Concert tuning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How I practice: an addendum

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

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

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

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

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

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

A good idea, and a life in church music

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

He was right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It makes you a better sight-reader.

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

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

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

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

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

It has been a good run.

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

Tulsi Gabbard

In 2015-16, I supported Bernie Sanders. With millions of others, I watched as Mrs. Clinton stole the Democratic nomination from him, using the supposedly impartial Democratic National Committee as an arm of her campaign. “Democracy is messy,” I think Bernie said at the Democratic convention.

And I watched as Donald Trump became President of the United States.

Senator Sanders is running again, this time with a strong network of supporters and volunteers. They had an organizing day last Saturday, April 27, with three gatherings at homes in our county and thousands of similar gatherings across the country. I continue to respect Bernie, but this time, I am supporting a different candidate.

Tulsi Gabbard is a congresswoman from Hawaii. She came to my attention in 2016 when she endorsed Bernie, one of the few members of Congress to do so, and gave the nomination speech for Sanders at the Democratic National Convention.

She and Sanders are in agreement on most issues, with solidly progressive ideals. Bernie tends to emphasize domestic needs such as Medicare-for-all; Tulsi speaks constantly about stopping the stream of “regime-change” wars such as Iraq and Syria and Yemen and now Venezuela that are bleeding this country dry.

She is a long-shot among some twenty Democratic contenders. Like Bernie, she is loathed by the establishment. Unlike Bernie, she is going to have a hard time being heard, and she is not going to have the Big Money that some of the “safe” candidates will have to push their views in the media.

I commend to you this six-minute video, wherein an Afghan-American woman speaks her heart about the war that has destroyed her homeland and Tulsi responds. I think it gives a good sense of who she is, why she is running for president, and why it is going to be so difficult. Yes, she is a long shot. So was Bernie when he started, and he would have won on a level playing field. So was an obscure first-term senator from Illinois in 2007-08, some guy named Obama.

And that is what gives me a glimmer of hope. I think that Tulsi could come from nowhere in Iowa, as Obama did. But in 2007, it looked to me like Obama had a lot of money behind him. Tulsi is not going to have anything like that. If she is to win, it is going to have to be from the support of ordinary people. Like me.

And I am not going to be able to do much. I am barely able to hang on with my bounden duties as organist/choirmaster and husband. I have made financial contributions to both of them, Bernie and Tulsi, and will stand up for Tulsi on caucus night in February. And pray for both of them, and for this country.

The organ at Notre Dame: an update

This is worth a new posting, so that more people will see it:
From the online journal "Vox Humana":
After the fire: Here's what we know about the Organs at Notre Dame de Paris

From Philippe Lefebvre:

“After the stupor and the dread, the unbearable sadness, and the devastating images of this tragedy: the Great Lady has valiantly withstood the worst — Notre Dame is still standing. Thank you for your well wishes, your testimonies of friendship, and solidarity.

“It is confirmed that, for the moment, the Grand Organ has escaped disaster. No melted pipes, but a lot of dust, particles, soot, etc. Water, of course, but no flooding.

“It will require more in-depth expertise to measure the extent of the damage. The Choir Organ has been doused in water and it is undoubtedly more damaged than the Grand Organ.

Thanks be to God.

Notre Dame: 15 April 2019

There are no words.

This building, where all roads in France converge.... It survived the French Revolution, centuries of wars and tumults, including two world wars and Nazi occupation in the last century. And now much of it is gone.

In the larger grief over what has been lost, I grieve for Olivier Latry, organist of Notre Dame, who has lost the instrument and place that he loves.

I commend to you two videos: the first is a short excerpt which has been noted by many, wherein Kenneth Clark begins his work "Civilisation"

"What is civilisation? I don't know. I can't define it in abstract terms - yet. But I think I can recognize it when I see it." He turned toward the cathedral, Notre Dame: "And I am looking at it now."

The second video is long, almost an hour. Among other things, it includes a lovingly detailed tour of the insides of the instrument, in its present form built by Cavaille-Coll and much modified, including a major restoration finished in 2012.

"In the belly of the organ of Notre Dame" (French, with subtitles).

If nothing else, watch the first moments, wherein Mr. Latry climbs the stairs, turns on the blower, seats himself at the console in the darkened church, and begins the Carillon de Westminster (by Louis Vierne, former organist of Notre Dame), and the lights of the church come on.

And now it is gone, or at the least extensively damaged.

When I wrote this earlier today (April 16), initial reports had been that the three rose windows were destroyed; now we know that they survived. Likewise, initial report was that the organ was destroyed; at this writing, they are saying its status is not yet known.

Another, more encouraging update on the organ, important enough that I made a new posting so that more people would see it:

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From the conservative columnist and blogger Rod Dreher: I think that his thoughts on the survival of the rose windows apply as well to the survival of at least major portions of the organ.
Hope in the ruins

So: I see the image above [in the linked essay] — of the light shining through the rose window, onto the ashes of Notre Dame cathedral — and I see a Sign. Beauty, order, and harmony were not consumed by the fire. The light that streams into the cathedral through the rose windows passes through colors arranged in such a way as to illustrate scenes from humanity’s mortal life. The rose window tells us that God — who, to the medievals, is Light — manifests Himself by passing through the stains of our mortality. He is everywhere present, He fills all things. Even when we sin — as some of the smaller in the west portal rose window depict — God is present, illuminating the sacredness of life, drawing even our frailty and brokenness into harmonious lines bursting with color, and life, and meaning.

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To hear all of the Vierne piece, it is here.
There is a YouTube channel for the instrument and its music: The Great Organ

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.

Tail wagging the dog? Of improvisations and codas

Here is this morning’s piano improvisation, based on two tunes that were to be sung later in the service: Nun komm der Heiden Heiland, and Bereden vag for Herran.

Key of A. I went into it with a vague notion of aiming for rondo form.

It begins with Nun komm, pretty much straight up and then with variations to the 2’43 mark. Then Bereden vag in the dominant (E major), likewise with variations.

At 4’03”, Nun komm returns, in combination with bits of Bereden vag. At this point, I started thinking “Sonata form, maybe?” and allowed it to become a Development section rather than the full-fledged return of Nun komm that would have been more characteristic of a rondo form. This goes on for about two minutes, until it slips into a Recapitulation at 6’02” with Nun komm in the tonic (I was pleased with how this transition turned out). At 6’40”, Bereden vag returns, likewise in the tonic (as it must be if it is to be sonata form).

7’58”: Coda. Time to wrap things up, or it should be in terms of the music. Still a lot of time on the clock.
8’50”: Musically, it should have stopped somewhere around here, but I still have over two minutes to cover. So, a “second coda.” At 9’44” it takes off in a different direction, and by about 10 minutes, I am thinking “big ending” and work in this direction with the last phrase of Bereden vag to the 10’50” mark.

But it wants to be soft, after all, so the texture settles down down to the 11’08” mark, and a “third coda.” Out of balance to have four minutes of coda(s)? Tail [Italian = “Coda”] wagging the dog? Possibly. But I think it ended up making the piece as a whole more interesting. And it was functional music; I am expected to end the prelude precisely at 9:00 am. Not 8:58 or 8:59, not 9:01 or 9:02. I do my best each Sunday to fulfill this functional need while creating a little composition that has a semblance of form to hold it together.

My preparation this week was simply "knowing the tunes" - playing around with them as I described here. I used to go to considerable pains to lay out a structural plan of key centers and thematic material. I rarely do that nowadays. Usually I have a vague notion (as I did today), which may or may not be how it turns out. Most of the time I will have formal ideas in mid-stream (again, as I did today). Sometimes it is no more than a feeling, an urge: “Time for the other tune,” or “It needs to go to the dominant” and it is only in retrospect, listening to the recording, that I can discern a structure.

One other thought: More and more, when I am working with a multisectional form such as sonata or rondo or what I call "overture form" (stringing several tunes together, one after another), I tend to make each of the sections out of variations on a tune rather than just the tune itself. The larger sections are then delineated by change of key center and tune-with-variations.

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)