Sunday Scorecard

On Friday, I wrote of my hopes for this day:

So what about that descant [Hymn 518, “Westminster Abbey”]? I view it as a possible breakthrough moment for our choir. We have sung descants, but they have not been strong enough to carry over the full congregation and organ. This Sunday, if they do it as they are capable of doing, that may change. I think they can pull it off. And if not this time, maybe the next.

I had not figured on several of our strongest singers being absent. All told, we were short by seven choristers, giving us a choir of fifteen instead of twenty-two. Of the senior girls whom I described as essential to “That Sound,” only Elise and Alice were present. It was not as strong as I had hoped it would be, but it was audible. Here is the sound clip, with the descant on stanza four. One of the descanting voices that you will hear was the Celebrant, Rev'd Raisin. She loves this hymn, and I hope it was meaningful for her to sing it alongside the choristers. You will hear the young people as well.


What about the Liturgy, Rite One with Penitential Order? At the beginning, there was much scrambling about in the BCP for the Decalogue – by congregation as well as choir – but by the seventh or eighth Commandment, they had the page open and said the responses. As I wrote the other day, there is never enough time. I would have liked to have gone over the Decalogue with them and gotten them thoroughly familiar with it and its place in this liturgy. We touched on it at the rehearsal a couple of weeks ago – the one where we had an ice storm and only a handful of them could make it to choir. It needed more teaching, but I was pleased with them for their effort in this, and especially the way that they helped each other. As the service progressed, they did fairly well with the other responses, especially “The Lord be with you/And with thy spirit.” They sat quietly through the sermon, they said the Creed, they participated. There were plenty of rough edges, but I was pleased with their progress. And at the end, they all said the Post-Communion Prayer, just as we had rehearsed.

The Psalm went better than I had expected. It was far from professional, but they got through it. Our primary emphasis had been listening to one another. We did much rehearsing without a conductor to encourage this, repeating verses until they were singing at the same speed – this took many tries, a half-dozen or more at times. In the event, the pacing was good and the words were clear. “This is like talking on a pitch,” one chorister observed at the end of this morning's warmup. It is, indeed.

The Anthem was not so good. It was here that we chiefly missed those senior girls; without them, several of the entrances were shaky. Still, we got through it, and they had the experience of singing it well in several of the rehearsals.

During the Sermon and Prayers, I sat with the treble boys. Looking down the row at the five of them, I thought about what a fine group they are, and how good it is be making music and liturgy with them. At two different times in my past, I have directed boy choirs; I never had a group of trebles as good as these young men. And the girls of this choir are just as good. I want them all, boys and girls alike, to be good singers, but much more, I want them to be good Christians, witnesses of the Resurrection in a dark world. I hope that this day was a small step in that direction.

It was a Good Day.


Here is my improvisation for the contemporary service, in a somewhat different style than what I more often do; it is based on the spiritual “Let us break bread together,” and is essentially (once it gets going, which takes a while) just a single leisurely play-through of the song, repeating the second half of it, with lots of ornamentation around the tune in homage to the way that some of the great old singers of these songs would do.

King of glory, King of peace

King of glory, King of peace,
I will love thee;
and that love may never cease,
I will move thee.
Thou hast granted my request,
thou hast heard me;
thou didst note my working breast,
thou hast spared me.
(George Herbert)

"This is my new favorite hymn," G. told me after rehearsal. She is a second-year chorister, maybe nine years old. She had the hymnal in hand to show it to me. We had sung it a little while before in the rehearsal, along with other hymns and music for this Sunday's liturgy. It is not what the Experts would call "age-appropriate" or "child-friendly." It is by a Dead White Male, and not only that, but he lived a long time ago and wrote in old-fashioned English which, they tell us, Modern People cannot understand. That is why we are supposed to avoid Rite One with its traditional language and use the 1970's Rite Two language or the more recent "Enriching Our Worship" texts, and why we are not supposed to use the Authorized (King James) Version of the scriptures. But nine-year-old G. knows little of these issues; she recognizes that there is Something here in this text and its tune, something that is worth her attention.

Our youth choir is to sing this Sunday for the 11:00 choral liturgy. I am giving the adult choir the day off, so it is all up to the younger group. That means they have to deal with our Lenten Rite One liturgy, complete with the Decalogue and the Penitential Order. We have to sing the Psalm appointed, which is the Nineteenth, all of it, in plainsong, with congregational antiphon. We have an anthem by David Conte, the "Prayer of St. Theresa," to a text sometimes known as St. Theresa's bookmark. And we have a descant with the processional hymn, "Christ is made the sure foundation," to the tune Westminster Abbey.

Long-time readers will know that the annual St. Louis RSCM Summer Course is important to me. One of the things about the Course for which I long through the cold winter months is "That Sound," the unique choral sound made by a group of confident trebles. Every year when we start doing warmups at the first rehearsal, I get choked up at its beauty.

Back home, this year's Youth Choir is young; the oldest chorister is fifteen and he has hardly been at rehearsal, being busy for most of the year with show choir at school. Without him, we have only one non-treble: Max, of whom I am extremely proud. He has proven his ability to sing a tenor line all by himself and hold his own against all these trebles -- he has some "solos" this Sunday in the Conte anthem, tenor lines that are not really solos, but he is the only one singing them. The center of gravity of this year's choir consists of about a half-dozen girls and treble boys between the ages of about ten and twelve. And some of them are becoming first-rate singers.

A key ingredient of "That Sound" at the RSCM course is the leadership of the older girls. Currently, that would be Kyle and Bryn and Olivia and a few others; not so long ago, it included Meara and Jenna, and before that two from our choir (Jennifer and Meredith), and before that Caitlin and Laura and Margo. We are very close to having a few singers of that calibre in our own parish choir -- Lucy and Caleigh and Elise are among this group, and they get a lot of help from other girls a few years younger, and from some excellent treble boys -- Ted, Charlie, Issay, and Evan come to mind. They watch the director in rehearsal, they sing with confidence, intelligence, and leadership. In another year or two, if we don't lose them all to Show Choir, we will have "That Sound" right here at home.

So what about that descant? I view it as a possible breakthrough moment for our choir. We have sung descants, but they have not been strong enough to carry over the full congregation and organ. This Sunday, if they do it as they are capable of doing, that may change. I think they can pull it off. And if not this time, maybe the next.

Wherefore with my utmost art
I will sing thee,
and the cream of all my heart
I will bring thee.
Though my sins against me cried,
thou didst clear me;
and alone, when they replied,
thou didst hear me.

-----------------------------------

The Lord be with you.
And with thy spirit.

As mentioned, this Sunday is Rite One. I have been working with the choristers on the responses, especially that one. Few of these choristers have experience with Rite One, and we have not had sufficient rehearsal time to explore it properly. There is never enough time. But we took the time at this week's rehearsal to read the beautiful post-communion prayer together. I told them that it is one of my all-time favorite prayers of those granted to the People to say, which it is (alongside the Prayer of Humble Access). It will not be enough, but if I can plant the seed that with Rite One, there is Something there, something worthy of their attention that is not present in the "People Magazine" prose of the Rite Two and EOW services, they can seek it out later. If they are very fortunate, they may find a parish where such liturgy is valued. At the least, I hope they can see that I consider this language to be important and beautiful and good.

Seven whole days, not one in seven,
I will praise thee;
in my heart, though not in heaven,
I can raise thee.
Small it is, in this poor sort
to enroll thee;
e'en eternity's too short
to extol thee.

There are times when my work is so enjoyable I can hardly stand it. This Wednesday's rehearsals were that way, the adult choir just as much as the youth choir. And yesterday, I had the privilege of an entire day of Music -- no meetings, no bulletin issues, almost no e-mail (I ignored it until late in the day). After Matins, I did a first workout on this Sunday's postlude, the Bach setting of "These are the holy Ten Commandments" from the Clavierubung, in response to the First Lesson which is the Giving of the Law at Mount Sinai (Exodus 20). After dinner, I went to the Congregational church for three hours of work in preparation for my noontime recital over there [for local friends, that would be Wednesday, March 18, 12:30 pm]. I am playing the Franck B minor Chorale, a marvelous piece which I love -- but cannot play on our little Pilcher. And after that, a quick supper in my office and upstairs for a violin doctoral recital. The artist was Timothy Hsu, resplendent in a red Chinese silk jacket, and the bulk of his program was the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto (with piano accompaniment). I do not like Tchaikovsky. I do not think that this concerto is well-built -- it is to a large degree just a bunch of tunes strung together to provide opportunity for virtuosic display. But boy, was it fun to hear! I sat in the back row with a smile on my face as one Big Tune after another came and went, and as Mr. Hsu played the heck out of the piece. "Virtuosic display," indeed!

It takes a certain panache to play something like this effectively, a panache which I entirely lack. But there are other things that I can do musically. None of us can sing the entire Song; we are granted only a part, a small part, though irreplaceable because only we can sing or play it.

The Post-Communion Prayer, from the Book of Common Prayer:

Almighty and everliving God, we most heartily thank thee for that thou dost feed us, in these holy mysteries, with the spiritual food of the most precious Body and Blood of thy Son our Savior Jesus Christ; and dost assure us thereby of thy favor and goodness towards us; and that we are very members incorporate in the mystical body of thy Son, the blessed company of all faithful people; and are also heirs, through hope, of thy everlasting kingdom. And we humbly beseech thee, O heavenly Father, so to assist us with thy grace, that we may continue in that holy fellowship, and do all such good works as thou hast prepared for us to walk in; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom with thee and the Holy Ghost, be all honor and glory, world without end. Amen.

Am I playing too fast?

One of our parishioners informed me recently that I play the hymns too fast. He followed up our conversation with a letter in which he listed some considerations I should keep in mind to play at the proper tempo. In our parish, he is not alone in his opinion. This is nothing new for me; in a previous church, one of the sopranos often told me (generally with a good dose of contempt for my lack of musicality) that it was obvious that I was not a singer. If I were, I would understand that my tempos were too fast.

I think that my tempos on the hymns are just right. Otherwise I would play them at a different tempo.

More seriously, they raise a question that is important for anyone who accompanies hymns. Are you going to play it safe, do nothing that will offend anyone? A lot of players do this – perhaps they have been beaten up too much over the years by parishioners and clergy. All stanzas on the same generic registration, a nice safe middle-of-the-road tempo on every hymn, no matter what the music or text might suggest. And they probably get fewer complaints than I do.

I do not worry about playing too fast. I worry more about playing too slowly – not on the hymns so much as with the organ repertoire. I seem to play almost everything slower than other people. I am not doing so because I cannot play faster; I play at what in my judgment seems to be the correct tempo.

Here is an example; my postlude at today's choral service. It is the manuals-only setting of the chorale Aus tiefer Not from Bach's Clavierübung. This afternoon, I checked YouTube for other playings of it; a search turns up lots of them. Of the dozen or so that I sampled, mine was by far the slowest. Most of them are on much larger registrations than my single 8' flute – I found only one other that agreed with me on registration; this one, by Jonathan Wessler. It is a fine performance, considerably faster than mine. I had not intended to post my version, knowing that so many others have this repertoire online. But I see that mine is at least unusual, whether it is any good or not.



At the contemporary service today, my improvisation was another attempt at sonata form, using two hymn tunes that would occur in the service. The first was “Deo gratias,” to the text “O love, how deep, how strong, how high,” in the key of E Dorian. For the second theme grouping of the form, I used the Shirly Erena Murray hymn “Touch the earth lightly,” which was a comment on the Old Testament lesson about Noah and the rainbow, and God's covenant with all living things. The tune is by Swee Hong Lim, sweet and gentle and very much in contrast with “Deo gratias,” and I put it in C major to allow the transition that you will hear. I like the uncertainty at first as to what mode it is - it is only after a few measures that one hears clearly that it is in major.

I think that the Exposition of these two tunes worked adequately. There were some good ideas in the Development too, but it was too long for the time available – for these improvisations do not occur in a vacuum; I am to finish precisely at 9:00 a.m. Thus, the Recapitulation was too abrupt. I wanted to give “Touch the earth” (now in the home key of E) two more variations as I did in the Exposition, but there was no time, and that was a musical flaw; the piece would have been more balanced with that extra playing.

I do not know if these efforts of mine are recognizable as sonata forms. Perhaps the idea of using two hymns in this manner does not work with the form. But it seems to push me in an interesting direction, and I hope to keep making the attempt from time to time.

And perhaps the point of tonight's essay is this: we never know with any certainty whether we are on the right musical path. We cannot adequately evaluate our own work. But we must go on the best we can.

Speak the Language (Part Two)

Last week I wrote about harmony, counterpoint, and listening to the Tradition. This week it is time to be more practical.

The manner in which Music Theory is taught is not immediately useful to the improviser. Most of the work is done with pencil and paper. How can the musician transfer this to the instrument?

One place to start: Harmonize a Scale. The book by Marcel Dupré (“Complete Course in Organ Improvisation”) begins here, and this is where I started. In his method, the student works out a solid four-part harmonization of a major scale with good voice leading, and plays it. Slowly. Over and over. Then in different keys. Then, the minor scales. Then with the scale in other voices: bass line (in the left hand, and also in the pedals), alto/tenor. By the time I had spent about a month doing this, it started to become easier. Dupré does not say so, but I would add the Modes (Dorian, Phrygian, etc.).

What made this skill come to life for me was accompanying the choir as they sing scales in warmups. In that setting, I cannot think much about the scale, for I am listening to the choir and thinking about them, so the scale and its harmony become automatic – eventually.

Gerre Hancock's book (“Improvising: How to Master the Art”) likewise begins with scales, but he suggests a less rigid approach – accompany the scale with a second voice, then three voices, then four, in various styles, various tempos, with rhythmic modifications. These are steps that the student must eventually take, even if she begins with Dupré's strict approach.

When you can play a scale and harmonize it, you can also play any stepwise passage. That is the next step: melodies that are mostly stepwise.

In a sense, this is the “top-down” approach. One can also work from the “bottom-up,” and that would be Figured Bass. I wrote of it here and here.

As an entrance into improvisation, Figured Bass provides a harmonic framework and a bass line, and the player must create the rest. There is no better training than this for practical keyboard harmony.

Yet another approach is by way of Counterpoint. For this, I recommend a little book by Jan Bender: “Organ Improvisation for Beginners” (Concordia Publishing House, 1975). He teaches the student to improvise two-part textures based on hymn tunes, then expanding to three-part contrapuntal textures, and finally free (non-hymntune) improvisation. The two-part work is the most useful, and not terribly difficult. Here is a review of the Bender.

Sadly, it appears to be out of print, and if it is on Google Books, I cannot find it. Copies are available on Amazon for outrageous prices ($40 and up, for this slender volume of 71 pages. I see a copy on eBay for over $200!) Don't pay that much, not even $40 – but see if you might be able to read it via interlibrary loan. You could pick up the basic ideas in less than an hour, take careful notes, and work on your own without the book.

I see that the Dupré is expensive too: volume one is in the Organ Historical Society catalogue for $65. For the serious student, that might be worth it, more so than the Bender. The OHS catalogue also has volume two for $79; hold off on that until you have completed volume one. In fact, you can harmonize scales without Dupré; save your money and work at this skill, and when you have mastered it, order a copy of volume one for the rest of his material.



It has been a difficult week, with another funeral. This time, it was a middle-aged father who died after a tortuous nine years of cancer treatments. He was a member of the contemporary congregation, and there was much grief among them. This morning, the day after the funeral, our Youth Choir sang at that service. We had one of the plainsong Propers for the day, the Last Sunday after the Epiphany, and I improvised on it for the prelude. I hope that my little bit of music-making was a beginning toward the healing of grief, and of incipient breaches in our congregational life that have resulted from it. Or I should say “our” music, not just mine, for my work was altogether a preparation for the Youth Choir's singing of the chant, and an attempt to place it in the context of the congregation's sadness and “morning after” emptiness that many felt.

It took one verse from the end of the Gospel as an Antiphon, a line that can easily be overlooked:

Tell no one about the vision that you have had this day, until the Son of Man has risen from the dead.

To this it added two verses from Psalm 97:

The Lord is King; let the earth rejoice: let the multitude of the isles be glad. Clouds and darkness are round about him: righteousness and justice are the foundations of his throne.

In rehearsals, we discussed this, concluding that the disciples were to be silent because people would not understand the Transfiguration without the Cross and Resurrection.

Nor can we understand the suffering and death of a person in the prime of life, and the grief of his family. Not without the Cross. And not without the Resurrection.

Here is the improvisation.

Speak the Language

The first stage of improvisation is to Know the Tune.

The second stage: Speak the Language.

A writer must know how the language expresses ideas. That involves such disciplines as spelling, grammar, composition of ideas into sentences and paragraphs. My impression is that modern education discounts such old-fashioned concepts, but the fact remains that deficiencies in these areas interfere with the readers' comprehension of the author's intent.

Beyond these foundational skills, a writer must read. She must read all the time, deeply and widely, immersing herself in the language and the art of storytelling, or poetry, or nonfiction writing, or (better) all of them. She reads and listens until what Tolkien called the Cauldron of Story is part of her soul.

It is the same for a musician. Here is where the academic coursework which is part of any music degree finds its application: harmony, counterpoint, musical analysis, music history. Beyond these things, every bit of music that the musician encounters goes into what one might call the “Cauldron of Song,” the great Tradition of which we all partake.

This is a good image in more ways than one. Both “cauldrons” exist more in oral transmission than in what our ancestors often called “book learning.” The books, if they are good, attempt to codify the untidy soup of words and archetypes and deeds – and tunes and rhythms and harmonies – that underlie the crafts of Story and Song. But it is the actual work – the stories, the novels, the poems and epics and fairy tales, the songs, the anthems, the jigs and reels, the ballads, the symphonic works, the hymn tunes, the sonatas – that are the genuine Language that we must know.

The musician (and the author) do not have to go to school to learn these things, not if they pay attention – “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” as the marvelous old Collect says. There are countless folk and roots musicians who have never come near a School of Music, and make better songs than people like me with my diplomas hanging on the wall. But many of us would not find our way through the thicket without some book learning, and even the folk musicians who have not been to a formal school almost always have had what amounts to an apprenticeship, listening to the old ballad singers, or sitting around the edges of bluegrass bands and occasionally getting a chance to play along, and then getting advice from the old-timers as to how it is done. That is what the books are doing, if they are worth studying. I think of old Fux and his Gradus ad Parnassum, or C.P.E. Bach and his “Essay on the True Art of Playing the Clavier” as two examples of such work. Or crusty old Schoenberg and his “Fundamentals of Musical Composition.” Or Hindemith and his “Elementary Training for the Musician,” a book that is so difficult that no one I know (and certainly not me) has gotten more than about a quarter of the way through.

Speaking the Language is often the barrier that keeps people from making their own music. Someone who has not had much formal training wishes they “knew the chords,” as it is sometimes expressed. But those who have a lot of formal education are equally paralyzed. “What if I play a parallel fifth? What if I don't resolve a dissonance, or use proper voice leading?” As soon as one starts thinking too much about such matters, it becomes impossible to play anything unless it is in black and white on the page: Real Music, written by a Composer.

To such people, of which I was one: Don't worry about it. Just play.

Yes, the proper voice leading helps. It is a tool that can make your music better, and the more skill you have with harmony and voice leading and counterpoint, the better. But at the moment of improvisation, you cannot be thinking about such things. Just play. The thinking comes in retrospect, when you realize why a passage did not come off the way you had hoped. It may lead you (as it does me) to practice progressions and cadences and suchlike that have caused trouble. And that will help you play better the next time.

When I am improvising, I am mostly keeping track of the Tune. A second level of thought is the Form, which I have often scratched out on a piece of paper, and it is usually a thought such as “Okay, I've got to get to G major from here.” A third level of thought is trying to keep the outer lines in contrary motion, and the most basic harmony – which for me is just trying to stay diatonic in whatever key I am in. Or if I am in a more chromatic language, maintaining that level of chromaticism. And while all this is happening, I simply try to go where the notes want to take me, for every musical statement, even just two or three notes, carries within itself implications that must be worked out.

It is very much like an author in the midst of a story: the characters and events that have brought him to this point have a certain inevitability that causes the story to continue in one direction and not another. At its most fundamental, it can be as little as one line...

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

That first sentence started Tolkien down a long path.

“Remember what Bilbo used to say: It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

-----
My music for this week is the prelude improvisation for the middle service . It begins with a song that was unfamiliar and needed some preparation (though only a handful of people were there early enough to hear it): the tune “Tucker” by David Ashley White, to the Fred Pratt Green text “From miles around the sick ones came,” a text that fits today's Gospel. I began by simply playing a verse of the tune straight from the hymnal, and expanded somewhat from there. The music continues with a well-known Scottish tune “Ye banks and braes,” for which John Bell wrote the text “We cannot measure how you heal.”

The artwork on the YouTube clip, a seventeenth century Ukranian fresco, is not about today's Gospel; it is, instead, about the time when the woman with an issue of blood touched the hem of his garment. And that was enough; she did not need him to go out of his way or take the time to lay hands on her. Perhaps her thoughts were like those of the centurion who said “Lord, I am not worthy that you should come under my roof.” But Jesus would not leave it there; he stopped what he was doing (which was important: he was on his way to the house of Jairus, where a girl lay dead) so that he could tell the woman that it was her faith that had made her whole.

Snow Day

It snowed here Saturday night and all day Sunday, about a foot of it. As I often do when the weather is questionable for Sunday morning, I spent Saturday night in my office. That let me get sufficient practice for the morning's organ and piano music on Saturday, extending into the evening, then a good night's sleep, and a fine early start on Sunday.

Had I attempted to drive in on Sunday morning, I probably would not have made it. Only three of our choristers arrived: Bob, Perry, and Natasia. We cancelled our anthem and sang a congregational hymn, but Perry and Natasia sang a descant on the opening hymn and the four of us sang the Psalm.

We had put a lot of preparation into this month's Choral Evensong, being the Eve of Candlemas. It was not to be: given the forecast, we cancelled. Instead, I spent the afternoon and evening working on next Sunday's music: the Bach A minor Prelude and Fugue. We shall see if I have sufficient time this week to pull it off.


This week's musical example is in two parts: First, Psalm 111 in plainsong with congregational antiphon. This is our standard form of psalmody for the Choral Eucharist; we sing Anglican Chant at Evensong. I am pleased with how this turned out today, even with our small group.

I have also included the Hymn that we sang before the Gospel: “Silence!
Frenzied, unclean spirit.” This is a very prickly hymn, and I believe that it has almost disappeared from view. But I would be hard-pressed to find anything better to accompany this day's pericope: St. Mark 1:21-28, wherein our Lord casts out a demon.

The text is under copyright so I cannot print it, but you can find it here with commentary by its author, Thomas Troeger. Thirty years ago, he and Carol Doran taught at the Episcopal seminary in Rochester, NY (an institution that has since closed). They collaborated on two slim volumes of hymns, with Doran writing tunes as unique as Troeger's texts. This one is not my favorite (that would be “Make your prayer and music one,” which is about Paul and Silas singing hymns in the Philippian jail), but it is indicative of the fine work that Doran and Troeger did. Notice how the tune hammers away at one note with lots of dissonance, reflective of the mental anguish of the person possessed by the demon.

I commend their hymns to you; search them out, and sing them.

No turning back

For Samuel, one could say that it began that night at Shiloh, when he heard the Voice calling him by name. One could also say that it began years earlier when his mother Hannah brought him there, a little toddler of a boy. “I have lent him to the Lord,” she said. Or one could say that it began in the mind of God before the foundation of the worlds, when he predestined Samuel to be among his children (see Ephesians 1:3-5).

The point is that God has been calling us, and preparing us for the call, for much longer than we have known of it. But for all of us, there comes a time when we hear the Voice, in one way or another. And we are free to walk away from it. Most of us do, at first.

But he is patient.


For me, I first heard the call at age twelve. Keith, who was a neighbor and my friend, invited me to the Vacation Bible School at his church. That week they talked about some of the parables. I was blown away; I had never heard any of these stories, and they were like nothing else I had encountered. A half-century later, that is still true.

In today's Eucharistic lessons, we heard about Samuel, and about some of the disciples. For most of them – for pretty much all of us now – someone told them about Jesus, and said “Come and see.”

Who is waiting for you to say “Come and see?”

We sang the little song “I have decided to follow Jesus” at the contemporary service this morning, and I improvised on it. The song is usually done in a cheerful up-tempo manner: I don't see it that way, and I certainly didn't this morning. Part of it, probably, was my concern for one of our young choristers, who has been very ill this week and is not altogether out of the woods. But that is just a reminder that following Jesus is not an escape from troubles. It takes you deeper into troubles, because you begin to share some of the way that He sees people, and loves them.

But, as the song says, “No turning back.”

George Fox

For several years in the late '90's, my wife and I worshipped on Sunday afternoons with the Society of Friends, after I had played services at the Presbyterian church in the morning. It was the only period in our thirty-plus years of marriage that we have been able to attend church together, and it was good to be there with her, to share the long silences, the listening.

George Fox, who died yesterday (13 January) in the year 1691, is unlikely to appear on any Anglican calendar of saints. I suspect he would be displeased with the very idea. But I commemorate him, and revere his memory. In a tumultuous age, he preached nonviolence. In an aristocratic society, he considered all to be equal before God, women and children as well as men. He called both Anglicans and Dissenters to account, and neither group would attend to his message.

Fox, and the Society of Friends which came into being around him, are, I think, an important corrective to the Anglican Way. Our clergy (and sometimes church musicians) too easily become enamored of our Perogatives, our fat pensions and comfortable salaries and medical insurance and fine pipe organs and lovely old buildings and clerical finery and all the rest. I cannot think of many Episcopal clergypersons who live a life of humble simplicity, and if they did, I suspect they would have a hard time finding a parish that would hire them. The musicians are no better – we love our AAM and AGO conferences where we stay in the finest hotels and eat at the finest restaurants. George Fox reminds us that this is not the path that Christ walked.

Worse still, we too easily become enamored of our Liturgy and our Music. We come to believe that they give us a direct line to God. Fox reminds us that the whole business – Prayerbook, Liturgy, church buildings, pipe organs, choirs, clergy, even the Holy Sacraments – is superfluous in comparison to the Inner Light, the simple following after God, the love for one's neighbor.


I believe that the Friends are not without their problems. In my experience, by throwing out Sacraments and Liturgy, they have also gradually lost connection with Scripture and (I would say) any recognizable belief in Christ. The Friends I was around are in belief essentially Unitarians, and most of them have not opened a Bible in decades, if ever. I would submit that without grounding in Scripture and a conversion experience in Christ (which Fox himself considered essential), it all becomes like chaff, blown about by the winds.

But there is nothing like a burial service among Friends. Or a wedding. And by comparison, Episcopalians know nothing about Silence, or waiting for Clearness. And there remains the steadfast nonviolence of the Friends, even at great personal cost.

Perhaps we need each other, we Anglicans and the Friends.

Rest in peace

We had another funeral yesterday: my friend Grace F., who died suddenly on Wednesday evening. She was an Organist and a member of our parish.

It was a scramble to prepare some music for a Saturday funeral. Here is some of the organ music. Without explanation, it would seem a bit strange.

First, there is the Bach Prelude in E flat that begins the Third Part of the Clavierübung. I often play the accompanying Fugue, often known as the “St. Anne” Fugue because of the accidental resemblance of the first theme to the head motive of the hymn tune; I played it recently, at the funeral on December 22. But the Prelude is another matter. It was a special favorite of Grace's. I had last played it on Trinity Sunday; it had a solid fingering in place, and I figured it was worth taking a chance on getting it ready in two days.

In the liturgy, this was the prelude. As I played, Nora came and told me that we would be five minutes late while guests were continuing to arrive, so I had time to add the chorale prelude “Vor deinen Thron,” which I played under similar circumstances on Dec. 22.

After that in the recording: the tolling of the church bell. I left it in with the ensuing silence as a remembrance of Grace.

The recording then skips ahead to the postlude, the aforementioned Fugue. Unless there is reason to play something else (such as a request from the family), I play this as the postlude for funerals.

The idea is not by any means original. Many years ago, I was with a group from my congregation at the Presbyterian worship and music conference at Montreat, NC. It is a grand event with about one thousand musicians of all ages, with a few liturgically-inclined clergy. That year, a young woman in the high school choir suddenly fell down dead, right in the middle of a choral rehearsal. It was quite a shock to the entire conference, especially her fellow high school choristers. I have to this day most profound respect for the high school director that year, Mr. John Yarrington, for the way he spoke to the two-hundred or so young people when they next gathered, that afternoon.

It was decided that we would have a memorial service for the young lady right there at the conference. The girl's family had arrived by then, I think from Florida. We sang many hymns. All of the choirs sang: children, junior high, high school, adults, handbell choirs. Scriptures were read. We even had Holy Communion, which in a Presbyterian gathering would not be as expected as it would be among Episcopalians.

The organist that year was Mr. Gerre Hancock. At communion, after the high school choir sang their anthem (and the rest of us wept), he improvised in his masterful way, and all of a sudden, I realized that he had worked his way around to the beginning of the St. Anne Fugue. It was the most perfect musical statement for that moment that could possibly have been offered, binding all that we had done and experienced into the glory of God.

I still remember that young person, taken from her family and friends all too soon. May she rest in peace. May Grace rest in peace, and all of my other friends, a list that continues to grow.

One of the blessings of growing older is that as time passes, more of your friends and family are on the Other Shore. Eventually, as with my 95-year-old mother, pretty much all of them are gone and you alone are left. That makes it easier to say good-bye to this life when the time comes; it becomes increasingly clear that you are going home, never more to part.

The Day After the Epiphany

The Magi have “departed into their own country another way” (St. Matthew 2:12). The shepherds have returned to their work, “glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen” (St. Luke 2:20).

What of us?

Last night, we heard the magnificent Lessons from the Eucharist for the Epiphany, one of the Seven Principal Feasts of the Church. The Rector climbed a ladder and blessed the door of the church with a chalk inscription. She later announced the Date of Easter and its related Holy Festivals and Fasts. The ladies washed the dishes from dinner. Everyone went home; I locked the church, turned out the lights.

What next? How do we go on from here?

I spent part of this day helping my fellow-laborers in Christ (John and Nora) take down the Christmas decorations in the church. This used to be a community project by the parish; it has now fallen to the staff, and I did not want it to fall solely upon John, our Sexton. We took down the wreaths, removed the bows and packed them away, threw out the greenery, removed the fake electric candles from the windows, boxed up the figures from the Nativity creche (including the Angel, who got lost in the next room and never made it to the Stable).

It was Holy Work, and not just from helping my friends (instead of doing the work proper to my profession). It was a Transition, a Fresh Start. When I mentioned this to Nora, she said that many people have sensed these days as such a transition, a “de-toxification” from the rigors of Advent and Christmas. That makes sense to me: I have hardly accomplished anything since my essay last week, despite having the Gift of several days when I should have made some progress.

Much work lies ahead. From here, the path runs straight ahead to the River Jordan, and from there deep into the Desert, where Satan awaits, but where also the Angels minister to us (St. Mark 1:13).

This day is like standing at the starting line. I am not ready, but I need only follow my Captain, one step at a time, and go where He has led.

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It is late for Christmas music, but here is my improvisation from Sunday, on "What child is this" and "O come, all ye faithful."

The music of Advent and Christmas can be a way that we, like St. Mary, ponder these things in our hearts. She never forgot those eventful days and months, nor should we.