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.

Paying my Dues, Making Mistakes

I have worked through the Mike Garson video masterclass, as I described here. At this distance, the most valuable lesson he taught me was how to practice improvisation, working from two directions: short etudes, as little as fifteen or thirty seconds, and extended “playing around” with a tune, an idea he learned from Thelonious Monk. That, and Garson’s attitude toward music as a gift from a higher power, and the responsibility that entails: gratitude, humility, helping and healing others with our music.

Recently, I found another “teacher” – Dave Frank, whose “school of jazz” is here. He has a series of free “masterclass” videos; I have watched two so far. They are enjoyable, and I got some ideas from both of them.

One of them was on the playing of Keith Jarrett, whom Frank calls “the greatest pianist of the recorded era.” As he explains, we cannot compare Jarrett’s improvisations with Bach’s, or Beethoven’s, or Chopin’s, for they made no recordings. But he is the best that we have had since it became possible to make recordings, in any genre – jazz, classical, whatever.

I am not prepared to agree with that, though Frank presents a convincing argument. But Jarrett is definitely one of the best. In some respects, his LP “Köln Concert” (the highest-selling solo piano recording of all time, over 2 million copies) planted the seed for what I attempt in my little piano improvisations. [Here is a YouTube version, one of many: this one includes a transcription of the first twenty-five minutes – the first side of the two LPs]

Jarrett’s improvisations were on the grandest of scale, and these concerts established his fame beyond the narrow circles of jazz enthusiasts. I purchased the album in the 1970’s when it first came out, and I pretty much wore it out. I still have it. I had never heard anything like it; Mike Garson’s “Now” music comes closest, and perhaps closer to what I do, for Jarrett explicitly quotes no pre-existing tunes and I do, always, for my work can exist only in the context of the Divine Liturgy and its music.

Yes, I would love to play like Keith Jarrett. Or like Mike Garson. So would a lot of other pianists. But there is a problem; I haven’t paid my dues. In this documentary, Jarrett said that the place where he learned most of his jazz tunes was the club in the Poconos where he played in his early teens. No one was listening, so he would learn tune after tune. Garson played a lot of club gigs, too, with few listeners and minimal pay, before he connected with David Bowie.

I haven’t done that. I do not know the jazz standards or the styles – which would take years of careful listening and imitation – and I will never be able to play in that manner.

But, as I considered these things, I realized that yes, I have paid some dues. This morning, the parish presented me with a certificate because I had mentioned to a friend that this is my fortieth year of working with choirs. More to the point, the youth choir sang me a song with lyrics they had written for the occasion.

Forty years. That is somewhere above two thousand Sundays. Plus weddings, funerals, revival meetings, Holy Weeks, Christmas Eves. And the practicing that goes with it.

That counts as “dues.” They are simply in a different school than the jazz club or the rock-and-roll band. I don’t know the jazz standards or the pop tunes, but I have learned a few hymn tunes along the way. I have not played in combos, which is where jazz skills are really developed (so far as I can tell), but I have been a part of a great many choral rehearsals, and I have collaborated with first-rate musicians and learned much from them, most recently Jean Littlejohn.

My Sunday morning piano improvisations are a continuing school, and the daily preparations for them the “homework.” I am grateful for my teachers, very glad to learn from these my fellow musicians, near and far.

Here is where I am on the journey:

All things bright and beautiful: Rogation Sunday 2017 (this morning).

I have put this on Soundcloud as an experiment. There are advantages – it is strictly audio, which saves me the most troublesome part of preparing a YouTube clip, which is locating pictures. I can post under a Creative Commons License. And you can download it, listen to it offline, put it on a CD, whatever you want to do with it. [Edited to add: I changed my profile name over there to "T. Andrew Hicks," because a Soundcloud search turns up a long list of other "Andrew Hickses", most of whom appear to be much younger than I, and who have a wide variety of musical interests.]

There will surely be disadvantages: I am limited to three hours of music without upgrading to a paid account. I note that as soon as I finished playing my track, it jumped immediately to another, by a pop musician named Travis Scott who appears to be “trending,” as they like to say. His work has no relation whatsoever to mine and I found the transition rather jarring. Clearly, Soundcloud would rather you listen to him than to me.

So it goes. As I read this week, “If you aren’t paying anything, you are not the customer. You are the product.”

In any event, my tentative plan is to put a few piano improvisations on Soundcloud, and leave other sorts of music (choral, organ) on YouTube. I want to be absolutely certain that no one can claim copyright on my Soundcloud material – as YouTube regularly does on any organ music I post, especially (for some reason) my playing of Bach. That lets someone else make money from ads. I do not like this.

Toward the end of today’s work on “All things,” I had a bit of extra “instruction” in the School of Improvisation. While moving my left hand up the piano, I accidentally struck an F natural (you can hear it at the 11’30” mark). In the key of D major.

Keith Jarrett said in the documentary that this is one of the hardest aspects of solo improvisations: whatever notes or ideas you play, you have to respond to them. I think the fear of such moments is what keeps many people from learning to improvise.

Well, you just go ahead and respond. I was limited by time, for I had to finish up within another minute or so, but I think I brought it around well enough. In retrospect, an analyst could say that it echoes the section earlier in the piece where I was in D minor. I can only say that I absolutely had no intention of doing that. And I can say that it made the ending more interesting – and better – than what I had intended. It does not always turn out that way – last week’s improvisation had some good music in places, but the bitonal direction the improvisation took in the middle was too jarring, and on the whole it proved to be not so good.

How do you learn to deal with such things? It comes in the practice sessions, when you are playing the tune for a half hour or longer at a time.

I had much trouble controlling this tune, so I was diligent this week, and made lots of “mistakes” along the way – and thus practiced working my way out of them.

I can well imagine young Keith Jarrett in that Poconos club making “mistakes” on new tunes as he learned them and working through them – in public – even though most of the public was paying no attention. That developed the skill and courage it took for him to walk onstage at places like Carnegie Hall, or the Royal Albert Hall, or La Scala with no preconception as to what he would do. Just him and the piano; sit down and play. For thirty or forty minutes, or an hour. An intermission, and a second improvisation. With a capacity audience, most of them enthusiasts who paid a lot for tickets, perhaps travelled far, expecting something miraculous like the Köln Concert. And the critics, who were often unkind to him.

I write in the past tense, for I learned that Jarrett no longer does extended concert improvisations of this sort. He had a physical/nervous breakdown in the late 1990’s, diagnosed as “chronic fatigue syndrome,” because these things were so hard on him. He took two years off entirely, and returned to the stage doing shorter-form pieces, jazz standards, etc.

Jarrett paid his classical dues as well, with a strong background in that area as a child prodigy, studying with Eleanor Sokoloff and others at the Curtis Institute before he got into jazz. He performed as a classical pianist for nearly thirty years alongside his other music-making.

I think I would like him. He is reclusive, living in an old farmhouse in New Jersey, the barn converted to a music studio. His life away from the piano is disciplined, simple, because he is all about the music. As I wish to be. What he would think of me is another matter; by most accounts he is notoriously prickly, and in general has a low opinion of classical musicians, probably lower still of church musicians, if he thinks of us at all.

It might be that we could find a point of contact in Bach. He has recorded the Goldberg Variations; I have performed them at least. He has likewise recorded both volumes of the Well-Tempered Clavier, plus the French and English Suites and other music. I have played quite a bit of the organ music, some of it this morning at the third service and more to come over the next two Sundays. He wrote in a liner note that "Bach is about ideas, not grand flourishes." I agree.

There are worse places to find common ground.

A day with Howells

Make that three days. And more to come.

Sunday, May 14
The choir is to sing the Howells anthem “Let God arise.” (Here is a performance by the choir of Chichester Cathedral)
A setting of verses from Psalm 68, it fits the Sunday after the Ascension in Year A, which is May 28. We have been rehearsing it for several weeks now (with a degree of grumbling from the choir over its difficulty, and the prospect of attempting it on Memorial Day weekend), but I have not properly worked out the accompaniment. Now is the time: three hours this evening, sufficient to do the fingering for about two-thirds of it.

I know the sacred choral music of Howells fairly well, but had not encountered this anthem. It was in the pile of choral octavos left by my predecessor when he retired in 2000. Over the years, I have nibbled the disordered collection of single copies, mostly gathered by him at workshops and AAM conventions, from five filing boxes to one stack of less than two feet. One reason I have not simply recycled it all is that I occasionally find something like this: an anthem by Howells that is new to me. Reading through it a few months ago, I thought of the Sunday at the end of May, penciled it in, and ordered the copies.

It replaces a composition of my own, a setting of the enormous Genevan Psalter tune for Psalm 68, in my opinion perhaps the most magnificent of that Psalter and a favorite of the early Calvinists with its warlike ferocity. It is the one thing I have written that got a bit of play; through a chain of circumstances, it was performed at the inauguration of the president of the New Brunswick Theological Seminary, a place where the Genevan Psalter remained important, at least on that day many years ago. But the Howells is far better than anything I could write.

Howells, writing during the early days of the Second World War, knew about warlike ferocity all too well. He captures the antidote in the middle section of the anthem:

He is a Father of the fatherless, and defendeth the cause of the widows, even God in his holy habitation. He is the God that maketh men to be of one mind in an house; and bringeth the prisoners out of captivity.

Tuesday, May 16
A day mostly filled with meetings. I find ninety minutes to finish the fingering, my only music-related work of the day beyond a bit of improvisation at the piano.

Wednesday, May 17
My reaction to a first exposure to the music of Herbert Howells was akin to his reaction to the music of Vaughan Williams. It was not until graduate school – his name was not mentioned at all in my undergraduate music history courses, nor theory and composition. Nor, for that matter, was Vaughan Williams; it was as if British music ceased to exist after Purcell and Handel. But at the Choir College, I was able to hear the Choir of Men, Boys, and Girls at Trinity Church, Princeton – and they sang “Like as the hart.” I could not sleep that night, not after such music.

“What is this?” I thought. “How have I missed out on this, all these years?” It was as if it were from another world, a place of beauty and longing and aching remembrance of ages past.

I have since played some of his organ music – quite a bit of it, actually – and have been able to teach and direct a few of his anthems and service settings. For a while, I was a member of the Herbert Howells Society, my only foray into a professional society focused on the music of one composer. I was part of a rather short list of American members, most of them leaders in the musical world – people like Gerre Hancock and Bruce Neswick, with whom I did not properly belong. But I shared with them a love for this man’s musical voice.

And now, a fine large anthem to learn and teach. I spend two hours at the organ, working out registrations; it is ready for tonight’s rehearsal.

But it is not the only Howells of the day, for today we begin rehearsal on the Collegium Regale Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis for the RSCM Course. I had worried much over this, in combination with Britten’s “Rejoice in the Lamb” – will the two pieces (along with the rest of the list, including some shorter pieces that will be challenging) be too much for the Course? And with the large group we are bringing from our parish comes large responsibility – will these choristers, my own choristers whom I love and have sought to train, will they be up to the challenge? I spend another hour or so studying the score over midday dinner, learning it in order to teach it.

At the afternoon rehearsal, we begin with the Gloria. They sing through it with ease. We work through the rest of the Magnificat, backwards to the front, finishing with a straight sing-through. It is glorious.

It brought back another memory of the choir at Trinity Church, Princeton. One sunny January afternoon, I observed a Girls’ Choir rehearsal as they sight-read part of the Mozart Requiem. I so wanted to someday work with a choir like that.

Well, I do.

Today’s work, these dozen or so choristers standing around the piano and singing Howells, was the equal to what I remembered from that January day.

Soli Deo Gloria.

Afterword
We did not rehearse "Let God arise" with the organ after all; a severe thunderstorm kept the youth choir and others downstairs for a long while, a half-hour into the time scheduled for the adult rehearsal, and kept most of the adult choir away. We contented ourselves with work at the piano.

That leaves one rehearsal; next Wednesday. I am no longer worried about the Collegium Regale; now I am worried about "Let God arise." We shall see what happens.

C. H. Lloyd (1849-1919)

Here are the second and third movements of Lloyd’s Sonata in D minor, played at choral evensong this past Sunday, May 7. The finale has some problems (including mistakes I made initially, and again when the passage repeated!), but I have posted it because Lloyd appears to have a very limited presence on YouTube.

He does, however, have a good biography at Wikipedia, and he was a distinguished musician in his generation. He succeeded Samuel Sebastian Wesley as organist of Gloucester Cathedral, where he taught Herbert Brewer, his successor (who in turn taught Herbert Howells), with later positions at Christ Church, Oxford, the Royal College of Music, and organist of the Chapel Royal. He was a close friend of Hubert Parry. According to Wikipedia, he enjoyed figure skating, cycling, boating, and golf.

Lloyd died “very suddenly” [Wikipedia] on his seventieth birthday in 1919. May he rest in peace.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

My admiration for this composer knows no bounds. No, it is more than admiration: Love. When I hear certain of his works, I melt: the Fantasia on a Theme of Tallis. The Lark Ascending. Any number of places in his many symphonic works. The anthem “Lord, thou hast been our refuge.” The setting of the Old Hundredth Psalm Tune, sung as the Princess Elizabeth entered the Abbey for her coronation: the YouTube link here is from the Fiftieth Anniversary of that day.

As the young and still mostly unknown Music Editor for the English Hymnal (1906), it fell to him to compose four tunes, needed to fit texts that were to be in the book. All remain in use; three of the four are indispensable:

- Down Ampney (Come down, O love divine)
- Randolph (God be with you till we meet again)
- Salve feste dies (Hail thee, festival day)
And most of all:
- Sine nomine (For all the saints)
[See this.
And this.]

Other tunes followed in later books, especially Kings Weston (At the Name of Jesus). But more even than these tunes, it was his philosophy of hymn singing, rooted in his love and knowledge of English folksong, that took English hymnody out of the nineteenth century propriety of Victorian chapel and music room into the fresh air. For, as I think he discovered when he began working with hymn tunes, the best of the Old Tunes are a type of folk music, rooted in the faith of common people – not the theologians or clergy – who know that God is with them come what may.

He wrote:

The task of providing congregations with familiar tunes is difficult; for, unfortunately, many of the tunes of the present day [that is, 1906]… are quite unsuitable to their purpose. More often than not they are positively harmful to those who sing and hear them…

The usual argument in favour of bad music is that the fine tunes are doubtless ‘musically correct’, but that the people want ‘something simple’. Now the expression ‘musically correct’ has no meaning: the only ‘correct’ music is that which is beautiful and noble. As for simplicity, what could be simpler than ‘St. Anne’ or ‘The Old Hundredth’, and what could be finer?

It is indeed a moral rather than a musical issue. No doubt it requires a certain effort to tune oneself to the moral atmosphere implied by a fine melody; and it is far easier to dwell in the miasma of the languishing and sentimental hymn tunes which so often disfigure our services. Such poverty of heart may not be uncommon, but at least it should not be encouraged by those who direct the services of the Church… (Preface to the English Hymnal, pp. viii-ix)

Vaughan Williams wrote little for my instrument. There are the Three Preludes on Welsh Hymn Tunes (1920) which I have played many times over all the decades of my career – Bryn Calfaria, Rhosymedre, Hyfrydol. There is the little “Wedding Tune for Ann.” There are two more Preludes on Welsh songs (1956) -- Romanza: The White Rock (which I have not played) and the Toccata: St. David’s Day (which I have, and must play again; it makes a fine energetic postlude)

And there is this:
Ralph Vaughan Williams: Prelude and Fugue in C minor

The above recording is from my noontime recital on March 8. I have owned the score for many years. I have looked at it several times. And I have laid it aside: “I don’t have time to learn this, not now. Maybe next year.” The one-and-only large-scale work for organ by this composer whom I love, and I had never played it.

For me, the number of “next years” dwindles. I felt that it had to be now, so I programmed it for an Evensong last fall – and (as I had warned myself all those years) I ran out of time. I was able to prepare only the Prelude, finding myself tangled in knots with the two-against-three of the Fugue. That determined me to make it the centerpiece of the March recital, and I managed to work it up, some of the fugue falling into place only in the final days of preparation.

I do not know that I will play this piece again. But I am grateful that I have finally grappled with it. I have learned much. And I am honored that I can in my small way keep his music – this little and somewhat obscure corner of his work, at that – in living performance. I hope that my March 8 playing of it may bear fruit in some manner, but that is up to our Lord.

Distler: Organ Sonata

Just a brief note to tell you that I have posted my recording of Hugo Distler’s Sonata for organ on YouTube. It is from the May 2016 Choral Evensong, but I am only now getting around to preparing it and putting it online.

I am surprised that there are not more recordings of Distler’s organ music on YouTube. So far as I am concerned, he is the finest composer of organ and choral music in the German twentieth century. He did not live long enough to write a lot of music, which makes the things that we have all the more precious.

This work is a trio sonata, modeled more or less on Bach’s six Trio Sonatas (as opposed to, say, the organ sonatas of Mendelssohn, or the Classical era sonatas of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven).

It is an honor for me to play this, and his settings of Wachet auf and Nun komm der heiden Heiland. Most of his choral music is too hard for the choirs I have directed, but we have sung a few things. I would like to do more.

Work over your head

“Work over your head,” writes Steven Pressfield in his book “Turning Pro.”

It would be easier to do otherwise. Then, I might not be terrified on Sunday mornings. I cannot recall a Sunday, not in thirty years of playing, without something that was on the edge of going wrong, something that has kept me awake on Saturday night.

Weekly improvisation has made it worse. When we have practiced a written composition sufficiently, there is much that could go wrong, but it is unlikely to entirely fall apart, at least when playing from the score. An improvisation? If it goes badly, it can be memorably awful. There is no limit as to how bad it can be.

Even if it goes well, there are always aspects which could be better. Where are the beautiful lines, the harmonies, the elegance and precision of form that were effortless in practice? Instead, the voice leading is awkward, the transitions are clunky, the phrases and periods are out of proportion, even the tune slips out of control.

Postludes at the organ are the worst. I played one of them on Sunday. [Here is the link, including the closing hymn to put the improvisation into its context.] It was a tune that I do not like, but it was the closing hymn and it needed a big, loud postlude to finish it off.

I was terrified.

Somehow, I got through it more or less in accord with my plan, scribbled on a piece of staff paper: introduction based on the first phrase, going forward with the tune mostly in the pedal, a middle section on the manuals, based mostly on the third phrase with movement through some of the flat keys, a return to the tonic for a mostly straight up play-through of the tune (in the pedals) with imitative work in the manuals.

But how to finish it off? With my piano preludes, I tend toward extended codas, most often at a soft dynamic. That is partly by preference, but I have found the coda to be useful because it is flexible. It can be long, short, or absent without harming the overall form. That allows me to finish the piece precisely at 9:00 a.m. For this postlude, a gentle ending would not do. I consider the final phrase of the hymn tune to be its weakest point, which was all the more reason that the improvisation needed a big ending.

Even the greatest of composers sometimes have difficulty with the big ending -- Bruckner, for one, whose endings can be among the most majestic of all but sometimes (I think) fail to carry off the grandeur of his intent -- but even (once or twice) Beethoven, and perhaps Bach -- I have never been happy with the ending of the Piece d’Orgue, for example. How does one make it sufficiently weighty to finish the piece, without bombast? In my practice this week, the ending was never satisfactory. I focused on it with my Saturday practice, striving to keep it short, and I think that it was still a bit overdone in the actuality on Sunday.

But it could have been worse. There was a chance that it could have been as bad as it was in some of my practicing.

I wish I could do it like Mozart. Earlier this month I had occasion to play his piano sonata, KV 545 in C major, as the prelude for a funeral. It is not a piece that is “big” in any dimension; it is gentle, playful in the closing rondo, but never loud. The endings of the three movements are simple, and absolutely right. When he is working on a larger scale, his endings are no less perfect. It may be that the ensemble that finishes off Act Two of Figaro is the most perfect ending in all of music, not only in itself but in relation to the rest of the opera. [The linked performance here is faulty in some technical respects, but the singers are among the finest, starting with Hermann Prey and Dietrich Fischer-Diskau, with Karl Böhm and the Vienna Philharmonic]

I studied the finale as a project while in graduate school, my admiration increasing all the while. The pacing, the tonal structure, the manner in which one by one all of the characters appear, all the tangled comic threads of plot are brought together, and the buildup of intensity… Oh, to make music like that!

In my opinion, each number in Figaro is a miracle; it is totally beyond me how anyone could create anything so perfect; nothing like it was ever done again, not even by Beethoven (Johannes Brahms, quoted in Wikipedia, s.v. “The Marriage of Figaro”)

Another example, one that we sang last season, is the “Worthy is the Lamb” which concludes Handel’s Messiah (see Here, and Here). It is enormous (especially the Amen) and it could not be any less without falling short in relation to the oratorio as a whole, to say nothing of its great Subject. When the trumpets come in with the stretto on the final page, the sopranos and trebles singing the final fugal entrance that begins on high A, swooping down an octave and a half to the low D, any listener who is paying attention is carried right up to the heavenly places. Or there is the ending of Bach’s “St. Anne” Fugue, which I played twice for funerals in the last fortnight. The manner in which the voice in the tenor soars up through the alto in the final cadence to finish on the B flat is extraordinary. Every time, it is as if my spirit is soaring up with it into the eternal dance of the Trinity.

My work will never be at that level. But I would like to make music with integrity on the scale that is appropriate to my place and time, whether it is in performance of music by others, or my improvisations and hymn playing. That will not happen if I play it safe.

Footnote:
I was not kind to the hymntune, which appears in only one hymnal, the Hymnal 1982 of the Episcopal Church – the one we use. I must say more, because the composer, Erik Routley, was one of my teachers, and it was named for another, James Litton.

I wrote of Dr. Routley here, and cannot speak too highly of him. Few people have been more important to me. But I do not think that this tune is among his best. For that, one might look at Augustine, for the George Herbert text “Let all the world in every corner sing” (H-82, number 402) or Woodbury for the Charles Wesley text “Come, O thou Traveler unknown” (H-82, number 639).

of Buxtehude, the Morning Star, and the Light shining in darkness

This is the hour of banquet and of song (Joe Cox)
Choir of Trinity Episcopal Church, Iowa City: January 17, 2016
Artwork: Institution of the Eucharist (Fra Angelico, 1442)

This is a fine and simple little communion anthem, not previously found on YouTube. I am pleased to remedy that. There is another “Joe Cox” who comes up on a YouTube search, who is not the composer of this song. Not by a long shot.

And from the same Sunday, the Second after the Epiphany:

Fantasia on “Wie schon leuchtet” (Dietrich Buxtehude)
Artwork: from the blog “Things God taught me”
(an interesting blog, which I found by looking for artwork. I bookmarked this for further exploration; it appears to be evangelical, and sporadically updated – in that regard, much like the Music Box.)
and from the “Spill” blog
(This blog is quite active; it is mostly about pop and “alternative” music, the best I can tell. There is some language and other content which I would consider inappropriate for young people, or for that matter anyone. But there is also a lot of music from styles with which I am utterly unfamiliar, arranged in playlists, so I might explore it some after all.)
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The Buxtehude was one of the test pieces for my Associate’s Certificate many years ago, and I may have caused a change in the examination procedures. The syllabus that year listed the piece, with the comment “Any Edition.” So, I played it from the inexpensive Kalmus, which is what I had. Like the Buxtehude originals (and unlike the more expensive scholarly performing editions) which were written in tablature rather than standard notation, there was no indication of what notes should be played in the pedals and which should belong to the hands.

I played most of it on the manuals, as I still do. One of the examiners strenuously disagreed, since my version did not require any facility with the pedals, though he/she noted in the comments that I was not to be marked down for it, since no edition of the work had been specified.

Ever since, editions have always been specified in the Guild examination requirements.

The AAGO exam was my first experience going “on the road” as an organist, and a first time in a high-pressure playing situation. To this point, I had taught myself to play the organ, doing my work at the little Estey pipe organ in the Baptist church I was serving. I was terrified at the prospect of driving all the way to Roanoke, Virginia for the test and playing on a Big-Time Instrument, an Aeolian-Skinner in the Episcopal church.

It prepared me for what was to come: a spiritual Calling to further study, with a graduate audition at Westminster Choir College. I would not have been admitted into their Church Music program without that “AAGO” on my application, and I would not have had the courage to attempt it. I wrote about that experience here.

The piece has remained one of my favorites; I try to find occasion to play it every Epiphany season. So far, Lent has been difficult for me (and what is worse, some of my friends), and it has cheered me this morning to hear the Buxtehude again. In the hard times, I have remembered Last Epiphany, when we sang the Beethoven “Hallelujah” from his “Mount of Olives” (which I hope to post here in due time; I did not want to at the time because our singing of it had some serious shortcomings, but at this distance, I think the level of Connection, which was quite high, outweighs such considerations). And the memory of that music has strengthened me, by reminding me of Whom we sang that day.

O God, who before the passion of thy only-begotten Son didst reveal his glory upon the holy mount: Grant unto us that we, beholding by faith the light of his countenance, may be strengthened to bear our cross, and be changed into his likeness from glory to glory; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Through Lent, through Holy Week, all the way to the Cross and the Tomb, He remains the Morning Star, the Light that “shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.”

Kenton Coe

For tonight, I have a new upload to YouTube: my prelude from the Midnight Mass [the link is further down this page]. It is a suite of six Christmas Carol settings by the Tennessee composer Kenton Coe. His website is here. I recommend that you visit it, if only to see the portrait of him and read his “random thoughts” on the homepage. Here is one:

I only trust a music that is a language between the composer and the listener: sharing an intellectual and spiritual experience. That music can be as simple as the simplest mountain carol, or as complicated as a piece by Elliot Carter. The only way to appreciate music is to listen to it, and listen to it, and listen to it. If it is in an unfamiliar style, keep listening. I had to play the recording of the Ives’ Concord Sonata fourteen times to begin to understand what it was about, and it was worth the effort!

This is something I am proud to put on the Net. It is about twenty-five minutes of music, and well worth the time to listen to it. I have played these pieces for twenty years and more, and they remain my favorite settings of these carols, by far.

Mr. Coe is one of the small number of Real Composers whom I have met. For many years, we lived in neighboring cities. He is very gracious, and has always encouraged me in my work with choirs and the organ.

I exchanged e-mails with Mr. Coe earlier this fall (our choir will be doing one of his anthems in 2016), and I told him that upon reflection, he is one of the main influences on my musical style. I can offer a composer no higher compliment, other than to perform his music.

Kenton Coe: Six Organ Preludes, Book II (Christmas Carols)
(composed in 1988)

Joy to the world
Puer nobis nascitur
Venite adoremus
Rosa mystica
Silent night
God rest ye merry, gentlemen

Artwork:
Angels appearing before the Shepherds (Henry Ossawa Tanner, 1911)
The Nativity (Lucas Cranach the Elder, c. 1520)
The Adoration of the Kings (Peter Breughel the Elder, c. 1556)
Virgin and Child (Madonna of Humility) – Andrea Mantegna, 1490

Ad nos ad salutarem

Someday I would like to play this:
Fantasy and Fugue on the Chorale “Ad Nos, ad salutarem undam” (Franz Liszt)


One of the perverse ways in which my mind has always worked is that when I am the busiest, that is when I have ideas about Big Projects, especially recitals. I am committed to play in the Lenten series for 2016 across town on the Casavant at the Congregational Church, and I must come up with something to do. There are easier things that I could do than this, but it is what this day I would love to attempt. I was thinking of it all night and on the bus ride into town this morning.

Among the organ music of Liszt, three pieces tower above the rest. The third (Variations on “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen”) I have played. The second (Prelude and Fugue on B.A.C.H.) is probably the best-known, and for that reason I am not much interested in attempting it. The first, written in 1850, is the “Ad Nos,” based on a chorale from the opera “The Prophets” by Louis Meyerbeer, one of the most noted composers of that era (and now almost forgotten). I have the score – it is in the same volume as the other two works, comprising 48 pages, some of it visually intimidating – I have looked at it and "read" parts of it mentally, but I have never heard this piece in performance, or even on a recording.

The modern musician in such a state does what I did this morning: I went to YouTube. There one may find a number of recordings. The one I linked at the beginning of this page is by Daniel Roth, in live performance on the masterpiece of Cavaille-Coll, the five-manual instrument at St. Sulpice in Paris.

Being a mechanical action (with Barker levers) instrument, Roth here employs two stop assistants, one on each side, each with multiple-page lists of stop changes, which Roth calls out to them as he plays. It is fascinating to watch them negotiate this long, complex work. It is a task that would be much easier on an instrument with electric stop action (at the least, if not some form of electric key action). But Liszt had no such action at his disposal. When he played it at the organ, he probably had stop assistants as one sees here.

There are two gaps in the recording, which is from the video archives of St. Sulpice, and there are doubtless many YouTube versions with better sound quality – I have sampled one by Dame Gillian Weir which is quite good, played at the Royal Albert Hall, and that recording includes the score so one can read the music as it plays. But the “behind the scenes” nature of this recording at St. Sulpice makes it especially interesting, at least to me. And it is a live recording. And, amazingly, it is a part of the Liturgy, a postlude. As the recording begins (and as Roth and his assistants busily prepare the stops), one hears the priests off somewhere down front, chanting the ending of the Mass. I marvel at the sort of Liturgy and Place that would support a major thirty-minute work as a postlude. Blessings be upon them!

It is enjoyable to watch Roth squinting through his glasses at the score, singing along with some of the melodies, most of all playing in the Grand Manner that such music (and such an instrument) require. At the end, he asks one of the assistants about the time, and he holds his wristwatch where Roth can read it – even as he is playing the final majestic chords. I wonder if they had to clear out for another Mass, and the long postlude was pushing the available time? Or perhaps he had to clear his mind and play the next Mass himself? That sort of thing is part of being an Organist – one always must have the external circumstances in a part of one’s mind, much more so than other classical performers.

As for my undertaking of the Ad Nos, it may come to naught like most of my Big Projects. I have other responsibilities between now and Lent, and I have pencilled in one of the large movements from the Livre du Saint-Sacrement of Messiaen for the April Evensong, which would be new to me and require quite a bit of work – I may not be up to doing both it and the Liszt. But I am growing old, and will not have many more opportunities to play such works as these; if not now, when?

A week with RVW

The Lord's Day: August 9

I hope to play the Vaughan Williams prelude on Bryn Calfaria next Sunday, since we are singing that tune (“Lord, enthroned in heavenly splendor,” Hymn 307). With that, I have often played as postlude the setting of Hyfrydol from the same set of three preludes on Welsh tunes, but I did that not too many months ago, on a Sunday when we sang that tune. I check my handful of organ scores by RVW, and in “A Vaughan Williams Organ Album” (Oxford University Press) I light upon the “Toccata: St. David's Day.” I have wanted for many years to play it, but I had thought that I should save it for a Sunday close that Feast (March 1). But when that time comes every spring, I am unwilling to play the Toccata because it is too cheerful for Lent. I will not have many more opportunities, so now is the time. “Doesn't look too hard,” I muse. “But that metronome marking. It could be a problem.”

Since the choir room is occupied by a jazz drummer hammering away at patterns, I take the piece upstairs to the Steinway in the church and work out the fingering. That goes smoothly and is indeed not difficult at all; there is only one passage on the last page that is a head-scratcher. Next, I get out the metronome and set it at the printed marking, presumably from RVW himself: Allegro, half note equalling 112. I think through the piece at that speed; it is insane. Not only would I be unable to play it that fast, but I do not think that it would sound well. Everything would be too rushed.

So, I turn to YouTube, and find this recording by David Briggs: his tempo is half note at about 88, and is thoroughly convincing. That is good news; I am fairly confident that I can play it at that speed. But I wish I had more than one week to do it.

Tuesday: The Feast of St. Clare

I am determined to get some work done before staff meeting, and dig in on the First Workout, which I have described elsewhere. The danger with organ practice at this hour on Tuesdays is that I have to drag myself away from it for the meeting at 10 am, and sure enough, the hour finds me in the middle of things. “Just a few more minutes...” I mutter and work right up to the last moment.

I complete the first workout after the meeting. It is not going to be so easy as I had thought. No metronome work today, excepting the final playthrough at half tempo, quarter note equalling 88. I make many mistakes at what should be a tempo where I could play it cleanly after one workout.

Wednesday: The Feast of Florence Nightingale

One of my working principles is the “One Big Thing.” Each day after Matins and a second breakfast while I check email and the Net, I tackle the Big Thing, the one thing that is most important. Today it is most certainly the Toccata. I head upstairs and work at it until dinner, about three hours.

The second day's work is the time to use the metronome. I start with the half-page passage that will be the most difficult (about one page from the end), work through it with the modified rhythms. Some of this does not go well, so I work through the various rhythmic adjustments several times. Then at last, I try the half-page with the metronome: quarter note at about 120 (which would be half note at 60), then ratchet it up a click to 124, then 128. I continue playing the half-page until I reach a tempo where I cannot play it cleanly: quarter note at 152. I need 176, but it is not going to happen today. After what is always a mistake-filled playing (for, after all, I have pushed it to that point), I play it slowly to settle it in my mind: back to half tempo, quarter note at 88.

This half-page has taken a bit over one hour. I get off the bench, stretch, say a Little Office. Back to work: the next bit of music after that half page, and on to the end, working in the same manner. Each time after I have reached the stage of playing it with the metronome, I go back to that half page where I started and include it in the playthrough, adding each new section as I get to it. Once I have made it to the end, I work backwards, adding sections that come before the hard part – some of these are challenging, too. But all in all, it goes well enough for this stage in the week: I work almost all of it up to 168, just one marking short of my goal. To round off the day's work at the organ, I take my third break (with another Little Office. I love including these in my practice; why haven't I been doing this all these years?) and do the final playthrough at half tempo.

Friday: The Feast of Jonathan Daniels

He was a seminarian in the 1960's at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, attending the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Answering a call for helpers from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., he went to Selma, Alabama. While entering a store with three companions, they were approached by an angry white man with a gun; it became clear that he was going to shoot one of them, a sixteen-year old black girl. Daniels pushed her to the side in the scuffle and took the blast of the twelve-gauge shotgun himself, which killed him. He was twenty-six years old.


Crunch time. I work another four hours today on the Toccata. Parts of it are still not going well, but I have learned a lesson: this week I have pushed the tempo so hard that my rhythmic variations have become spastic in places, which is precisely what I should avoid. The point of the fingering, slow practice, and rhythmic practice is to avoid that very thing. Calm, controlled playing, no matter what the tempo might be.

Four hours is enough; I must work on other music for Sunday. I start the prelude on Bryn Calfaria, which I have played many times. A first workout takes about thirty minutes. It is good that there is no more, because I am pushing my physical limits; one of my fingers is beginning to hurt and my wrists are very tired. Mental limits, too – I am frazzled.

But it is good to spend this time with Mr. Vaughan Williams. The Bryn Calfaria is going well, and parts of it are profoundly moving. Sweat and tears are pouring down my face by the time I am done.

I hardly know how to thank him for what his music has meant to me. There is the Fantasia on a Theme of Tallis, which has brought me healing many times, and the Hodie, and the symphonic music. I cannot forget his work on the English Hymnal, bringing folk tunes such as Forest Green and Kingsfold into our hymnody, to say nothing of his own tunes, Sine nomine and King's Weston and the gentle Down Ampney. And there is the anthem “Lord, thou hast been our refuge.” Working with our choristers on this has been one of the chief events of my life in music; I tried to describe it here: October 23, 2011.

These organ pieces are on a smaller scale, but they too partake of the same vision. It is akin somewhat to what I sense in J. R. R. Tolkien, for both of them were rooted in an England that is no more. With JRRT, we see it in the Shire of the Hobbits and in characters such as old Bilbo, and Frodo and Sam, and Merry and Pippin; with RVW, we hear it in "The Lark Ascending," or indeed on almost every page of his music.

Saturday: The Feast of Saint Mary the Virgin

Mary, the Mother who cared for Jesus, now cares with maternal affection and pain for this wounded world. Just as her pierced heart mourned the death of Jesus, so now she grieves for the sufferings of the crucified poor and for the creatures of this world laid waste by human power. Completely transfigured, she now lives with Jesus, and all creatures sing of her fairness. She is the Woman, “clothed in the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars” (Rev 12:1). Carried up into heaven, she is the Mother and Queen of all creation. In her glorified body, together with the Risen Christ, part of creation has reached the fullness of its beauty. She treasures the entire life of Jesus in her heart (cf. Lk 2:19,51), and now understands the meaning of all things. Hence, we can ask her to enable us to look at this world with eyes of wisdom. (Francis I: Encyclical Letter “Laudato si'”, paragraph 241)

Yesterday's work has borne fruit; the Toccata goes well this morning; ninety minutes and I am content to lay it aside for tomorrow. Bryn Calfaria is solid too, very secure after a second workout.

But there is much more: a middle service improvisation, songs and hymns. And not just any songs: tomorrow's Epistle includes the great mandate for music in the life of Holy Mother Church:

Wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is. And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess, but be filled with the Spirit, speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord; giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. (Ephesians 5:17-20)

For this, we are singing Fred Pratt Green's hymn “When in our music God is glorified” with the tune Engelberg by RVW's teacher, C. V. Stanford; George Herbert's poem “Let all the world in every corner sing,” with the tune Augustine by my teacher Erik Routley; and a hymn by Thomas Troeger and Carol Doran, “With glad exuberant carolings,” which in some ways is the best of all. It is this last that I plan to use as the heart of my improvisation, paired with the Psalter tune Rendez a Dieu (“Father, we thank thee who hast planted”). I work on these tunes for a couple of hours, downstairs on the brown upright piano outside my office door.

It has been a full week, and I have neglected much else for the sake of tomorrow's music. In the middle, struggling with the rhythmic variations and metronome on the Toccata, I lost sight of why I am doing this: today's work on the hymns made it clear, and showed me why I had ended up with the Toccata in the first place, by “what some would call chance.”

How often, making music, we have found
a new dimension in the world of sound,
as worship moved us to a more profound
Alleluia!

So has the Church, in liturgy and song,
in faith and love, through centuries of wrong,
borne witness to the truth in every tongue,
Alleluia!

(Fred Pratt Green: copyright © 1972, Hope Publishing Co.)

William Mathias (1934-92)

I am not sure that he is a great composer, but he was very good, a solid and productive craftsman, and I always enjoy his music. This “Postlude” (played in today's service) is typical – it is cheerful, to the point, and remains as delightful today as it was when he wrote it fifty-plus years ago – probably on commission from his publisher for their “Album of Postludes” by various composers. It is the only piece from this Album that I still play.

One summer towards the end of his life, Dr. Mathias was the music director for the Montreat Worship and Music Conference. I and about six hundred others in the adult choir sang with him for a week; much of what we did was his own music. We did his most famous choral work, “Let the people praise thee, O God,” which was written for the Royal Wedding (no, not William and Kate; the other one, William's parents in 1981); we sang “As truly as God is our Father,” and quite a few others.

I will also link here to his anthem “The doctrine of wisdom,” which I described in last Sunday's essay.

He was a marvelously prolific composer. In this essay by his daughter Rhiannon (from which the photographs in the YouTube clip are taken), she recounts that he would go to his studio and work every night after supper until the wee hours. One of the photos depicts this: Mathias hard at work, piles of music and papers all around him.

During that week at Montreat, I had only one opportunity to speak to him in a receiving line, and all I could do was stammer a few words of appreciation. I wish I could have found better words to thank him. He had the misfortune to live and work at a time when classical music was supposed to be arcane, dissonant, ugly – and he wrote in a manner that people could readily comprehend, with tunes and common-practice triads and infectiously delightful rhythms. So, I think that many of his academic colleagues misunderstood him and dismissed his work. There are few composers of the 1970's and 80's whose work I would now listen to: Messiaen, Howells, Kenneth Leighton, Mathias – and that is about it. Of the four, Messiaen is certainly the greatest – but Mathias is the most approachable.

Overtures, an Artist, and the Good Shepherd

This week, all three of the hymns that we sang were magnificent tunes and I would have been happy to improvise on any one of them. So I decided to include all three, one after the other, followed by a bit of development and a recapitulation of sorts.

One of the best models for a church prelude improvisation is the Overture. Often, such a work quotes several tunes from what is to come, one after another. Such overtures have been cranked out by the hundreds, from the earliest days of Italian opera right up to modern Broadway musicals and Hollywood motion pictures. Many of them are hackwork.

But it is possible to do this sort of thing extremely well:
Rossini: Overture to “William Tell”

Or from a later composer: Beethoven: Overture to “Fidelio”

Most would acknowledge Wagner to be the master of this form: Overture to “Tannhauser”

That gives us some worthy models to emulate on Sunday mornings....
This is as impossible as trying to imitate Bach!

Gerre Hancock used to say something like this: “When you improvise, there are no wrong notes.” He is right; whatever you play is the definitive version of the piece. That does not mean that the choice to go in one direction rather than another results in a better composition, for of course the possibility is present for Good Music or Bad Music whenever one plays – whether it is a piece from the repertoire by a Real Composer, or music of one's own.

Still, “there are no wrong notes.” Part of what Hancock meant is that very often an “unexpected” note, one that you did not intend to play, leads in a direction that is more interesting than what you had in mind. This happens every time I play and I think it is true of everyone who improvises.

This week's improvisation provides an example. At 2'24” into the file, I have completed the first section: St. Columba (“My Shepherd will supply my need”) in B flat. I am ready to move into the second section: Land of Rest (“I come with joy to meet my Lord”) in F. I make a transition, which is not especially well done but it gets me there. But at 2'44” I play an E flat in the accompaniment (at the top of the texture) which throws it right back toward B flat major – by 2'47” I have lost control of the tune and landed very firmly in B flat. I must then stay with it on through the tune (to 3'7”) where I then yank it kicking and screaming into F with a V-I cadence (finally!) at 3'26.

A full minute, out of a ten minute piece, doing something I had not intended. I wish it had not happened and I think upon repeated listening that it weakens the form. At the time, I considered it a disaster.

But the important part is where the player then takes it. Because of this little excursion, I make some other excursions out of the key during the course of the tunes. The first is at the transition between Land of Rest and the third section: Old Hundredth (“All people that on earth do dwell”) at 4'26”. I sequence through a couple of keys to get to my goal of G major (4'47”), and I probably would not have done it that way had I not played that E flat at 2'44”.

After some time with Old Hundredth, I had intended a development section based on St. Columba in Mode III (Phrygian, the mode whose keynote is “Mi”). In my preparations, I started by playing around with the tune in minor, but found Mode III (which differs only by one note, the second scale degree) more unstable and very interesting. I intentionally let it slip out of the key halfway through the tune (5'57”) on its way to the parallel major (E major, that is: 6'30”) and using the relationship of a third, to C major (6'40”). The key of E Phrygian is about as far from B flat Major as possible; we are on our way home, and we get there at 6'48” with yet another jump out of the key in the middle of the tune – again, I would not have done it this way without that E flat at 2'44”.

At 7'14” begins the transition into Old Hundredth for what amounts to a recapitulation, in the home key of B flat, to which we arrive at 7'34”. But right away, another mistake; I lose the tune at 7'40”. This one is repaired more gracefully than 2'44”; I simply stop and begin the tune anew, staying safely home in B flat. Once through the tune, and it is time for a coda (8'35”), mostly based on the final phrase of the tune and lots of IV-I cadential activity, one and a half minutes of it. This was entirely unplanned and would not have been needed but for the harmonic instability earlier – and I think it proved to be a good ending, much better than what I had intended.

The important thing is that most of these decisions were by instinct, by feel. In the middle of an improvisation, one cannot reason through it logically. But one can – and must – go where the music has led, mistakes and all. Sometimes it does not work so well; sometimes it is, by grace, much better than it would have been.

This is one reason why we must Know the Tune and be able to play it in pretty much any key. You might plan on a certain sequence of keys, as I did, but a “wrong” note or two might lead you into areas you had not intended to visit. You had best be able to play the tune once you get there.

And this is an important way in which improvisation differs from Real Composition. When you are writing it down, you can (and should) throw out things that don't work, and stay with the compositional process until the result is as perfect as you can make it. When you improvise, you cannot throw anything out; you must go on as best you can with the song as you have played it so far. In this, improvisation imitates Real Life.

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In order to post these clips to YouTube, I must convert my sound file into a MP4 file, with video. That caused me to discover www.WikiArt.org which has become one of my favorite sites on the Net.

Today's clip introduced me to a new (for me) artist: Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937). He was the first African-American artist to achieve a degree of international fame; you can read about him in Wikipedia here. The only black student at the Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts, he was a victim of racism. He wrote:

I was extremely timid, and to be made to feel that I was not wanted, although in a place where I had every right to be, even months afterwards caused me sometimes weeks of pain. Every time any one of these disagreeable incidents came into my mind, my heart sank, and I was anew tortured by the thought of what I had endured, almost as much as the incident itself.

After his studies, he left the United States to escape the racism, ending up in France. There, he was accepted into the artistic community without regard to his race.

Many of his paintings are religious, such as the impressionistic one that I have used for the YouTube clip, “The Good Shepherd.” I love the moonlit night into whose shadowy darkness the Shepherd goes, seeking a lost sheep.

One of his other paintings that I discovered today and to which I will return is “The Banjo Lesson,” in which an old man teaches his grandson to play the banjo. It captures a moment that has been repeated countless times throughout the history of folk music. We pass what is precious to us on to the next generations, and so the Song continues.

While in Philadelphia at the school, Tanner became close friends with Robert Henri, who is another artist who has become important to me, mostly through his book “The Art Spirit.” I learned of this book from a novel: “My Name is Asher Lev” by Chaim Potok, and I must write about it sometime. In the meantime, I recommend both books to you.
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I would like to say more, but it is almost 11:30 at night, and it has been a long day.
May God's blessings be with you this night and always.

Choral in B minor

Today was my noontime “Lenten Meditation” at the Congregational Church: the two Bach settings of Dies sind die heil'gen zehn Gebot' and the Franck Choral in B minor. It all went well enough, for which I give thanks to God. I have posted the Franck on YouTube, to go alongside the hundreds or thousands of other performances of this piece; here it is.

From the program notes:

In the summer of 1890, which proved to be the final year of his life, César Franck wrote a collection of three Chorales for organ. They are among the crown jewels of the organ repertoire. Today's program includes the second of the three, the Chorale in B minor. In form, it is a passacaglia, a set of variations on a sixteen-measure bass with which the piece begins. After three variations of increasing intensity, a second theme is presented which may be thought of as the “chorale.” Two phrases are presented on the Great Organ, separated by passages on the Swell. The third phrase is a coda in B major, now presented softly on the Swell rather than the Great; its conclusion is the midpoint of the work. An interpolation on full organ leads into more variations on the passacaglia theme, now combined with the chorale theme and developed, building to a statement on full organ. With a beautiful diminuendo, we return to the B major coda, which concludes the work.

In sorrow that the ancient curse...

In sorrow that the ancient curse
should doom to death a universe,
you came, O Savior, to set free
your own in glorious liberty.
(Conditor alme siderum, number 60 in the Hymnal 1982)

“What does this stanza mean,” a young chorister asked in rehearsal. “What is this curse?” They knew about Adam and Eve and the serpent, but they had not heard about the Curse. I did not explain it very well; I spoke of the sweat of our brow, the thorns and thistles, the pains of child-bearing. And Death. We all die, and not just us, but all the other animals and plants. We all die.

That is the point of the hymn: He came to set us free. I said this. “No he didn't,” one of them replied. “We still die.” “But we will live forever with Him after that,” I said. “That is what He did. Without Him, we would die and that would be it. He broke the Curse and gave us life.”

They seemed puzzled by this. Perhaps they will think about it, perhaps for a long time.


This was another difficult week. I had a big voluntary for the Evensong prelude, but I did not make it onto the bench Tuesday, or Wednesday. That meant that I had Friday and Saturday to work it up – and this hardly a fortnight after I had sworn I would not play another big piece without more preparation.

I have played the piece (the Partita on “Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme” by Hugo Distler) about a half-dozen times over the years, the first time on my graduate recital under Dr. McDonald, so it had a solid fingering and I have a good idea of how I think it should go. Starting from scratch, such a piece would be impossible in two days, or a week.

But the mighty ones of old could have done it. Back in the day, the students of Alexander McCurdy (my teacher's teacher) had to prepare and memorize a new piece every week. No matter how difficult it was, right up to the most challenging works in the organ repertoire, they had one week.

I want to be that kind of organist.


This was “Cocoa and Carols” day, in some respects the most important parish event of the year. I was worried about it; many of us were, for a variety of reasons. As the morning progressed, it grew more frantic behind the scenes. My friend Anne who has done most of the hospitality events in the parish for the last several years was not to be found, and the clock was ticking. Thirty minutes before the event, there was no one working on food but me. I got John C. to start the coffee pot and I started boiling water for the cocoa in the kitchen.

Another friend, Judith, appeared in the kitchen and said “I am Anne,” telling me what had happened; Anne was in the emergency room. I was helping get the food in place when Nora pulled me away and sent me to the piano – for it was time; I had to kick off the event. The church was almost full, lots of children and families, loud chattering and excitement.

I stepped to the microphone: “WEELLLCOMME to the 2014 edition of COCOOA and CAAAROLLSSS!!!!” I gave it my best Caesar Flickerman imitation (a character in The Hunger Games, for those unfamiliar with the name), and got the people applauding. They probably thought I had lost my marbles.

We sang a couple of Advent songs, and then “St. Nicholas” knocked loudly on the church door – so loudly that he put some dents in it. Two young people opened the doors for him and the Rector gave him the full liturgical greeting appropriate for a visiting Bishop. He processed slowly down the aisle blessing everyone, looking for all the world like Pope Francis.

My part done for the moment, I slipped downstairs to check on the food. There was still a good deal of frantic putting-things-in-order. But it was showtime again; the young folk were pounding down the steps, running across the room to the cookies.

I played a few carols and started the Songs By Request. People (mostly the children, by this time sitting on the floor) shout numbers from the Christmas section of the hymnal and we sing them. It is very loud, chaotic, and wonderful.

The time came to wrap it up with Silent Night and Go Tell It On the Mountain, and I trotted upstairs: 10:55, and I had another service to play at 11:00. I climbed on the bench, took a deep breath, and started the prelude.

By 1:00 when all was done, I was exhausted. And there was still a lot to do. I ate dinner, spent almost an hour crafting a careful e-mail and making a related phone call, and warmed up for Choral Evensong. There was, inevitably, not enough time to do it properly.

But the choir sang splendidly: the Ayleward Responses, Psalm 37, and Sumsion in G, along with a Chinese-language anthem, “Pengyou, ting.” The lessons were dark; the excellent sermon by Judith was dark – as was the morning's sermon by my friend Meg W., newly ordained as a Deacon. There was much talk of the events in Ferguson, in New York City, and elsewhere. “I looked for grapes, and it brought forth wild grapes” (Isaiah 5:4). “He looked for judgment, but behold oppression, for righteousness, but behold a cry” (5:7).

And we sang Hymn 60, Conditor alme:

When this old world drew on toward night,
you came, but not in splendor bright,
not as a monarch, but the child
of Mary, blameless mother mild.

From Evensong, I joined a small group of families to walk over to a community residence for the elderly. A handful of them were awaiting us in the common room, and we sang Christmas carols for them, using the sheet which I prepared yesterday. One of our own adult choristers, Louise, was there, like me having just come from Evensong; she lives in this facility.

The final song was “Silent Night.” I invited any of them that knew it in German to sing it that way, and Louise did. That finished me off; hearing her sing “Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht” just as she had done as a child many years ago brought tears to my eyes and I could no longer sing.

It is a dark world, and the Curse is still with us.
But it has been broken.

Stille Nacht! Heilige Nacht!
Alles schläft; einsam wacht
Nur das traute heilige Paar.
Holder Knab im lockigten Haar,
Schlafe in himmlischer Ruh!
Schlafe in himmlischer Ruh!

Here is the Distler. There are mistakes, to be sure – this is one way that the Curse manifests itself for a musician – but it turned out well enough. In the YouTube clip, I include three photographs of this young composer who is very dear to me. It was his misfortune to come of age in a time and place much darker than ours: Nazi Germany in the 1930's. The third photo shows him with some of his students at the Hochschule, these young men whom he loved, so many of them fated to die in the Wehrmacht.

May he rest in peace. May they all rest in peace.

Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, now and for ever. Amen (Collect for the First Sunday of Advent, BCP p. 159)

For all the saints

It has been a busy fortnight.

Last Sunday, we had Choral Matins for the first time in this parish for many years. For the occasion, we sang the Howells “Collegium Regale” morning canticles – the justly famous Te Deum, and the less-often performed Jubilate.

We had known of this service for less than a month, and prepared the music in three rehearsals, at the same time as we were working on the Victoria Requiem for a service tonight, November 2, and a challenging anthem for this morning's Eucharist. It was almost more than we could handle. The three rehearsals were tense, often discouraging. I was much aware that these choristers are all volunteers, free to walk away at any time, and I feared that some of them might. As it transpired, we were further hindered by illness and other circumstances; on the day of the Howells, our choir of fifteen singers numbered only ten. When we learned that morning that one of our strong sopranos had laryngitis, and another was out of town, one of the altos, Kay, graciously moved to soprano at the warmup rehearsal and sight-read the part. Without her, we could not have done it. Without the hard work of all ten of these choristers, we could not have done it.

It was not without flaws, but the choir sang from the heart and there were some fine moments.

And then, on to this Sunday's Requiem, the four-voice setting by Tomás Luis de Victoria. We sang it in place of our normal First Sunday Choral Evensong, with our rector, L.L., providing good leadership in the High Church manner. The Altar was moved to its proper position so that she could face liturgical East for the Eucharistic Prayer as is meet and right, assisted by Deacon and Subdeacon, with plenty of incense.

We do not normally have services like this in our parish.

The Victoria was, like the Howells, not without flaws. But it was pretty good; the liturgy as a whole was very good.

From the Organist's point of view, the Howells was challenging to play, and its preparation kept me from advance work on today's voluntaries: the Leo Sowerby setting of “Sine Nomine,” a setting of the same tune by Craig Phillips (of which more later), and tonight's postlude, the Messiaen “Apparition de l'eglise éternelle.” As of Friday morning, I had done first workouts of only the final six-page fugue of the Phillips, the last two pages of the Sowerby, and I had not touched the Messiaen. I have played all three pieces before, and they had good fingerings and registrations in place; otherwise, they would have been impossible. Even so, it was a lot of work for two days.

It came to a climax on Saturday. I spent the day on the bench, much of it on the first eleven pages of the Phillips (both a first and second workout that day, sandwiched around the Sowerby, and about fifteen minutes on a few measures of the Messiaen, and some work on the hymns and anthem accompaniment). Late in the day, the Swell to Pedal coupler malfunctioned; when engaged, it has been causing the middle F to “blip” momentarily. Now, the F was not blipping; it was sticking on, firm and immobile until the coupler was removed. I could not play any of this music without the pedal coupler.

So, the clock ticking away, I climbed into the organ. It was clear what was happening – the wooden sticker that engages the coupler for that note had come loose and was blocking the tail of the key up. I removed the offending sticker – easily done, but it meant that the note no longer had its coupler. The loose backfall looked like it might want to rub its neighbor, but it cannot be removed without much trouble, far more than I can handle, and the “repair,” such as it was, had to suffice. When I went back around to play the instrument, it seemed all right.

Sunday morning arrived, and the service went well. The Sowerby went well, the choir sang its anthem, “At the round earth's imagin'd corners” by Lee Hoiby, very well, the hymnody was good, and it came time for the Phillips.

As you will hear in the linked recording, there is a soft section about two-thirds of the way through where the pedal has the melody on a 4' stop, very exposed, with repeated use of the F. It chose this moment to lock up, as I had feared – when I played F, that loose backfall hung on its neighboring E and both pitches played. It took me most of the exposed passage to figure out that when I tapped the note a second time, it would clear.

I have nonetheless posted the recording on YouTube for several reasons. Partly, I think that I played it fairly well, despite the ugly “car horn” effect of those F/E double-notes. More to the point, I consider it a fine piece of music, and would recommend it to other organists. I do not know if it is published, but if it isn't, the composer would gladly sell you a copy, and would be pleased to hear of your interest.

Most of all, in playing it (and in posting it here) I sought to honor my friend D.D., for whom it was written upon his retirement a few years ago. I well remember the night when it was first performed, in a splendid reading by Brett Wolgast – a far better performance than what you hear in my video.

In my years at this parish, D.D. has been a constant support and encouragement. Without him and a few other friends, I would have thrown in the towel a few years ago.
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The Pilcher is starting to have a number of action problems, of which the adventure with the F is the latest. I do not know what to do; in sum, they are more than I can deal with myself. I have asked – twice – a young local technician to come and work on the instrument; he does not appear to be interested. There is a fine and experienced organ man in the community who used to work on the instrument, but is nowadays physically unable to contort himself into it. I could bring the fellows from Bedient back over, and pay milage from Nebraska for a service call. They would probably want to do thousands of dollars of work on the action.

For now, I will see if I can keep it patched up.

Beethoven and God

From Romain Rolland: “Portrait of Beethoven in his Thirtieth Year”

When we speak of Beethoven we have to speak of God: God to him is the first reality, the most real of realities.... [Beethoven] can regard him as a companion to be treated roughly, as a tyrant to be cursed, as a fragment of his own ego, or as a rough friend, a severe father qui bene castigat. (The son of Johann van Beethoven had learned as a child the value of this treatment.) But whatever this Being may be that is at issue with Beethoven, he is at issue with him at every hour of the day; he is of his household and dwells with him; never does he leave him. Other friends come and go: he alone is always there. And Beethoven importunes him with his complaints, his reproaches, his questions. The inward monologue is always à deux. In all Beethoven's work, from the very earliest, we find these dialogues of the soul, of the two souls in one, wedded and opposed, discussing, warring, body locked with body, whether for war or in an embrace who can say?

for Beethoven's Birthday

December 17, 1770 – March 26, 1827

I am an organist, and no longer a Real Pianist, not the kind who plays Beethoven. But there was a time...

Like most piano students, my first encounter with him was the fine little composition Für Elise. And like most young pianists, I played it over and over. I would not be surprised if I played it a thousand times. It was a gateway into another realm of being.

That led, in due time, to the Sonatas. I no longer have the yellow paperback two-volume set of the Thirty-Two Sonatas, edited by the great nineteenth century conductor Hans von Bülow and published by G. Schirmer, numbers one and two in their series “Library of Musical Classics.”

Sadly, I was influenced by Purists as an undergraduate in the 1970's, when the Romantic sensibilities of von Bülow were unfashionable, and I discarded the set. I wish that I still had them, for I now recognize that von Bülow's copious footnotes and editorial suggestions, extending even to rewriting some of the notation, retain value. Those Thirty-Two Sonatas helped me survive to adulthood, and von Bülow's comments helped this romantic-minded teenager find a way into the spiritual meaning of these works.

In those days, every evening, when I had finished my regular practicing, I would stumble through a sonata movement, pounding it out on our little spinet piano in the living room. Nearly all of them were far over my head; it was the equivalent of a child in Sunday School class reading Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. But they all were icons, windows into a world of freedom and purity. It was like looking up at the stars, and seeing by their unchanging grace that my petty concerns were not so important as they seemed.

Some of the late sonatas and quartets, which are the ones I love the best, are still over my head; Beethoven's path led far beyond mortal realms. But I played the Moonlight Sonata and the Appassionata Sonata in high school recitals, and (much) later played the Opus 110, one of the most sublime of the late sonatas. I would love to do more, and contemplated a few years ago learning the Diabelli Variations. I soon realized that I am not up to that task, and probably no longer up to playing any Beethoven in public.

In graduate school, I had the opportunity to sing the Ninth Symphony under two different directors, one of whom I hated, and one (Rafael Kubelik) whom I loved. I will be forever grateful for this opportunity. It was not until adulthood – well after graduate school – that I finally encountered the Missa Solemnis.

It is fair to say that Beethoven was not a pious person in the conventional sense. But one author, it may be Romain Rolland, observed that for Beethoven, God was always part of the conversation, and this is true. The best one can tell through the music, Beethoven's relationship with God was much like that of the Psalmist – often stormy, sometimes (as in the Missa) ecstatic [there is hardly anything more amazing in all of music than the opening bars of the Gloria in excelsis], always unflinchingly honest.

Here is the Ninth Symphony, as conducted by Kubelik in 1959.

Seid umschlungen, Millionen!
Diesen Kuß der ganzen Welt!
Brüder, über'm Sternenzelt
Muss ein lieber Vater wohnen.
Ihr stürzt nieder, Millionen?
Ahnest du den Schöpfer, Welt?
Such' ihn über'm Sternenzelt!
Über Sternen muss er wohnen.

Scaling Back

(Friday) The sonata-form was definitely not working. The hymn tunes now seemed wrong for it, demanding a much larger time scale than is available in order to be worked out in this form. Nor am I yet capable of controlling a development section. But what I find, to my delight, is that I can indeed play a decent sonata-form exposition, controlling the key centers and presenting two thematic groups in an interesting manner. I am much closer to being able to work in this large and important Form than I had thought. But not yet.

I decided to scale back to an A-B-A form plus coda - simply my "exposition" with a direct return to the A section (the Intercessor tune, in B minor), without any explicit development. This plan worked much better, and I was comfortable with it after two hours or so of practice.


(Saturday) Just a bit of work today on the improvisation; I played through the Form twice (with, of course, differences in detail), and I think that I am ready for tomorrow. If all goes well, the piece will be about ten minutes long, and provide a good setup for the opening hymn as well as (hopefully) the liturgy as a whole.

For that is the purpose: a Prelude sets the context for the day. It should join other artistic work such as the liturgical colors and the architecture to communicate what is at hand as people arrive, and to do so more specifically than those other forms, for the Prelude should to a large degree indicate the ethos of this particular day's Collect, Lessons, and their intersection with this congregation and this time and place in the world. Sermons do that too, and more effectively, but the Prelude can lay the groundwork without people realizing it in a conscious manner.

When the Prelude is hymn-based, as this one is, it also brings the hymn tune to the mind of the congregation so that when the time to sing the tune arrives, people sense that they have heard this before.



It is important to me that these improvisations are ephemeral. They are not recorded, and I throw away any written notes or plan after the service. Music is perhaps the most ephemeral of arts. That applies to written compositions, too; they exist only when someone performs them.

My postlude is a setting of St. Anne (Our God, our help in ages past) by the composer Kenton Coe. I knew Mr. Coe when we once lived in neighboring cities; one of my choristers introduced us, and said to me: "You must know, he is a Real Composer." He studied with Nadia Boulanger and Paul Hindemith, both of them among the finest of teachers, and Kenton Coe is indeed a Real Composer. Some of his music appeared on the programmes of symphony orchestras; he has had at least three operas appear on the stage; he composed a number of soundtracks for PBS documentaries, and a goodly amount of choral music. He may still be writing; I am sure that he is, if he is able.

But most of his organ music is unpublished, as is this setting of St. Anne. As I practiced it this week, I was much in mind that there are not many people playing this, or any of his organ music. I know of one organist, Stephen Hamilton, who has championed Mr. Coe's music, but I suspect that there are not many others of us, and fewer as the years pass. I see that there is no entry for him on Wikipedia; that is not a good sign. He does, however, have his own website. Stephen and I, and others who may have gotten this music from the composer, are no longer young. What will happen to this music in another twenty years? Will it be gone, as ephemeral as tomorrow's improvisation on Intercessor and London New?

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
bears all its sons away;
They fly, forgotten, as a dream
dies at the opening day.

But, I realized as I worked on his setting of St. Anne, that some of my musical language has come from him, some very directly into this week's improvisation. Whether or not any of his compositions remain in the repertoire, he has contributed to the Tradition, through me and through others who have played and listened to his music and perhaps written music of their own.
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Afterword:

I have written these three essays to illustrate my "compositional" process in the preparation of an improvised organ voluntary. What shows up on Sunday is only a small fraction of what happened during the preparation; most of the ideas have been discarded, including some of the best parts. The ideas that remain are not necessarily the best, but rather the ones that fit the piece as it comes to fruition.

Today finished with a doctoral recital in trombone, played in our church. It is the final recital on the Steinway before it heads to the shop. Afterwards, the pianist agreed with me that the action needs work, but he added that "it is a great-sounding piano." I was pleased to hear that.

Bruckner, and Wilhelm Furtwängler

This is part one of a recording of the Ninth Symphony of Anton Bruckner, the one that he dedicated "to the beloved God" ("dem lieben Gott") and was unable to finish before his death. Three movements were complete, and much progress was made on the fourth and final movement, but not enough (in my opinion) to justify assembling a completion, though several attempts have been made. It is incomplete with just the three movements, but perhaps it is best to leave it thus, a reminder of our mortality. When it became clear to Bruckner that he was not going to see it through, he suggested that a performance might conclude with his choral setting of the Te Deum, an immensely magnificent work - in the wrong key for a conclusion to this symphony, but I think it indicates in spirit Bruckner's intent for the final movement.

The recording is by Wilhelm Furtwängler (one of my favorite conductors of the older generation) and the Berlin Philharmonic, in a live performance on October 7, 1944. The original tapes were confiscated by the Soviets in 1945 and only became available decades later. This performance is almost terrifying in its intensity.

One can hardly imagine what the conditions were for a group of musicians to play this music in that time and place, with the Russians almost at their doorstep, the Germany they loved in ruins, and an insane and deadly tyrant in control. It is not hard to hear this in the background of this recording; it is life and death for these musicians. To hear what I mean, listen to the last two minutes or so of the first movement, starting about the 8:55 mark of the second YouTube file:
Ninth Symphony, part two of five

In his "de-Nazification" trial after the war, Furtwängler said this:

I knew Germany was in a terrible crisis; I felt responsible for German music, and it was my task to survive this crisis, as much as I could. The concern that my art was misused for propaganda had to yield to the greater concern that German music be preserved, that music be given to the German people by its own musicians. These people, the compatriots of Bach and Beethoven, of Mozart and Schubert, still had to go on living under the control of a regime obsessed with total war. No one who did not live here himself in those days can possibly judge what it was like. (from Wikipedia, s.v. "William Furtwängler")

After the war, it became clear that Furtwängler had helped as many Jewish musicians as he could to escape, including the conductor Josef Krips and the composer Arnold Schoenberg. He also had connections with the Resistance, and the organizers of the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler in 1944, the "20 July plot." But to a large degree after the war he remained under a cloud. Because of intense opposition by musicians such as Isaac Stern, George Szell, and Arturo Toscanini (who all three spent the war safely ensconced in the United States), the Chicago Symphony Orchestra was forced to withdraw their offer to make Furtwängler their musical director. He was never permitted to conduct in the United States.

Furtwängler died in 1954.

There is a 2001 movie on YouTube about the investigation and trial of Furtwängler in 1946: "Taking Sides." I have not yet watched much of it [added later - now I have; see the second footnote]

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Footnotes:

There are some 900 "views" of the first of the YouTube files of this performance of the Bruckner; the later sections of the recording (there are five, covering the three movements) have only 300 or so views.

The other day, as J. and I planned music for a summer diocesan event, we sampled two YouTube recordings that will be used for liturgical dance. These recordings, of "music" which I found to be cold, commercial, and entirely devoid of either musical or spiritual content, had some 200,000 views each.

The wicked prowl on every side, and that which is worthless is highly prized by everyone. (Psalm 12:8)

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I spent the latter part of this Sunday evening watching the aforementioned movie about Furtwängler. One thing is clear: there are no easy answers as to what a musician is to do in such a time. Or any person. May God have mercy on us all.

The Nazi experience is a proof that Music and other aspects of High Culture are not in themselves sufficient to resist evil. Only God can do that. Or more to the point, God-With-Us (Emmanuel).