Music for Friends

At the end of August, I wrote:

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.

I resisted (and still resist) calling it a Recital. I am done with such things. Eventually, I called it “Music for Friends.” It helped me to think of it that way – I have nothing to prove and I no longer care what anyone thinks of my playing. It consisted of three parts, which are now on YouTube:

a Free Improvisation at the clavichord
the Six Pieces for Organ by Herbert Howells
and an Improvisation on submitted hymn tunes

For this, I invited my friend Jean to select two or three hymn tunes. I think that her daughter Claire and perhaps her son Ben helped with this. There was one Big Tune - “I bind unto myself today” or St. Patrick’s Breastplate, with its companion Dierdre (“Christ be with me...”) embedded in it. And there was one Little Tune: the canon “Go now in peace” by Natalie Sleeth, We sing this every Sunday in our parish as the children leave for Children’s Chapel (with, on many weeks, me wishing I could go with them). When Jean handed me the envelope with the tunes and I opened it, I must have had an interesting expression on my face, because people giggled.

Well, some questions were settled: the tunes, obviously. The key: I had already decided to play in whatever key the main tune was printed. It seemed good to save “Go now in peace” for near the end, as a prayer for these my friends who were listening. With that, it was time to play. As I said above, St. Patrick’s Breastplate is a Big Tune, and it became immediately clear that it was going to as loud and grand as I could make it. As the piece developed, it bordered on “out of control” more often than I would have liked, with plenty of wrong notes, but it would have been dreadfully wrong to play it safe with such a tune.

I finished. As ever, I had no idea if the work was any good. In listening to it since, I do think that there was some Real Music here and there, for which I am grateful. The part I like best is when it finally turns the corner into “Go now in peace,” about the twelve minute mark. It came to me that this Little Tune was related to Deirdre in some interesting ways, so I was able to play around with that for a while, especially in the coda.

All this was Gift: Soli Deo Gloria.

As for the rest, I was glad that Jean encouraged me to go ahead with the little clavichord improvisation. One Friday afternoon we carried it upstairs from my office to the church and took turns playing it. The sound could hardly be heard at all. But, as Jean said, after a minute or so, one’s listening was transformed, and it could after all be heard in its quiet grace.

And the Howells… It went much better than I could have possibly hoped. No breakdowns from the yips. Wrong notes, yes; but upon several listenings since, it came out the way that I think these pieces should go, within the limitations of our beloved little Pilcher. I am proud to put it on YouTube in hopes that it may help others who want to hear these pieces as a set and perhaps play them.

I had always liked the fifth piece, the “Saraband (in Modo Elegiaco),” less than the others when I have played it by itself. But in the final days of my preparations, I came to understand that it works much better in the context of the other pieces, especially with something close to an immediate attaca from the end of the fourth piece. That makes the Saraband feel like a continuation and ultimately consummation, leaving the air cleared for the final Paean.

I was granted another Gift a few weeks later: the prelude for Evensong was the great Passacaglia of J. S. Bach, and that, like the Howells, went much better than anything I could have hoped. It was not quite my farewell to the great organ works of Bach – the next Sunday I played (badly) the B minor prelude and (somewhat less badly) fugue, and there are a few quiet chorale preludes ahead in Advent – but I am happy that at least I could do the Passacaglia well this one time.

That is enough for today. I have not often written in the Music Box this fall, seeking to focus on Finishing the Course – six Sundays left. I do not know what role the Music Box might play in my retirement, if any. But I thank you my readers for your kind thoughts.

A Fugue, and Five Hundred Essays

On Friday, I attended a lecture on Buxtehude by Craig Cramer, distinguished organist at Notre Dame University. Most of his talk was analysis of a Praeludium by Buxtehude. Not a “prelude and fugue” as they were called when I was an organ student, but a single unified piece that among other elements contains several fugues, three in this case.

Being an improviser, I tried it on my own later that day, seeing if I could make something in Buxtehude’s form. It was thoroughly bad.

Not a surprise; my first effort at anything new is always thoroughly bad.

But the idea percolated overnight, and bumped into my Sunday improvisation. I had been struggling with it all week, for the only one of the tunes in the service that I was willing to work with was Engelberg, the fine tune by Stanford often sung with the text “When in our music God is glorified.” In this case it is another text, “We know that Christ was raised and dies no more,” commenting on the selection from I Corinthians 15 appointed in the lectionary. I had been “learning the tune” as is my custom, playing around with it on the clavichord every morning, but not having any ideas as to how to approach it beyond a vague notion of playing variations.

Well! What if I were to begin with a fugue, with the subject related thematically to the tune, and give out the tune near the end as a coda? I spent about twenty minutes fiddling around with this on Saturday, still making no significant progress.

On Sunday mornings, I rarely have time to begin at the piano, for my organ practice must be completed by 7:15 and Matins. But today, I could spare a few minutes, so I made a beginning at the Steinway up in the church – and there it was; a fugue subject that was related to the tune, and with which I thought I could work. That was too good to leave to chance, so I scurried downstairs for staff paper and scribbled out the subject and its tonal answer, settling on the key of A Dorian by writing these things down. I improvised with it some more in the break between Matins and the 9:00 service, perhaps fifteen minutes, and it was time to play.

Here it is, my first public effort at an improvised fugue:

00’14” - I run off the tracks immediately; I play the tonal answer incorrectly, even though it was written down right in front of me. I turn it into a false entry, and give the real thing at 00’19”
00’27” - parallel octaves between bass and soprano. Red ink is mounting up, and I don’t even have all the voices in yet.
00’45” - a final entry in the bass
00’58” - time to finish the Exposition (the first part of a fugue) and go into Other Stuff (technical term: Episode). Again I fall off the tracks, and throw in a few more fugal entries in the existing voices. It could charitably be called a Second Exposition.
01’11” - finally, an Episode. About time.
01’24” - back to the fugue subject. At 01’30” I try to get fancy with the subject in inversion. I think it works pretty well. Heartened by this, at 01’39” is the subject in augmentation in the bass.

And so it goes: some good, some not so good. The opening fugal section winds down by 02’30”. Here, I am making a transition into the hymn tune. At 03’03” is a final (for now) harmonized statement of the fugue subject. It ends with an important transition: the C major chord at 03’20”. This sets the stage for the head motive of Engelberg, which (in C major, as I am going to play it) outlines a C major triad. I introduce the tune in the soprano, still overshadowed by echoes of the fugue subject in A dorian. This is a good idea, so I go with it to the 04’42” mark. Here I leave the tune and start a new fugal section, with a vague notion of suggesting rondo form: Fugue – Tune – Fugue etc.
05’08” - rather surprisingly (to me), the Tune returns in the soprano and takes over completely for a bit.
05’46” - Engelberg continues, now in minor, becoming major. This quiet little passage turned out well. And it keeps me on track with my notion of rondo form: so far we now have Fugue – Tune – Fugue – Tune.
06’42” - enough quiet; it is time for some motion and energy, leading back to the fugue. The subject enters in the bass at 06’55”.
07’22” - Coda (a bit early in terms of the clock: I still have almost two minutes to cover). I seek to make quiet combinations of the fugue subject and motives from the tune. By 08’05”, it leads to a final fugal exposition.
08’31” - Schoenberg wrote about “dissolving” as a way to bring a passage to conclusion, giving examples from Beethoven and others: take a short bit of your material, work with it, become simpler and simpler. This is what I am doing here, using a five-note descending scale.
09’01” - a final playthrough of the hymn tune in the bass, and we are finished.

Overall, I am pleased, especially as a first effort. I have listened to the piece several times this afternoon and I think it holds together, despite the red ink for contrapuntal errors. The problems I hear are these:
- It is too long for its material, and demonstrates why fugues tend to be a little shorter than this.
- Related to that, I got tired of hearing the fugue subject by the end. Were I to play another piece of this scale (and I must; this is the size of piece that is needed as a prelude to the 9:00 service), I should consider a double or triple fugue – perhaps something along the lines of a Buxtehude Praeludium. Of which I made complete hash on Friday afternoon; I am not anywhere near ready to try such a thing in public.
- There are too many passages where the texture is simply the longish fugue subject all by itself, or perhaps with one other voice or chordal accompaniment. This is Not Counterpoint. I would give these passages some more red ink.

But I really did like the transition to Engelberg (03’03” and following) and the quiet passage at 05’46”, and the ending, and my comfort level with the Dorian mode.

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This is my five hundred and first post in The Music Box. I started in February 2010, nine year ago this week. Thank you, my readers. Most of the time, it is around thirty or forty of you. Certain categories of essays draw more readers, especially when I mention a conflict that tore the United States asunder in the mid-nineteenth century; I am trying to not write about it now that its sesquicentennial is in the past. Improvisation-related essays such as this and the previous are also popular.

The second-most-read essay is from 2012: In defense of choral evensong. Many of its 445 readers probably came from Bosco Peters’ excellent liturgy website, which is a Real Blog, the sort that reaches thousands of people and makes a genuine difference, which he does. But I still think I was right in defending choral evensong.

The most-read essay, with an astonishing 1457 readers, is one of the two sermons I have preached (there are several Imaginary Sermons in these pages as well, but this one was real, given at Choral Evensong for the Second Sunday of Easter, 2010): No more a stranger nor a guest.

I have been absent from the Music Box for two months. There are reasons, the first being Advent and Christmas. More recently, I have sought a Change of Habit, best expressed in the Zen proverb:

When walking, walk.
When eating, eat.

I used to do most of my writing as I ate at my desk at work. I love eating and writing, separately and together. But I decided to give Mindful Eating a chance, and I do not think that I will go back. Food is too precious and notable as a gift from God to do other than partake of it with mindfulness, thanksgiving, and full enjoyment. I should know this principle, for I have always been this way with music; I cannot comprehend how people can have music playing in the background as they work. When I listen to music, I listen. So I am simply doing the same with food.

The obvious drawback: I don’t get so many things done. It is not just the writing of essays; I am not reading much, something else I used to do with food and tea at my side.

But my sense is that the work I do get done is a little better, benefiting from better focus. My intention is to continue writing in the Music Box, but it may be infrequently.

Blessings be with you all, and God's grace.

Advent, hymn-playing, and the AGO exams

Tonight was our Service of Advent Lessons and Carols. I could say much about this, not least that the choir sang with strong connection and beautiful phrase-shaping, but upon review of my reference recording, one comment:

I am playing the hymns better than I used to.

And I did not put a large amount of preparation time into them, not directly; two hours perhaps. But indirectly – yes. I could not have played tonight as I did without my work on improvisation, intensively in recent years, but in other ways for twenty years and more, often with little or no audible progress for years at a time. Improvement in hymn-playing was not my intent with this work; I did not even consider it as a possibility. But that is what happened.

From time to time, the AGO talks about revising their professional examinations to make them more relevant. I gather that such revision may currently be in progress. I do not think this is a good idea.

Many of the musical skills one must develop for the exams seem thoroughly irrelevant on the surface. Why does a modern organist need to sight-read in open score with C clefs? Or transpose? Or write a fugal exposition for string quartet? Or read the “square” plainsong notation and engage in modal analysis of chant, and write a short unaccompanied motet?

It took me a long time after I had completed my exams (AAGO, ChM, FAGO) to understand better how the various skills interweave and bear fruit in unexpected ways. Tonight’s hymn playing – and the singing of the choir, for that matter – are an example. All that time wrestling with plainsong and the modes laid the groundwork for being comfortable with playing in the modes, such as my improvised accompaniments for the three plainsong hymns in the service. Reading C clefs is a gateway to transposition (which I found exceedingly difficult and still do), which in turn is groundwork for improvisation.

In short, any work you do as a musician helps all of the other aspects of your playing, singing, and conducting. Any skill that you take the time to develop will pay dividends, most often when you least expect it. And there is hardly anything in music that comes on a straight, direct path; it all happens indirectly, a little at a time.

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I came into this day, the First of Advent, hating the season, wishing it would go away. A look at my December calendar fills me with dread. And it is not unreasonable; I have lived through many Advents and know well what is involved. I do not want to do it for yet another year.

But tonight’s music, and the choir’s singing of the spiritual “Steal away to Jesus” in this morning’s service, saved me. I hope that the music may have had similar effect on others, for I am not alone in dreading this season, this month of darkness and cold and despair.

Lo, how a Rose e’er blooming
From tender stem hath sprung!
Of Jesse’s lineage coming
As seers of old have sung.
It came, a blossom bright,
Amid the cold of winter,
When half-spent was the night.
(German hymn, 15th c.. tr. Theodore Baker)

Howard Riley: an aesthetics of imperfection

I would argue that improvisation as an art is informed by an aesthetics of imperfection. On this view, improvising musicians exploit the contingencies of the performing situation – the instrument, the acoustic, and their own capabilities – creating something out of apparently unpromising as well as promising circumstances. Age and infirmity are among these contingencies. (“Howard Riley,” by Andy Hamilton, International Piano Nov.-Dec. 2018, p. 89)

We have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us. (II Corinthians 4:7)

Riley is a jazz pianist, a “giant of contemporary piano improvisation, with a highly personal musical vocabulary” (Hamilton, p. 88). Now in his mid-seventies, he began experiencing symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease in 2011. Hamilton writes that since then, “Riley [has] pared down his approach, playing very beautifully and minimally” (p. 89).

His music is new to me and I haven’t heard much of it yet. There are some tracks on YouTube; most of them are from long ago, the 1960’s and 70’s, and the few of these that I have sampled so far are well worth a listen. I find only one that is fairly recent:

Piano solo @ Brookes, 29 Nov. 2012

Especially at the beginning as he walks to the piano and gets settled, one can see that he has become old. But much more than that, one sees and hears that he is still playing.

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I love Hamilton’s phrase “an aesthetics of imperfection.” It is entirely foreign to the carefully manicured perfection of commercial recordings, pasted together from multiple takes. It is equally foreign to the world of piano and organ competitions, where one wrong note in your performance means that you are done.

Church musicians know about “creating something out of apparently unpromising” circumstances. For most of us, it takes a long time to figure that out. In my experience, some of the finest music-making has come by surprise – a congregational hymn that takes wing, an anthem that was shaky right up through the final warmup but goes right in the service, and much of my playing at the organ and piano.

Today is the Feast of All Saints. The glorious company of patriarchs, prophets, apostles, martyrs, saints of all kinds, known to us and unknown, is a kaleidoscope of personalities, gifts, peculiarities (and some of them are quite peculiar), weaknesses and strengths. But they have this in common: none of them was perfect, not in this life. It seems that God works precisely through their imperfections – and ours – to manifest his glory to the world. Thus it is no surprise that Real Music happens in a similar manner.

Almighty God, with whom do live the spirits of those who depart hence in the Lord, and with whom the souls of the faithful, after they are delivered from the burden of the flesh, are in joy and felicity: We give thee hearty thanks for the good examples of all those thy servants, who, having finished their course in faith, do now rest from their labors. And we beseech thee that we, with all those who are departed in the true faith of thy holy Name, may have our perfect consummation and bliss, both in body and soul, in thy eternal and everlasting glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (BCP p. 488)

Sweet Hour of Prayer

It has been a long time since I have posted any music online.
Here is a piano improvisation on the Gospel song “Sweet hour of prayer,” from September 30. I played it twice that morning, at our 9:00 and 11:00 services: this is the earlier (and better) version. I considered posting both of them so that the listener could see how two improvisations on the same theme, played only a couple of hours apart, differ. But one is enough, and my (free) SoundCloud space is limited.

Singing the hymn elicited a lot of feedback, about equally divided between positive and negative. For some, it was profoundly moving, healing. For others, it was “like being in the Baptist church” (not usually a compliment from Episcopalians). One woman, who generally supports my musical choices, simply said (with disgust in her voice) “Please! No more of this!” She was no happier when I followed up by selecting “Jesus loves me” for the next week. For that one, she said afterwards “I almost walked out.” But the positive responses from others to both songs were equally strong.

I do not know if singing these two songs was the Right Thing To Do, given the divisions they awakened. In their defense, they did fit the lessons for the day, which was my primary reason for choosing them. Both of them appear in Official Episcopal Songbooks (though not our main book, the Hymnal 1982). And they represent a musical style almost never heard in this parish, a voice that in my opinion is worthy of our attention.

I can offer only one thought: with songs like these, both of them with simple three-chord harmonies, it is essential to respect them. The musician can easily trivialize them, which is fatal. With the piano prelude on “Sweet hour” (and the next week’s prelude, which included “Jesus loves me” alongside two other hymns), I wanted to establish the idea of taking these songs seriously.

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Yesterday I spent close to an hour at the music store, improvising on their Casio GP-500 hybrid piano, with headphones as I will mostly be playing in retirement. I enjoyed it every bit as much as playing the Steinway at the church (the one heard in this and all of my piano recordings). The session with the Casio brought clearness to me: given all the considerations involved, this is my piano of choice. I am ready to write a check and buy it. Except there is no place in our current living arrangement to put it, and I would have little time to play it.

Before his retirement, one of my dearest friends longed for a yacht. I think he wanted to live on one. As it came to pass, he was denied that wish by health conditions, but I think the dream helped him make it to the finish line of his career.

And so it is for me: the piano has become a symbol of retirement and freedom. Some days it seems so far away. But I recall the Word that came to me through a friend over a year ago: “You still have work to do here.” I believe that is still true.

Good services on Sunday: good choral singing, good hymn singing (yes, even “Jesus loves me”), Choral Evensong with Wm. Smith (which all by itself is enough to make my day). I played the organ well enough, including two pieces by Bach, one of them being a piece where I had fallen apart with the “yips” a year ago. I could feel them coming on in one passage, but by God’s grace it did not fall apart.

It was especially good to practice the big C minor prelude and fugue (BWV 546) over the past fortnight and play it for the evensong. I am glad that it is granted me to keep doing this sort of thing.

I will sing to the LORD as long as I live:
I will praise my God while I have my being.
(Psalm 104:34)

Scales (with an afterword on Modes)

My piano student figured out on her own how to play a C major scale. We had introduced the concept of thumb-turns in the context of something she was playing, and she took it from there. It showed up in one of her improvisations (complete with the correct right hand fingering, which I did not teach her). I pointed it out to her and told her it was important. We then worked out the left hand fingering; I emphasized that for now scales must be SLOW and steady, thinking about good tone and hand position; we added them to her practice routine, which now (I hope) begins as follows:

Prayer
Scales
Other Stuff

She returned for the next lesson with C major, one octave, hands separately, played slowly and accurately.

So far, so good.
For as long as she is a musician, she will be playing scales. As will I.

But I got away from them for a number of years in midlife. I was bored with them, and focused instead on the pieces I was trying to learn. Insofar as I was doing technical work at all, it was more from the Brahms “Fifty-One Exercises” than anything else.

Then I began to improvise.

Dupré’s course on improvisation begins with the harmonization of the major scale, then minor. I spent a long time with this, in all keys. Scale in the soprano. Scale “en taille” (in the tenor). Scale in the pedals, or the left hand bass. It was a grind, but over the years since then it has proven increasingly worthwhile that I spent the time on this.

After Gerre Hancock published his book on improvisation, I found that he too began with scales, in a considerably freer approach. Unlike Dupré, Hancock encouraged creative harmonization in any style that takes your fancy in the moment.

That finally made it fun to play scales. When I am practicing free (non-hymn-based) improvisation, I often begin with a few scales – harmonized or contrapuntally oriented (or best of all, both), and let them lead me in whatever direction the ensuing music wants to go. Even when the work at hand is preparation to improvise on a specific tune, I might begin with the scale for the keys I hope to use in the improvisation before beginning to “learn the tune” (playing it in unison, and taking it from there).

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Afterword:
Much more could be said about scales. I content myself with a final observation:

Play in and with the Modes.

Work with them in the same manner as major/minor: the scale in the soprano, chords harmonizing each note of the scale, up and down, slowly. Later, the scale in an inner voice or the bass. Do it in as many keys as you can. This remains for me a work in progress. If you ask me to knock out a quick harmonized scale in F sharp Mixolydian with subsequent improvisation, the results would likely be less than professional. But I am working on it.

The secret is to think “Where is Do?” In the above case, Mixolydian has the keynote on Sol, so Do is on B. Five sharps. It also helps – a lot – to notice that Mixolydian is Major with a flat seventh degree. So I can think “F sharp major” and play E naturals. All four of the Modes have near neighbors that are helpful in this manner:

Dorian – like natural Minor, with raised sixth degree
Phrygian – like natural Minor, with lowered second degree
Lydian – like Major, with raised fourth degree
Mixolydian – like Major, with lowered seventh degree

A benefit of this sort of work is that one soon gets a feel for the mode. What chords make a good cadence? What chord combinations work well, which ones not so much? What chords work well with specific scale degrees?

And: What is the characteristic ethos of the mode? Mixolydian has a sober dignity to it that I love: Lydian is the most joyful of modes, even more than Major: Dorian is like Minor but with greater strength and a yearning that comes from the raised sixth degree: Phrygian is strange, something all its own. To explain it I commend to you the magnificent Third Tune of Thomas Tallis (the Third Mode being another name for Phrygian), and the Fantasia on this tune by Vaughan Williams.

That brings me to another benefit of work with the modes: you might start sounding like Vaughan Williams. Or Herbert Howells.

I suspect that these composers got their “sound” in part from long exposure to the Modes – for RVW, it was his work with folksongs; for Howells, his work with the Tudor Church Music project. I can imagine them playing around at a piano with these things, finding the characteristic harmonizations and melodic patterns.

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.

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.

Wachet auf, and a YouTube update

Some while back, I posted a rant about Microsoft and the demise of Movie Maker, which made it easy to prepare MP4 files for YouTube. It turns out that in this instance, my steaming about the Evil Powers at Microsoft was unfounded. One can, with slightly more difficulty, get the job done with another Microsoft product: PowerPoint, at least in its 2016 version (which is what is on my computer). PowerPoint is not something I normally use, which may be part of why it has taken me two months for this idea to occur to me.

As a trial run, I prepared this YouTube clip of my piano improvisation from last Sunday. It is mostly based on the chorale Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, which in turn is based on last Sunday’s Gospel, the story of the Wise and Foolish Virgins (St. Matthew 25:1-13). Because we were to shortly sing another song based on the same story, I included it as well: “Give me oil in my lamp,” starting at about the 6 minute mark in the video.

As for the PowerPoint procedure, here it is – for, in defense of my slowness of mind, I did not find anything along these lines in a Net search for how to do this. Then again, maybe it is so obvious to everyone else that no one has felt it useful to explain it.

• Run PowerPoint.
• In the headings at the top, choose “Insert”
• From the ribbon below the headings, choose “Pictures” (or other things, such as photo albums, or further to the right, Video)
• At the right end of the ribbon, labeled “Media,” choose “Audio.”
• That gives a little drop-down with two items; choose “Audio on My PC” which opens a File Manager box where you can locate the audio file that you want.
• After some few minutes, one ends up with a PPTX file – that is, a PowerPoint presentation – with your chosen Audio file under the photo(s).
• It needs one more tweak: there is an audio control/volume icon in the middle of the picture, which you don’t want in the YouTube file. Right-click on the icon to select it, and choose “Send to Back.” This puts it behind your picture.
• Now you can save the file. Under the “File” heading, choose “Save As,” and in the box that pops up, find “Save as type.” It has a long drop-down list, which includes what we want: MPEG-4 Video (*.mp4). Choose this, give it a filename (which will appear at the beginning of the video) and hit “Save.”
• After another longish while, you now have an MP4 file, which can be uploaded to YouTube.

Despite finding a way to do it, I do not expect that I will often post to YouTube.

A followup: "If you cannot preach like Peter..."

If you cannot preach like Peter,
If you cannot pray like Paul,
You can tell the love of Jesus
And say he died for all.
(from the spiritual “There is a balm in Gilead”)

I hasten to add a corrective to yesterday’s essay about improvisation in the French manner. Namely:

Just start playing.
Improvise. Have fun with it.
Whatever your skill level, do it.

I was giving the impression (and, I must say, Dupré likewise gives the impression in his course) that if you have not devoted a thousand hours or so to high-speed scales in thirds and sixths in all keys, nor gained effortless fluency with instant arpeggiated harmonization of any note in any key, you shouldn’t attempt to improvise.

That impression is possibly the biggest obstacle to improvisation: like I wrote a couple of times in yesterday’s essay, “I will never ever play like that!” That is, of course, absolutely true. I (and presumably you, the reader) will never improvise like Mr. Latry, or Gerre Hancock, or Peter Planyevsky, or Paul Manz. Or Keith Jarrett, or Bill Evans, or Mike Garson.

Such thoughts must not stop me (and you) from playing. Here, now, with the knowledge and technical equipment that we have. Ultimately, such thoughts (or more precisely, the despair that arises from them) are the work of the Adversary. “You will never get it right. You might as well give up.” Such thoughts come to me at times, especially when I have played badly, or failed as a choral director in rehearsal (I did so this past Wednesday, when I got angry at one of the choral sections and was hurtful to these people, whom I love.)

The Adversary says “You must be perfect, or you are worthless.”
The Holy Paraclete says “You are a beloved child of God, and you shall be perfect, when I have completed My work.”

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Someday I should write about the concept of “Words.” I got the idea from Mike Krzyzewski, who coaches a certain well-known collegiate basketball program, and (as he recommended) I developed my own list of Words. They are among the things on my Door, down below the pictures of composers.

The first three are the Cardinal Virtues, and I think of them a lot. They have been a light in the darkness ever since St. Paul wrote them:

Fides (Faith)
Spes (Hope)
Agape (Charity)

Fides gives us confidence that God has given us what we need – indeed, precisely what we need, no more and no less – to do what He desires of us in our place and time. No, I will never improvise like Olivier Latry. But he has to play at the Cathedral of Notre Dame; I don’t. And I think God may have given me some gifts (or trained me by experience, often unwillingly on my part, to where I can do what He wants done here) that Mr. Latry may lack, because he does not need them.

Spes teaches us that we can grow and learn. One day in fact, we shall be fully formed in the image of Christ. That includes being fully formed in the exercise of our musical gifts.

Agape reminds us that all of this is for the benefit of the people around us, our sisters and brothers. Without Agape, all of it is but “sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.” Cantare amantis est.

Enough of this. Time to practice what I have been preaching.

An improvisation, and a way forward

Last night, I had the pleasure of attending a concert by Olivier Latry, organist of Notre Dame de Paris, professor of organ at the Paris Conservatoire. My respect for him is very great; he is my “go-to” person for his recordings of the complete organ works of Messiaen. Here is one of his Messiaen tracks from YouTube, the final movement of the Livre du Saint-Sacrement. He played no Messiaen in last night’s concert, but there was plenty of other fine music, notably (in my opinion) his playing of Duruflé’s Prelude and Fugue on the name of Alain.

And an improvisation.

I did not time it, but my estimate is that it ran about twenty minutes. It was based on the chant “Dies irae” plus a cheerful triadic tune often played by the local university marching band, as well as polka bands everywhere:

In heaven there is no beer:
That’s why we drink it here.

The envelope containing the tunes was solemnly presented to Mr. Latry; after some difficulty opening it, he set the tunes on the music rack and played them for the audience. After a few moments, off he went, starting with the “In heaven” tune – dark, in minor, low in the tenor/bass register. That proved to be the main theme of the improvisation, complete with a fine large four-voice fugue before a concluding toccata passage. “Dies irae” was in a decidedly secondary role, though it was present as a dark undertone.

In conversation afterwards, my friend Jean and I wondered how he could do such a thing as this. Both of us have heard many improvisations after the French manner, and they often come across as somewhat formulaic. Latry’s piece on this night did not seem that way at all. It seemed more a creation of the moment rather than random tunes pasted into a form.

Some thoughts, and a way forward:

I admit to a twinge of discouragement as I drove home. I will never, ever play like that!

As I have written elsewhere, “Someone is always better. Don’t let that bother you.” That helped, as did the corollary: “Be the best that you can be.” That thought leads to the organ bench, and perhaps renewed intensity to my work on improvisation. At present I am overwhelmed with repertoire and anthem accompaniments to prepare for the next fortnight of services, but at least there are three piano improvisations in the music list to keep me working at the skill.

“Be the best that you can be” also leads me to think more seriously: How did he do that?

Upon a night’s sleep and consideration, I suggest some possibilities. The improvisation was in essence Theme and Variations; he may have had that form in mind before the evening began, at least as one of several possibilities. The key (though not the mode: lots of movement between major and minor, and probably other modes) was that of the two tunes, and I do not recall any significant modulations from the home key, not in the sense of a sonata-allegro form or even an ABA ternary form (staying in the home key is fully appropriate for Theme and Variations). That covers two of the major decisions the player must make.

There was plenty of variety in color and dynamics, plenty of rise and fall of energy level. At one point I noticed how my heart was racing, my palms sweating as he built to an intermediate climax on full organ, and I was grateful for being swept away by the music (as I was, beginning to end). [I will add that Keith Jarrett does this too, at the piano; it is one of the strengths of his long-form improvisations.]

There were elements that I recognized – the fugue, several passages of toccata figuration with the tune in double pedals, a couple of hymnlike variations in homophonic chords (like the one at the very beginning), some unison lines, one of them taking it down to the slow-speaking bottom note of the keyboard on a reed stop that he seemed to particularly like.

Aside from the unteachable genius of the thing, most of the rest was virtuosity of passagework in hands and feet.

That is why the second volume of Dupré’s improvisation course begins with a “Table of daily exercises at the piano” - pages of scales in thirds, sixths, octaves in all major and minor keys, as well as chromatically (adding fourths and tritones to the other intervals). Then arpeggiated chords – triads, seventh chords of all sorts. Discussion of pedal scales and exercises to attain an equal level of virtuosity with the feet. Dupré titles this first chapter: “The Piano, basis of technique at the Organ.”

My eyes glaze over and despair sets in. But at least I can “see in a glass darkly” how this could be done. Mr. Latry has most certainly done these things, and I would suspect that he continues to work at them regularly. I suspect, also, that he knows the two-volume Dupré course intimately as student, performer and teacher, for it has been the foundation of the French manner of improvisation for decades.

Dupré then turns to Harmony in chapter two. He begins with the observation that the player must have a spontaneous, immediate facility with harmonization, a knowledge of every possible chord that could harmonize each note of a melody [the jazzmen say this too, in their own way]. Pages of exercises follow: triads, chords of the seventh and ninth, modulations, “resolution of polytonal aggregations” (p. 23) – or as Mr. Hancock used to say, “Salvation is just a half-step away.” Again, in all major and minor keys, with the goal of the absolute and effortless harmonic control that someone like Mr. Latry demonstrates.

This is a long path.
But it is the path that, I suspect, has brought Mr. Latry to his present level of skill as an improviser.

Dupré eventually gets around to the treatment of Themes and their analysis as to how they can best be presented rhythmically, harmonically, etc. – and contrapuntally, with canon, imitation, ornamented chorale with contrapuntal accompaniment (e.g., after the manner of Bach), fugue. And then, forms: binary, ternary, symphonic forms, many others.

Some of the finest improvisers, after years of work, reach this level. These are the players that Jean and I have heard who play amazingly, and with great effect, but their work has a hint of the formulaic. They have mastered all of Dupré’s formulas.

Mr. Latry (and a handful of others: among the Frenchmen, I put Daniel Roth in this category, and certainly Messiaen when he was still with us) has gone beyond this. He has made all of this work so natural and automatic that he probably does not need to think about it at all. Like Keith Jarrett at the piano, he simply starts to play, with at most some general ideas as to form – which may, in the execution, turn in quite a different direction than it began.

Again: I will never, ever play like that!

[Edited to add: There is another side to this - see the next essay.]
[See also this, from Glenn Osborne's fine improvisation blog, as to his theory of "how do they do this?" -- deeper study of solfege, harmony and counterpoint in the French system than is typical in the American training of organists and other musicians.]

What brought me back down to earth this morning was my humble little clavichord. After Matins I opened it up and improvised for a while, simple four-bar phrases in G major. The clavichord by its nature works against any thoughts of virtuosic display. It rewards quiet, careful playing – at least for me at my elementary stage as a player of this instrument.

Mr. Latry’s improvisation and its ripples this morning have nonetheless brought me to a revelation. Dupré’s course has been on my shelf for decades, ever since Gerre Hancock named it in a workshop as essential – this was in my first years as an organist, when I was self-taught and working toward my Associate certificate (AAGO), before graduate school. Hancock’s own book on improvisation is probably a better starting place now, but he had not then written it.

Back then, I spent much time on the first, “preparatory” volume of Dupré. This work was what got me through the improvisation requirement for the AAGO (barely, with the minimal passing grade). The second volume frightened me so thoroughly that I have hardly touched it. Not least, it is in French; I do not think that it is available in translation. But as Hancock said all those years ago, “Don’t let that put you off. It is easy French.” And it is, most of it musical terminology.

Paging through the book this morning, all of a sudden, without realizing how I have gotten here, I see that I am ready for it.

I will likely never get far up the path – there are too many weeks when there are other more pressing demands on my practice time. I may never get past the first chapter with all its forbidding pages of exercises in thirds and sixths and arpeggios of every sort. But I think that I must take care not to get stuck there. I think that after some work on these things, I could profit much from the rest of the book.

Jesu, juva.

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A YouTube search for “Olivier Latry improvisation” brings many results. Here is one that has not so many views as most of them. I chose this because it shows him at work with something a lot more important than a polka song and a showpiece improvisation in the middle of the U.S. – an improvisation, a defiant statement if you will, for the memorial Mass at Notre Dame for the victims of the three coordinated suicide bombings of November 13, 2015, which killed 128 persons in Paris.

This is why one studies improvisation, or for that matter any kind of music: to have the tools for when it becomes your duty to make a musical statement where no words suffice.

My Clavichord

Most people who visit my office at the church think that I have a work table to the left of the computer. Few people know that it is a clavichord.

I built it from a kit which was sold by the Burton Harpsichord company, which I think no longer exists. This was in the late 1970’s, when I lived in my grandfather’s old farm house and for the only time in my life had a fine large workshop. I thought that I would be there for the remainder of this mortal life, and that the clavichord would be a fine addition to the old upright piano that was my other instrument. The kit cost around $200 as I recall, which was a huge sum for me in those days.

I have never played the clavichord as much as I would have liked, partly because I did not stay in that house long. When I left a few years later to go to the Choir College, I packed it into a crate and put it in storage, for I was headed for a dormitory room. After that, I worked in the Caribbean, and left the clavichord and my furniture and most of my books in the storage warehouse until I could get properly settled. It was good that I did, for my path soon took me to Tennessee. At that point, many years after going into storage, I set up the instrument in our basement at home.

I played it some, but we lived across the street from my church, so it was generally more productive to go over there and practice on the piano and organ. It had suffered from its years in storage; the frame warped somewhat (which I gather is common for the instrument), causing the soundboard to develop a large crack, decreasing its already small resonance.

Two moves later, it landed in its current location, even worse in condition from its travels. I soon piled it high with things to be done, most notably the five boxes of single-copy anthem octavos left by my predecessor. It has taken me seventeen years to work through them and finally clear the top of the instrument.

I did play it occasionally, an undertaking that required moving the boxes and piles of music from the clavichord lid to the floor. That was enough resistance to make my playing very occasional, indeed. Sometimes years would pass without the lid being opened.

As mentioned, I finally dealt with the thousands of octavos, quite a few of them finding a home in my own octavo file on the shelves. But there was still resistance to playing the instrument. There was a broken string. Many of the notes did not play properly. It was badly out of tune. I put it on my task list, but I could not justify a high priority; it was a “someday/maybe” task, labeled “low priority” to make it even less likely to be done.

Today, out of the blue, I had the right energy to deal with it. I repaired the string. I adjusted the tangents (see below) so that all of the notes played properly. I tuned it – to B flat equals 440, a half-step low, to protect its forty-year old brass strings from breaking. All told, it was the work of about two hours, a task of such small size that I should have done it years ago – as I should have finished dealing with all the music on top of it.

What, you may ask, is a “tangent”?

The clavichord is not the oldest of keyboard instruments – that honor goes to the pipe organ – but it is the simplest. The keys are simple levers. Towards the back of each key, there is a short piece of brass rod, filed to a dull knife-edge at top – this is the tangent. When the key is pressed, the back end rises and the knife-edged top of the tangent contacts the string, which vibrates and makes a soft sound. When the key is released, the sound stops. That is it. No complicated mechanism as there is for the modern piano, or even the harpsichord – and the organ most of all!

Many of the tangents were out of adjustment because of the case warpage – their relationship to the strings above them was not quite the same as it had been when I built it. When the tangent rose to the string, the string would slip off the front or back of the tangent, or in the worst cases, the tangent would miss the string altogether. The fix is simple: remove the key, bend the tangent (holding it with two pairs of pliers so as not to split the wooden key), put it back in, try it and see if it works properly. If not, repeat until it does.

It is not difficult at all, though it does take some patience.

The result: I think it sounds pretty good. Obviously it would sound better were I to disassemble the whole thing, true up the case framework so it is square, replace the soundboard, and restring it with new wire. Perhaps in my retirement; certainly not before.

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I could learn much from playing the clavichord. It demands (and, I suspect, teaches) a most gentle and even touch. The slightest movement of a finger produces a sound, and the slightest difference in pressure from one note to the next is noticeable in the sound. It teaches careful listening to the shaping of phrases, to balance between multiple notes in a chord, or contrapuntal lines.

In a way, I have not been ready to attempt the instrument until now; I needed to make a beginning with improvisation first, for the clavichord is a magnificent instrument for the improvisatory art, perhaps the best of all.

We shall see where this leads. I have made a note in my task management system to improvise at the clavichord at least twice a week – perhaps by candlelight on Wednesday and Sunday nights when my other work is done. I think that this might be the best setting for it.

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Here is a YouTube demonstration of a Clavichord by Han Ding, a playing of the Aria from the Goldberg Variations on his modern instrument. I chose it over the other YouTube clips that came up in a quick search because it gives a more realistic impression of the volume – that is, very soft.

My instrument is not so handsome as the one in the clip, but is similar in layout. It is most decidedly inferior in every way to the instrument in the next clip, a playing of the same piece on an historic instrument at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is a good example of how a clavichord can look – notice that the inside of the lid is a fine oil painting; this was not uncommon in the old days. But for the recording, the instrument is miked very close and loud; you can get a sense of this from how loud the action noise is, such as when he lifts his hands from the keys at the end. It does not give as good of an impression of what it actually sounds like as the previous clip.

Keith Jarrett did an LP recording of improvisations on the clavichord: “The Book of Ways.” I do not think it is his best work (and like most of the clavichord recordings on the Net, it is mastered far too loud!), but I should continue to listen to it for guidance. Some of the LP tracks are on YouTube; here is one that I like.

This sort of playing is what I would like to do with the clavichord. I doubt that I will ever advance sufficiently to play Bach effectively on it, but improvisation at a sufficient level to please myself might be possible. I think that this work may help my playing of the piano and organ and my general musicianship. It may prove worthwhile for its own sake.

Finish then thy new creation

“Play softly,” they told me. “Quiet background music,” while people prayed. Some for healing, back in the side chapel where a line of people formed; a dozen or so at the baptismal font with the priest, renewing their commitment to Christ. Some, sitting in the church, listening, praying. Many in other parts of the building and outdoors; one-on-one prayer with the bishop, walking a labyrinth, mindful coloring, writing of prayers.

For twenty minutes I was to play. Or twenty-five. Or more. However long it took. I was terrified. I could easily play random soft chords in a new-ageish manner and fill the time. But could I do better than that?

I came to view it as an examination. I have improvised preludes and postludes all summer and devoted all of my practice, such as it was, to this skill; have I made any progress? Sometimes it has gone well this summer; sometimes not so much. Could I now attempt a long-form improvisation in the manner of Mr. Jarrett? Obviously I will never have his virtuosity, but could I do something that would be worthy of the occasion, perhaps a channel of healing and prayer?

Well, I gave it a try. I played variations on Hyfrydol, which was to be the closing hymn a bit later in the service. With that much time, I could go pretty far afield. I consciously tried to avoid any clear statement of the tune, and kept it in minor for much of the piece. I sought to extract motives and work with them.

Always, there was the liturgical constraint: “Quiet background music.” That removed dynamics as a possibility for contrast and development and I had to rein in the ideas several times when they wanted to grow larger than would have been appropriate. The constraint mostly ruled out “fast” as well as “loud.”

I made a recording, but I am not going to post all of it; there is too much noise. That was a clue that I got it right; for most of the first fifteen minutes, the priest speaking quietly with people at the other end of the room from the microphone is louder than my playing. This is a good sign.

There was some good playing in it, and some that was not so good; if it were indeed an examination, I would give myself a C-plus and be content that it was not an F. [Edited 9/13 to add: I listened to the recording two more times; it was not so bad as I thought as I played, nor on first listening. Maybe a B instead of C plus.] (I am grateful to one of the jazzmen who used to work in our choir room, a saxophonist. He told a student: “Any improvisation where you don’t feel like you need to put a bag over your head and sneak out the back door is a success.” He is right about that.) The best part was not me: one of my tasks was to set up the key for the Skipperlings to sing “Long time traveler” after me. That is worth hearing, so I am posting the last eight minutes or so of the improvisation followed by their song. The selection starts softly, just before my return to the improvisation’s tonic of C after a long excursion to G flat and B, but it builds up (finally!) after the bishop returns, my cue that it is time to wrap things up.

And here is the closing hymn, on which the improvisation was based. My intent was for the violinist to play on the final stanza, doubling the descant; instead, he played for all three stanzas. That made the middle stanza, unaccompanied except for the violin, much better than what I had anticipated.

Lessons:
- The summer’s work was not entirely wasted, but there is much still to do. I am unable to convincingly organize twenty-five minutes of improvisation so that it sounds like a unified musical composition. Not for the first time, I am filled with admiration for how Mr. Jarrett can do this so well. The way to get there would be to do many more “practice runs,” with close attention to form. This is not directly useful for my proper duties, so it is unlikely to happen. I am still listening to his four-CD recording “A multitude of angels” and seeking to internalize it.
- There were a few weeks this summer where my organ improvisation was better than my work at the piano; I have posted a couple of these on SoundCloud. This was a goal, and I am happy to have reached it, even if the way I did so was with lame piano playing on said Sundays.
- I survived despair. There was a week when I became convinced that my improvisations were driving people away, keeping them from entering the church from the narthex until my noise-making was done. By “what some would call chance,” that very week I happened on one of Pressfield’s books: “Do the Work,” the sequel to his important book “The War of Art.” I must say that “Do the Work” is not as good of a book, and something of a waste of money – it is short, and mostly repeats material from “War of Art.” But some of the material unique to this book was exactly what I needed to drag me out of the Slough of Despond.
- Possibly the chief benefit of the summer’s work was to my accompaniment of congregational song. Devoting more of my practice time to what I call the “Thelonious Monk method” (play the tune at the organ continuously for an extended period, forty-five minutes or an hour) made me more adventuresome when it came time to sing the hymn on Sunday, and in some cases perhaps more effective.

Now it is back to repertoire and anthem accompaniments. There is much to be done there, too. In fact, this very day I received what I view as a word from the Lord: a trustworthy friend told me that during the service I have been describing, she heard it as a voice: “(my name) has more work to do here.”

I wrote that down and attached it to my door, alongside the pictures of Bach, Bruckner, and Keith Jarrett.

Finish then thy new creation;
Pure and spotless let us be;
Let us see thy great salvation
Perfectly restored in thee;
Changed from glory into glory,
Till in heaven we take our place,
Till we cast our crowns before thee,
Lost in wonder, love, and praise.
(Charles Wesley)

He who would valiant be

He who would valiant be
‘gainst all disaster,
let him in constancy
follow the Master.
There’s no discouragement
shall make him once relent
his first avowed intent
to be a pilgrim.
(John Bunyan, adapted by Percy Dearmer)

Having played Bach for all of my organ voluntaries for the four weeks ending with Trinity Sunday, I determined to improvise all voluntaries for the summer at both the 9:00 and 11:00 services: piano and organ. I hoped that sustained effort might result in some skill development, sorely lacking at the organ and still much needed at the piano.

The prospect of this work scares me about as much as anything I have attempted musically. How am I going to practice? How can I improvise this much and not drive away the 11:00 congregation? Are they going to put up with my learning curve, which will doubtless be steep? How dare I put my music ahead of the likes of JSB, or Paul Manz, or Kenton Coe, or John Stanley (whose voluntaries would be much easier to prepare for a summer Sunday than improvisations)?

Well. Nothing for it but to give it a try.

Week I, ending with June 18

On this first week, my practice time is limited by preparations for Saturday’s Gay Pride Parade, in which our parish has a float. On the float: the Palm Sunday Marching Band in its second public appearance, having expanded its repertoire well beyond “All glory, laud, and honor.”

For the uninitiated, the PSMB is a group of (mostly) middle-school bandswomen and men. Our group this time consisted of three clarinets, oboe, alto saxophone, trombone, and a band/choir mother walking alongside the float playing recorder. For safety’s sake, we play everything in unison, though that puts the alto sax in a not-so-comfortable tessiatura.

The parade was terrific fun. People cheered, many sang along with us.

But I was not as prepared for Sunday as I would have liked, especially for this first Sunday of my summer’s work. The piano prelude at 9:00 went well; it is here on SoundCloud.

The organ? Not so much. For a prelude, I improvised on the fine tune East Acklam (“For the fruit of all creation, thanks be to God”). It was thoroughly conventional. Dull. And too long for what little imagination there was in it. At least it was soft and hopefully inoffensive. The postlude was better, based on Paderborn (“Ye servants of God, your Master proclaim”). It was lively and had some good moments, though the big ending that was the direction it wanted was about four bars too long. Still, it was a start: big endings are notoriously difficult – certainly for me, but even the Real Composers sometimes have problems.

Week II, ending with June 25

Well. How does one practice?

On the face of it, no problem: I have described my improvisation practicing here, complete with YouTube example. But how does that work out when this sort of practice is all that I am doing, all week – for that matter, all summer?

His eye is on the sparrow:

I sing because I’m happy,
I sing because I’m free,
For his eye is on the sparrow,
And I know he watches me.
(Civilla D. Martin)

This is the piano prelude, for we are singing this fine old Gospel song at both services. It gives me another opportunity to Play the Changes, this time with a longer and more challenging chord structure.

Perversely, the improvisation seems to want the key of G flat major. I try playing it from the printed version (C major, a fully written out SATB hymnal version with chord symbols) and stumble along with it all week, until in exasperation I write out a lead sheet version in G flat. To make it more fun, I use alto clef, because the tune fits the staff better that way. If nothing else, the week has taught me the value of lead sheets. The written harmony parts are a distraction for this sort of work, and as much as I like the Roman numeral chord designations (I, IV, V, etc.), the letter-name chord symbols are less subject to error in this context. I even discover why the jazzmen often make enharmonic changes that seem strange to a classically-trained player, for I quickly replace the IV chord (C flat major) with B major, totally foreign to the key but something I’m more likely to play correctly on the fly.

After Matins on Saturday, I give it the T. Monk treatment – just shy of two hours. At first it remains cheesy, the sort of backgroundish Baptist communion music that I once could play well. At about the one-hour mark, it becomes more interesting. I find myself in what is almost a bop version, a four-against-three walking bass line with syncopated melody. This is fun, so I stay with it for several variations, but my chops are definitely not ready to do this in public. From there it gets slow and much more dissonant. I find that I can pretend the alto clef is treble and play the tune as C mixolydian, while still playing the G flat chord pattern (well, mostly). Thinking of how much other work lies ahead, I round it off with a final play-through of the tune, soft and meditative. It is good; I hope I can find this place on Sunday morning.

That is one of the problems for the improviser. You find the magic, the unexpected insights into the tune, but the gold is mixed with the dross. How can you get to it when the congregation is not going to patiently listen to you stumble around for an hour or more? How can you play the good stuff and not any of the bad stuff?

The best I can say is that this sort of long-form practicing puts enough material into the Cauldron of Song (with homage to JRRT’s Cauldron of Story) so that the unconscious can work with it through the week – I suspect much of this work occurs as we sleep – and on Sunday we can perhaps be sufficiently transparent so that the Holy Spirit can use us for Her divine purposes.

Another problem is that some of the more bizarre material (such as the bitonal variations) would not make sense to listeners who had not walked the long path to that point in the music. I do not yet see how to get there in the time frame of a service prelude. Perhaps the value of it for practice is that it builds confidence that no matter how strange the material you stumble into, you can do something with it, and that something might be more worthwhile than all the rest of the piece.

My almost-two-hours complete, I am exhausted. “We come to practice as warriors,” says Steven Pressfield. It is time for an Alexander lay-down exercise. A re-exposure to the Alexander Technique by means of an AGO chapter program this spring and the book I read after that taught me the importance of the exercise at this point, after practice. The authors say to practice twenty minutes, then do the lay-down for twenty minutes. I have trouble imagining any professional musician with enough time for that, but I have this spring and summer made it habitual to do a five or ten minute lay-down after each hour of work. Or in this case, longer – that is part of why I am so tired.

On this day, I make it a full twenty-minute laydown, followed by Second Breakfast, a hobbitish custom I happily embrace. It is well over an hour before I am ready for another round.

He who would valiant be:

This week’s hymnody puts the question to my premise. There is a fine setting by Leo Sowerby of St. Dunstan’s (“He who would valiant be,” the opening hymn at 11:00) which I could play for a prelude, and it would be superior to anything I could possibly improvise. Worse still, the closing hymn is Ein feste Burg (“A mighty fortress”). That one puts me in competition with the whole array of German Lutheran composers, up to unplayable (for me) masterpieces such as Max Reger’s fantasia on this tune. More practically, there is a setting by Michael Praetorius that I have played many times. It likewise is superior to anything I could improvise. Right up to the bulletin deadline, I ask myself: Am I really going to do this? Shouldn’t I give up, and play the repertoire based on these tunes? That would put me right back to where I have been all these years – scrambling from one week to the next to prepare repertoire, always wanting to improve but never having sufficient practice time for something that is clearly optional to my work.

This fortnight, I have applied the same improvisatory practice techniques to these hymn tunes at the organ, but it became quickly evident that the music must go in a different direction from what it would be at the piano. The organ seems to demand more counterpoint. It is coloristic, more perhaps than the piano but in quite a different manner. One thing that is requiring work is to think ahead about registrations. I find myself playing with one hand while setting a registration on the other manual for music that has not yet come into existence – that is, I have only a vague notion as to what I might play for the next bit. But the registration helps create it when the time comes. That too is a surprising insight.

After initial work early in the week on each tune separately, I am finding that on the final days it is well to simply work through the 11:00 service, beginning to end. This Saturday, I improvise on St. Dunstan’s for a half-hour or so, then recall that I was intending – and had practiced and intended all week – to work Wer nun den lieben Gott (“If thou but suffer God to guide thee”) into the prelude as a contrasting theme, so I do – in this case as a coda of about twenty minutes.

After all that, playing St. Dunstan’s as the opening hymn is easy; I need only stay in the printed key and keep the tempo slow, probably much slower than I am thinking of it for improvisation.

Following a brief Alexander break, I work through the other hymns and service music, experimenting with an improvised introduction to Wer nun den lieben Gott. That too becomes easy after having worked with the tune at length through the week.

I finish the “pretended-service” with the congregational version of Ein feste Burg, and launch into improvisation on it. Again, the good stuff does not arrive for about twenty minutes.

June 25 - Sunday Scorecard:

The piano improvisation on “His eye is on the sparrow” is here.

Some of it is pretty good. I particularly like the “bass” solo on one of the stanzas, and the final time fully through the tune, taking a lot more time with it. As with last Sunday, I should have stopped four bars sooner.

Perhaps the real benefit of working on this one tune so much, probably four or five hours this week, came not at the 9:00 service where I improvised on it, but at 11:00. I lost count of the stanzas (a constant danger, especially for hymns that finish with a refrain or chorus) and kept playing after the congregation was done. It became clear that I should continue, as a coda of sorts. People started humming along, and it was absolutely right, the thing that was needed for that moment in the liturgy. I would not have played it as well without the practicing.

Both of the organ improvisations went well. I kept them fairly simple, conservative and brief, and they were more interesting than the ones from last week, though a bit sloppy in places. I will take “sloppy” over “dull” (e.g., last Sunday’s prelude) any day. Here is a SoundCloud clip combining the prelude and postlude.

[a technical footnote: There is a brand-new computer in the music office, running Windows 10. But Microsoft has done away with Windows Movie Maker, which I used to make MP4 clips to post on YouTube. I do not know how to work around this, so my YouTube channel may be finished. It is for now, anyway.]


Four insights:

1. This work will make me a better organist. After a mere fortnight, there is considerable improvement. Were I to practice every hymn in this manner, every week, my hymn playing would be transformed.

2. Improvising is not a shortcut. Yes, I can sit down at the organ or piano and play something without preparation. The results are not dissimilar from what would happen if I sight-read my normal preludes and postludes without working out fingerings and practicing them.

3. It pleases me that I managed to play the two organ pieces without sounding – well, like anyone that I can think of. There is certainly influence from a great many sources in these things. But I cannot readily say “This sounds like [fill in the blank].”

4. I have little sense as to where this will lead.

Part Four: Whitsunday

Learning is nonlinear.

My intention of learning to “play the changes” in jazz style on “As the wind song in the trees” ran aground on the hard reality of Sunday morning, which arrived well before I had mastered the skill. But it is all right; I did learn from the week’s work. In some respects, it is better than all right; parts of this morning’s improvisation were indeed “playing the changes” – improvised lines over the chords of “As the wind song.” These parts were incorporated into a larger whole that made for a better piece of music than it would have been had I been strict about staying with the changes.

Here is a link to the improvisation, on SoundCloud.

Even my work on Song of the Holy Spirit bore fruit; I did not use it in the improvisation, but it made my accompaniment of the congregation’s singing more interesting than it would have otherwise been. So was “As the wind song,” when it came time for everyone to sing it.

What did sneak in was Veni, Creator Spiritus, which was not part of this service. But we had sung it at Matins upstairs in the chapel and it came to mind when it came time to begin the improvisation and seemed to make a good introduction.

And then there was Bach. At the later service, I played the two organ settings of Komm, heiliger Geist which begin the Leipzig Chorales, and both of them went pretty well – better than they would have been without all the time I have spent listening and thinking about Keith Jarrett and jazz ballads and playing the changes. I have played these chorale settings many times over the years – and never so well as I did today.

I sense that I have been stuck at about the same level with my playing for a while, both at the piano and the organ. In the past few weeks, both have been in more of a flux, and I think I am making progress. Not in a linear manner, to be sure, and with setbacks. But discernible progress: yes, I think so.

Soli Deo Gloria.

Here is the link to one of the organ settings, the soft trio version of Komm, heiliger Geist, BWV 652. I am posting this rather than the BWV 651 toccata because there are many more settings of the latter than the former on YouTube. I might as well improve the balance.

Part Three: A multitude of Angels

Friday: The Martyrs of Lyon – Blandina and her Companions
In this day’s mail: Keith Jarrett’s 4-CD album “A multitude of angels.” In 1996, weakened and discouraged by a then-undiagnosed ailment, he played four solo improvisatory concerts in Italy over the span of a week: Modena, Ferrara, Torino, Genova. These four concerts would be the last, and he knew it.

The past fortnight has shown me that I needed more of Jarrett’s music. There is much on YouTube, including many of his more famous solo concerts from Vienna, Paris, Tokyo. I hesitated to spend $40, but from what I read of them, I was drawn to this album, not least by the title. I wanted to see what the twenty years since the Köln Concert – the only one of his albums that I know well – had taught him.

“A multitude of angels” was not released in 1996, or any time thereafter – not until last summer, 2016, another twenty years down the road. The best I can tell, Jarrett, unable to play the piano at all in the aftermath of these concerts, could not until fairly recently bring himself to listen to the recordings, which he had made himself on a DAT recorder.

I began with the first CD, the concert at Modena. Immediately it was clear that he had grown quite a lot. The first half, some thirty minutes of continuous music, was a clear descendant of Köln and his other concerts of the 1970’s, but more mature and focused. More classically-oriented, as well, perhaps from all of the Bach and Handel and Mozart he had performed over the intervening years.

But it was the second half, after intermission, that floored me. It begins in a spiky, energetic mode – precisely the sort of thing I sought the other day, taken to a much higher level. Some of the critics probably called it “atonal,” as they do with this style when he plays it; it did not seem so to me in the strict Schoenbergian sense, for it was more pan-diatonic and felt like it related to a key center, but its home was very much in the twentieth/twenty-first century classical music language with only an occasional hint of jazz in the rhythms. Astringent non-triadic lines and sonorities, all at breakneck pace and energy. And he builds it up for fifteen minutes and more. Gradually it becomes a bit more “major-keyish.” And triumphant; it is as if he has fought his way through to something neither he nor the audience could have foreseen. And then it becomes a hymn. There is no other word for it. It ends in peace, on a soft tonic chord repeated several times in the low register.

No wonder he could not go on after something like this! He managed to get himself back on the bench for an encore: a heartfelt and gentle playing of “Danny Boy.”

Even now, writing this the following day, I cannot get over it. I do not think I have heard such ferocious Connection between soul and music anywhere else. I am almost afraid to listen to the Modena CD again, much less the other three. For he went on to Ferrara and somehow found the energy to play again, two days later. He attributes it to the “angels” who were with him.

Yes, it has been done before. I wonder if Liszt’s improvisations were on this order – I think of something like the “Weinen, Klagen” that I played at the organ, ending likewise with a hymn. Or whatever it was that Bruckner improvised in London as a full-length concert at the organ (perhaps along the lines of one of his symphonies), the crowd carrying him from the hall on its shoulders when he finished?

But nobody, including Jarrett himself, is doing this now, not so far as I know. I listened on YouTube to the Carnegie Hall concert, played quite a bit more recently as a solo piano event, but broken into multiple shorter improvisations. It seems to me that the magic is gone.

Perhaps where it can be found for Jarrett now, or so it seems to me, is when he plays with his friends – the album “Jasmine” (2010, recorded in 2007) with his old friend and bassist Charlie Haden, and many concerts and recordings with his trio – the one I have purchased is a live concert “Somewhere” (2013, recorded in 2009). These are all treatments of jazz standards, “American Songbook” pieces, and they are wonderful.

My guess is that among his “angels” were these his musical colleagues. It may have been their support that made it possible for him to figure out how he could once again play the piano. But most of all, it was his wife, who stuck with him through the dark days. He writes in the liner notes:

I swear: the angels were there.
One reason I know this is because, after waiting twenty years to give these concerts a serious listen again, there is no other reason I can give for the unbelievable experience I re-entered. They took theiur places aside of me and urged me, gently, to go on. After these concerts were over, I couldn’t play at all for two years and, without the support of the one angel in my house, I may never have played again.

It saddened me quite a lot to learn from his Wikipedia biography that they divorced in 2010, after thirty years of marriage.

I bought the “Multitude of Angels” album plus "Jasmine" and "Somewhere" in hopes of learning from Jarrett. Perhaps they will bear fruit in that way, though the Modena concert is so far beyond me that it is like the Bach pieces I am playing this weekend. As I have written in these pages, I have in my practicing played little “etudes” in imitation of Vaughan Williams and Howells and others, and have learned much from them. But never Bach.

The other day I said in passing that I wish I could play like Jarrett. I must make that more precise; I do not want to be an imitation Jarrett. The thing that I wish for in playing “like” him is to play with his Connection and intelligence and skill, in whatever manner is appropriate for me given my place and time and background.

On my office door are pictures of two musicians: J. S. Bach for obvious reasons, and Anton Bruckner, seated at a piano – partly for love of his music, partly for the example of his perseverance and for his devout Catholic faith which shines through every phrase. This weekend, I have added a third: Keith Jarrett.

I have added him to my daily prayers as well. It is a little thing, for I cannot do any great thing for him. But he is a spiritual man and would perhaps welcome such energies as might come to him through the prayers of others. I hope so.

[Added later:] Not for the first time, I marvel that it is a pianist who blows me away with the quality of his playing and musicianship, and the intensity of his Connection. Not an organist. For that matter, not a classical pianist.

I do not like most of the organ playing I hear (including my own). I can think of some people from a slightly earlier generation for whom my admiration approached what I have here expressed about Mr. Jarrett - David Craighead for one, and Del Disselhorst, my friend, with his playing of Bach. John Ferguson and Paul Manz with their hymn playing. Not many others.

But no one from my generation. And most of the younger players, the ones whose publicity photos grace the American Organist and who play for the conventions, leave me completely cold.

The answer to that is simple: Be that person. Play with such intensity that you become a fully transparent window into the heavenly places.

Jesu, juva.

Playing the Changes - Part Two

It is better to play one tune for twenty-four hours than twenty-four tunes in an hour. (Bill Evans, quoted by Dave Frank)

Wednesday: the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary to St. Elizabeth
For several years, I worked in my office a couple of mornings a week, eavesdropping on the Beginning Jazz Improvisation class next door in the music room. That is now bearing fruit, for most of the concepts I am learning this week are not entirely new to me.

In those days, I heard a lot of the tune “Summertime, and the livin’ is easy” – every week for a semester, and again the next year, and the year after that. Each fall, the new class was given the assignment of learning the tune and improvising on it. Each week, they would do it in a new key. In the class sessions, they would go around the room, each player/singer taking a four or eight bar phrase as a “solo.”

With that in mind plus my experience that in “learning” a tune, it is not your own until you can play it in other keys, I took the “Wind song” tune into E flat this morning. Sure enough, the initial struggles to control the chord progression returned with added intensity – I found it necessary to explicitly write out the chord progression in the new key – but once I got past that, it opened some doors that I would not have found staying in G major. I think I can work it into my Sunday improvisation; I could start in E flat, and the move to G later on would be refreshing. It was for me, at least.

There was no opportunity for the extended work I gave to it on Tuesday, beyond my usual half-hour at the piano before Matins; it was fifteen minutes here, twenty there. But on the whole, it was a day of considerable progress; I have advanced to sounding like a cliché-ridden pop pianist playing soupy background music.

Thursday: The Feast of Justin Martyr

Lots of Bach today; the two settings of Komm, heiliger Geist from the Leipzig Chorales on Sunday. Keith Jarrett talks somewhere about the difficulty of shifting between the classical and jazz mindsets; he said (I think) that he would never attempt both in the same program. I see his point, certainly, but I suspect he might agree with me that the two mindsets help one another. In my specific case, the perfection and compositional intensity of Bach stands in judgement at my poor improvisatory efforts, a reminder as to how far I have to go.

Mike Garson said in his videos something to this effect: “When I was young, I thought I understood maybe eighty percent of what there is to know about music. Now [he is around 70] I feel like what I understand is more like three percent. And less every year.” Amen to that.

Later in the day, I had a solid session at the piano; ninety minutes or so. I continued work on the “wind song” tune, and started considering more seriously how it might fit into a Sunday improvisation. I played a sample piece with introduction in G major, the tune in E flat, modulating to G, coda.

It is too quiet. Monochromatic. Boring.

I played around with Abbot’s Leigh, which is in the service and could be a contrasting tune. It didn’t seem to fit. Near the end of my session, I felt the need to play Song of the Holy Spirit (“A mighty sound from heaven,” 230 in the Hymnal 1982), which is the opening hymn on Sunday. I know that tune well, having struggled with it for past Whitsundays. It was a considerable relief to play something spiky and loud, so I stayed with it for about twenty minutes, taking the tune through six or eight keys. None of this careful work with a fixed chord progression, not for this. I reveled in alternate harmonies, most of them dissonant, definitely non-triadic.

I am left with a jumble, and no clear sense as to what I will play on Sunday. But now I have some materials at hand. And (if I go with Song of the Holy Spirit as part of what I play) it will not be soupy background music. What it will be remains to be seen.

Playing the Changes - part one

We come to practice with humility. (Steven Pressfield)

This Sunday’s songs include “As the wind-song through the trees,” a marvelous text by Shirley Erena Murray with tune by Swee Hong Lim. It is what amounts to a ballad, complete with written-in chords, one to a bar.

It is perfect for “playing the changes,” a skill I want to learn. Normally I work from the other direction, starting with the tune and seeing what develops from it; in jazz and pop improvisation (blues also), the tune is certainly in mind, but you are working with a fixed chord progression (the “changes” as they call it) – especially if you are in an ensemble, where the other people will be playing the chords and you can’t go wandering off in your own direction. Improvisations tend to start with the changes, and the right hand makes a new melody that fits them. This is done by working within the appropriate scale for the progression. More advanced players add chromatics and all sorts of other things, but the scale remains the foundation.

So, to work. For this, I needed Dave Frank’s beginning lessons, the first of which is here. I watched the first and second lessons over my second breakfast, and took the song upstairs. I set the metronome at 60 to a quarter note and took off.

It was horrible. And that was a good thing.

The musician must never fear making a fool of himself. That is the only way you can learn anything new. But it remains painful to stumble around. My work for the week is not even as complex as what Mr. Frank is doing on his videos; it is a simple song in G major with six chords. Triads, mind you, not even seventh chords (though it is easy enough to add the sevenths to them). No key changes – “Planet G” as Mr. Frank would say, beginning to end.

Play the chords to a steady rhythm in the left hand – for a while at first, this was all I attempted, no right hand at all – then play any notes from the G major scale in the right hand, in eighth notes with some “swing.” Stay with the groove. Make phrases with clear-cut endings and a breath before the next phrase. Two-bar phrases. Four-bar phrases. Nothing fancy.

I did this for about twenty minutes, stopping for staff meeting. Later on I did it for another hour, all on the same tune, the same set of chord changes with the metronome. It got better, a little. After a while I expanded beyond eighth notes to some triplets and syncopations and “straight” eighth notes mixed in, and a bit of countermelody in the inner voices. There were a few stretches where it sounded fairly decent. Then I would lose control of the chords and play something outside of the given progression. Or a chromatic note outside of G major would slip into the right hand. I kept going.

My goal: “play the changes” on this tune on Sunday for the middle service piano improvisation. If I can find one or two hours a day, I might make it to a fairly acceptable standard. Any musician who happens to hear it – such as the professor of jazz from the university, who often attends that service – will find all sorts of mistakes. At best, it will sound like a third-rate cocktail lounge pianist on a bad day. I will certainly feel like a bumbling unmusical idiot when I am finished.

The thing is, I could improvise on this tune in my usual manner with little difficulty; I have done so on past Sundays, several times. It would be better than what I am likely to give the people (and my Lord and Teacher) on Sunday.

But my sense is that I need to give this a try.