the material in the database.

But I don’t keep everything. From last year’s Course, I added nothing.

For decades, I was a member of the American Choral Directors’ Association, and thus received mailings from choral publishers. I also subscribed to three publishers' listings, where for a small fee they sent single copies of all their new publications [MorningStar, GIA, and Oxford, for those who might be interested in such things]. Music workshops and conferences often include reading sessions, where a clinician puts a selection of choral music in front of a group of directors, who sight-read the packet. All of these venues were sources for good material that has been essential to my work.

And there was a lot that was less useful, especially in the unsolicited publishers’ mailings. All told, I would guess that I have kept perhaps one out of every thirty or forty titles that have crossed my path. That implies that I have sampled 60,000 or more over the years.

It makes you a better sight-reader.

More to the point, it gives you the tools to plan a choral season with music that will hopefully be of interest to the singers, within their skills as a group, appropriate to each Sunday’s liturgy, and accessible to the congregation.

Looking back over these 2090 octavos and books, I can trace my life in the church music profession. Lots of “practical” music, like the John Ness Beck item that begins the collection. Many things that I have sung and played with choirs in one or another place where I have worked, though these account for only a fraction of the collection, a quarter or less. Many hundreds of things that I would dearly love to do, but have never had the right opportunity.

Some items are reminders of one-time events which I can never possibly repeat: #1397, the Berlioz Te Deum, sung with the Choir College and the New York Philharmonic for an anniversary concert at Carnegie Hall. #1399, “An die Freude,” the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth. We sang this twice with the Philharmonic in Avery Fischer Hall (as it was then known); the one I remember most fondly was under the baton of Rafael Kubelik.

For that matter, #2089 and #2090, the Howells and Britten mentioned above: our singing of these things at the 2017 RSCM Course with Stephen Buzard was something we repeated at home, for Choral Evensong in May 2018. But I cannot imagine a situation where we could do either of them again.

Others are old friends: #0026, Let the peoples praise thee, O God (Wm. Mathias). #0278, the Preces and Responses by Byrd, Morley, Tomkins and (especially) Wm. Smith, in the Church Music Society edition of Dr. Watkins Shaw. #1282, Stanford in C. #1544, Messiah, by G. F. Handel.

It has been a good run.

Bless, O Lord, us thy servants who minister in thy temple: grant that what we sing with our lips we may believe in our hearts, and what we believe in our hearts we may shew forth in our lives; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.