To every thing there is a season, and a time for every purpose under the heaven… (Ecclesiastes 3:1)I have been a church musician for a long time. Long enough, as a variety of indicators are telling me. Therefore, it is my intention to retire from my current post as organist/choirmaster as of the end of December. I announced it to the choirs at their first rehearsal on Wednesday and have duly informed the rector and the senior warden, who replied with a very nice note. I played for her wedding many years ago, and her two sons were choristers until they got too busy with other things as teenagers.
The hardest part is the farewells, and not just to the people. Week after week, pretty much every hymn I play is for the last time. I sometimes wonder whether it is genuinely the last time for some of them – whether any of my successors will ever schedule some of these songs. Church music has changed over these forty-odd years and I have no idea where it will go from here. That indeed is one of the indicators that my work is done.
It is good to play hymns for this congregation. Last Sunday, we sang “Glorious things of thee are spoken,” with Haydn’s magnificent tune Austria. The congregation sang with strength; the sopranos among them launched unbidden into the hymnal’s printed descant. There was no choir; they simply knew to do this, and probably would have sung it whether anyone wanted them to or not.
I will miss them: hymns such as this with substance and history, and the people who sing them.
Another indicator has been the declining quality of my organ playing, or so it seemed for the last couple of years. As I wrote during the time I was struggling with it: “My vocation had a significant shift at the turn of the year [2017 into 2018, that is]… Music, and especially keyboard music, has been a much smaller part of it.”
But recently, I think that my Sunday service playing has improved, and may be the best of my career. Partly, it is the knowledge that “I ain’t got long to stay here,” as the spiritual says. There is freedom in that. Just knowing that my time is short is a liberation, and I think it has helped my playing to be more carefree.
In the dark days, I did not think that I would play another recital, but I have scheduled one for Sunday, October 13 at 6 pm. Most of it will be improvisation, for when I realized that I could improvise instead of playing ninety minutes or so of repertoire, it became clear that it was possible, where I probably cannot now play a genuine full recital. I may not be able to do even this much adequately – especially a second half that will be a long-form piano improvisation on hymn tunes, a prospect that seemed liberating when I conceived it, but increasingly fills me with terror – but I am viewing the evening as a last opportunity to play a little music for my friends and I hope that they will overlook a few wrong notes. Maybe a lot of wrong notes, and perhaps they might find some Music in it somewhere.
As I wrote above, it is clear to me that church music is moving on into directions I cannot fathom. But I take comfort in what I heard this morning at the local farmers’ market: the Skipperlings, in a two-hour gig. Three girls, all of them veterans of our youth choir. It had been almost a year since I heard them as a group, and even though I knew their increasing skill as individuals from choral rehearsals, from the first notes of their gig I was blown away. They have grown mightily as musicians and have gone well beyond anything that I can now teach them.
I cannot go further with the Song, whether in church or in the wider world. But they can, and will. So will the other young singers with whom I have been privileged to work. One of them, Mike W., is now directing choirs of his own.
And that is enough for me. Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace…
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Yamaha has a lovely short video, “The Gift.” In the text description, it asks “What have you done to share the gift of music?”
The gift of music was given to me by others. There was my grandmother whom I never knew, dead long before I was born, who taught piano lessons in a West Virginia coal camp. There was my first piano teacher, an ancient white-haired lady (I think she was probably about the age I am now). I learned much later that she graduated from conservatory and had a horrible experience with marriage that lasted only a few weeks. She went to the railroad station, put every penny she had on the counter, and said “How far will this take me?” They answered with the name of my home town. And there she stayed for the rest of her days, “Teaching Little Fingers to Play” (the John Thompson method book she used, and with which I began).
There were teachers at university: several piano teachers (for I was passed from one to another in those years), but equally others: a teacher of first-year Music Theory who played Carpenters songs to demonstrate form and chord progressions; my percussion teacher (my minor instrument) who took this overconfident piano major and ripped him to shreds in his first lesson because he could not play a string of quarter notes on a practice pad with sufficient steady accuracy. “That will do for a pianist, but pianists aren’t real musicians,” he said. “Neither are you. Now go away, and practice until you get this right.”
There was the piano teacher in Vienna from whom I learned nothing. He assessed my keyboard technique as fundamentally flawed, and assigned a strict diet of Czerny exercises. I had come there with visions of learning to play Schubert, for I had played his magical G major Sonata in my junior recital the previous spring and loved him in those days above all other composers. Here I was in Vienna, the city of my dreams, and no Schubert. No Beethoven, or Mozart, or Haydn. Czerny. Nothing but Czerny. And Scales. I do not think that it did me any good. But at the end of my four months of study, he gave me an old volume of Schubert sonatas which I still treasure. I now know that it was as hard on him as it was on me.
There was Mr. F., one of my piano teachers at university who was not granted tenure and moved on to a college in western Iowa, leaving me to others. When I graduated, I called him and asked whether I might come and study intensively with him for a year to prepare for graduate auditions. He not only agreed, but welcomed me into his household as a nanny to his two young children. He taught me two lessons a week without charge, he nudged me toward organ because I so loved to play Bach and did what he considered a fine job with Franck’s Prelude, Chorale, and Fugue for piano. And he more-than-nudged me to the school where I learned piano tuning and repair.
There was Sir John Stainer, and the unknown person who left a tattered copy of his organ method in the bench of the instrument where I had taken a job as Organist, completely innocent of how to play it. I had answered a classified newspaper ad, and told the minister “I do not play the organ, but I am a good pianist and willing to learn.” He said “You’re hired.” So he must be thanked as well for giving me a chance.
There was Martha Livesay, organist at the local Presbyterian church who became my best friend in those days and a constant source of encouragement, then and for decades after. And there was Ralph Mills, who was “Mr. AGO” to me when I needed it. I wrote about him here:
When I was getting started, there was a man, Ralph M., dean of the local chapter there in West Virginia, whose license plate was for many years “MrAGO.” If anyone ever deserved such a term, Ralph was the guy. His cordial welcome to me as a scruffy twenty-something from out in the sticks (I had driven about two hours to get to a meeting) was part of what made me an organist. He helped steer me toward the Guild’s certification exams, and I was able to complete the Associate’s Exam before applying for graduate school. That was part of what got me in, because my credentials were lacking.There was Dr. McDonald, my organ teacher at the Choir College who was the one who dealt with the abovementioned serious deficiencies. And Erik Routley, and John and Helen Kemp, and Warren Martin, and Joseph Flummerfelt, and many others.
I could go on, and I do not wish to slight those I have not mentioned. But the point remains: the Gift is not mine. I have received it from others, and done what I can to pass it on.
Go thou and do likewise.
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