Recital Season, responses, and improvisations

Recital Season has begun: The parish hosted a doctoral recital on Double Bass this afternoon, and the Graduate Student Jazz Combo tonight. Both were excellent; both had fewer than twenty people in the audience. No parishioners attended.

I am of two minds about this work; I consider it important and I enjoy it – but it results in a day like today when I put in lots of hours and still do not discharge my duties. All told, the two programs consumed close to six hours. I tell myself that if it was my Duty, I should not feel badly about it. There would be no blessing on such work as I might have gotten done in those six hours if I did it by shirking what God wanted of me. And, the best I can tell, that would be hosting these two recitals.

Whether I like it or not, there will be a lot fewer recitals from now on: the School of Music will finally be moving into their new building this summer, eight years after they lost the old one to the flood.

****************

Some new YouTube clips:

Preces and Responses (Craig Phillips)
This is the only accompanied set of the responses that I know, and they are excellent.

Preces and Responses (David Drinkell)
Another fine set of the responses. The photo is from a webpage that has information about Drinkell, who sounds like a delightful character. He is a fan of Tolkien and LOTR, which raises him several levels in my estimation.

Walk as children of light (Daniel Kallman)
Our anthem from the April Evensong; it is so good to be done with Lent and into the Fifty Days!

Improvisation for the Fourth Sunday of Easter
I had three tunes that I wanted to include: one way to do that is a Rondo form, so that is what this is. “Resignation” (My Shepherd will supply my need) is the main tune that recurs each time in the tonic, following each of the other tunes, which are “St. Columba” (The king of love my Shepherd is) and “Old Hundredth” (All people that on earth do dwell). I don’t like all of this improvisation, but there are parts of it that I think went very well, especially the “C” section (Old Hundredth, which combines with Resignation), and the final return of the “A” section, where Old Hundredth continues to go alongside Resignation, with bits of St. Columba as well.

Improvisation on “Land of Rest”
This one is a set of Variations, from this morning’s service. It is structurally simpler than the previous.

****
I keep putting improvisations on YouTube; they are not much listened to. For that matter, I do not know if the congregation likes them or not. Someone did thank me for the “Land of Rest” variations this morning, and one of my friends sometimes listens to a CD of these things as she drives to work. All I know is that I like them; they are the sort of music I would want to listen to before a church service, or at certain other times -- I like to end my Sunday night with some of this music.

More to the point, they are functional. There was a time when the 9:00 service did not begin well. Since I began playing improvisations, people have entered quietly and perhaps have used the time to prepare themselves for worship. If that is the case, I am doing the right thing.

Almost heaven, West Virginia...

The first time that I heard this song, it was sung by John Denver. Live, in concert.
I was in college, far from home. I almost never went to non-classical concerts, but there I was. The show was simply him and a couple of other musicians sitting on stools, playing guitars and singing. No special effects, no fancy lighting, no larger-than-life overamplification – just the music, most of it songs that he had written.

At the end, he started in on this, which would become one of his most famous songs:

Almost heaven, West Virginia,
Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River…

Sitting beside me was my friend M., who grew up in the next county over from me. West Virginia was (and is) a place that gets almost no positive notice. Few people have anything nice to say about it.

But anyone who grew up there always wants to go back.

Country roads, take me home
To the place I belong,
West Virginia, mountain mama
Take me home, country roads.

I will never forget looking at her, the two of us amazed and delighted that someone was singing a song about home.

That was a long time ago, and both of us are even farther from home nowadays, a thousand miles and more in opposite directions.

All my memories gather round her,
Miner’s lady, stranger to blue water.
Dark and dusty, painted on the sky,
Misty taste of moonshine, teardrops in my eye.

I have not forgotten the Mountain State. None of us ever will.

*************
Tonight, three of my young friends, singing as the Skipperlings, made their first appearance at the Mill, one of the leading music venues in our community; they were the opening act for an evening of music, singing to an appreciative full house.

And they finished with this song.

I hear her voice in the morning hours she calls me,
Radio reminds me of my home far away…

When I consider how I was one of the people who helped teach these girls to sing, it gives me goosebumps. I do believe that I will remember this night as long as I remember that John Denver concert, and with equal affection.

Dear Skipperlings -- should you see this, thank you for singing that song tonight. You could not have given me a greater gift. I hope you always remember that Music can do such things for people. It can take them home, no matter how many years and thousands of miles it may be.

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.

Kreutzer Sonata, Bach, and the Armor of Light

This was the weekend for musical events. We had two concerts on Friday night, and another tonight, following our Advent Lessons and Carols service.

One of them was a doctoral violin recital by Tim Cuffman. Long-time readers may recall my reaction to his first doctoral recital last spring.

This time, I am not going to write a review. It is not fair to the many other fine musicians to single Tim out for special notice. The doctoral viola recital on Friday by Tim's friend Manuel Tábora and his wife and accompanist Joanna was also very fine – what I heard of it. I was drawn away from much of it by logistical problems and heard only parts of it, and that mostly from outside the closed door to the church.

But I will say this: Tim showed again that when he has a Big Piece to play, he takes hold of it and sweeps this listener away. Last year it was the Bach Chaconne; this time it was the Beethoven “Kreutzer” sonata, Op. 47, No. 9. He and his accompanist Asami Hagiwara played with the enormous energy and commitment to the sound that Beethoven requires. And, like last year with the Chaconne, it is only later, as the movements conclude and finally the piece as a whole, that one grasps the unity of purpose that binds the entire performance into a whole. It is this quality that is special about Tim Cuffman's playing.

Here is my organ prelude from this morning: a setting of Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland by Bach (BWV 659, from the Leipzig Chorales).

And here is a bit of this evening's Lessons and Carols service: a setting of the Collect for Advent that concludes the service, written for a commission from our parish a few years ago by Craig Phillips. It is followed by the blessing and the final Hymn, “Joy to the World.” The organist for the Phillips is Del Disselhorst, the flute is played by Beth Cody Hayes; I am playing for the hymn.

Tim is a better musician than I am, and his recital was better than our music-making. But as Tolkien wrote, “in God’s kingdom the presence of the greatest does not depress the small.” Our choir consists of amateur singers, and we make the best music we can. It is my task to help them improve, and to get better myself. The day will come when we shall finally have cast away all that hinders us, when we see Him as He is.

Almighty God, give us grace to 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.

It has been a long week, and a long weekend; I can say no more. Blessings be with you all.

Whitsunday, and the Leipzig Chorales

This day is the feast of the Holy Ghost the Lord, and Giver of Life, one of the seven Principal Feasts of the Church. My organ voluntaries today were the first two chorale preludes from the great Leipzig Chorales, gathered as a collection by J. S. Bach in his final years. The collection begins with Komm, heiliger Geist “in organo pleno” [see the first link at the end for a YouTube performance]. It is followed by a second setting, “alio modo” (“in another form”). The first (which was my postlude) represents one aspect of the Spirit: Her boundless energy, Her infinite capacity to be “outside the box,” outside any possible limitation and beyond even our wildest hopes and imaginings. The second is the quiet and gentle Comforter, the “still, small voice” who guides us when we are perplexed, binds up our wounds, patiently forms us into the image of Christ. The first is the mighty wind and the tongues of fire that fell on the disciples; the second is the water of life, flowing out from the throne of God – and from each believer – for the healing of the nations (Ezekiel 47, Revelation 22:1-2, St. John 7:37-39)

But there is also a subtext to this Day which is heard in the Daily Office Lessons:
- Deuteronomy 16:9-12
- Acts 4:18-33
- St. John 4:19-26

Deuteronomy makes clear that this feast of thanksgiving is not just for the elites. It is for everyone, and especially the “stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow.”

And thou shalt rejoice before the LORD thy God, thou, and thy son, and thy daughter, and thy manservant, and thy maidservant, and the Levite that is within thy gates, and the stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow, that are among you.... And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in Egypt.

Our Lord Christ tells the Woman of Samaria that the worship of the living God is no longer bound to any place, nor limited to the priests and Levites and the few who have been the chosen.

[T]he hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for the Father seeketh such to worship him.

The door is open for the likes of William Tyndale, who told one of the prelates of his day that “ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more Scripture than thou doest.” From the first, Christianity has been most of all a religion of slaves, outcasts, beggars, sharecroppers, peasants, common working folk, and children. And, miraculously, it is all this without setting them against the rich, the well-educated, the comfortable; there is room for all. This is the work of the Holy Ghost, in concert with the Father and the Son. The door is now open for everyone.

“Would God that all the LORD's people were prophets,” said Moses (Numbers 11:29). Today is this hope fulfilled: “Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy... And on my servants and on my handmaidens I will pour out in those days of my Spirit, and they shall prophesy” (Acts 2:17-18, quoting Joel).

One of the ways in which this is fulfilled is through Music, which is given to all of us in one form or another. In Friday's Epistle from the Daily Offices we heard this:

[B]e filled with the Spirit; speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making music in your heart to the Lord (Ephesians 5:19)

When we sing well, or play well, the music is living water flowing out from us. It is not our doing; it is the work of the Spirit.

For every work [or act] of creation is threefold, an earthly trinity to match the heavenly.

First [not in time, but merely in order of enumeration] there is the Creative Idea, passionless, timeless, beholding the whole work complete at once, the end in the beginning: and this is the image of the Father.

Second, there is the Creative Energy [or Activity] begotten of that idea, working in time from the beginning to the end, with sweat and passion, being incarnate in the bonds of matter: and this is the image of the Word.

Third, there is the Creative Power, the meaning of the work and its response in the lively soul: and this is the image of the indwelling Spirit.

And these three are one, each equally in itself the whole work, whereof none can exist without other: and this is the image of the Trinity. (Dorothy Sayers, “The Mind of the Maker” p. 37-38, quoted here.)

---

I would love to play the Leipzig Chorales as a concert, or more probably as two concerts on successive nights. One sometimes hears the Clavierübung chorales in concert, with the Prelude and Fugue in E flat framing them, and it makes a highly effective programme. I do not recall ever hearing of the Leipzig Chorales as a programme, though surely many have done it. I believe that this music, heard all at once, would be a most profound lesson in the art of the organ chorale. Not only does Bach demonstrate many ways in which the Tune can be treated, he offers multiple versions of some of the chorales, showing the range of possibilities – as we heard today with the two widely divergent settings of Komm, heiliger Geist.

Were I to do such a thing, today's two voluntaries would be the beginning of the first concert, the first fifteen minutes. There would follow:

An Wasserflussen Babylon
Schmücke dich, O liebe Seele
Herr Jesu Christ, dich zu uns wend
O Lamm Gottes unschuldig
Three settings of Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland

This set of preludes would begin and end strongly and contain sufficient variety to be engaging. If we sang the chorales, it would help the audience understand what Bach is doing, and would make a good full programme. The problem might be with the second night's music:

Three settings of Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr'
Two settings of Jesus Christus, unser Heiland
Komm, Gott Schöpfer, Heiliger Geist
Some Canonic Variations on the Christmas song Vom Himmel hoch, da komm ich her
Vor deinen Thron tret ich

For the most part, this music is quiet. It might be especially difficult to maintain interest through the Canonic Variations so late in a program; they are sublime, but the listener (and the player) must be attentive. It would be well to end with the Vor deinen Thron, composed in part on the final day of Bach's life. It would be very well indeed; coming to such an ending would be a chief reason for playing these programs.

In practical terms, I have played all but four of these chorales, and one of the four is fingered and on the schedule for October (Herr Jesu Christ, dich zu uns wend – I am excited to finally be playing this delightful piece). Several of these are among the chief parts of my repertoire, music that is perhaps more important to me than any other – in that category I would place the quiet setting of Komm, Heiliger Geist from this morning, the O Lamm Gottes, the first setting of Allein Gott, and Vor deinen Thron. But I do not know if I could get all of them to performance level at the same time; it is a lot of music.

Here are recordings of the Eighteen Chorales, but without the Canonic Variations, played very well by Hans Otto in 1970 on two Silbermann organs of the sort that would have been familiar to Bach. All told, it is about ninety minutes of music.

First part
Second part
Third part

And here is Helmut Walcha playing the Canonic Variations on another Silbermann organ, from perhaps 1960.

Wounds of Love

When encountering music as listener or performer, there are occasions when everything is right, as I have attempted to describe in the previous essays. The music is so perfect, so beautiful and strong, that for a moment it is as if we have passed from this life into the heavenly places; we have been pierced by a joy too intense for mortal flesh. And then, the moment is gone.

We may also encounter such moments of illumination elsewhere -- in Nature, in the fine arts, poetry, and literature, in human interactions where we are surprised by love and grace, and in the Divine Liturgy, especially in the Holy Eucharist (cf. St. Luke 24:30-32) and Choral Evensong. We would, like St. Peter, build tabernacles and dwell forever in these places (St. Mark 9:5). And we cannot. The performance ends, or comes unglued, or we lose connection with it.

We make recordings, seeking to capture the moment. But a recording is no more than a snapshot, a flower dried and pressed in a book. Music is a living thing and cannot be captured. By its nature, live music is gone as soon as it has sounded. And even though the recording is always the same, we are not; we never hear it again in the same way.

The great spiritual doctor St. John of the Cross warned us to cling to nothing of this earth. When I began reading his writings this spring, his calls to intense mortifications of the flesh and spirit struck me as wrong. It seems ungrateful to take no pleasure in the gifts of God. But in his “Spiritual Canticle,” he described these good gifts -- and most of all, these moments of illumination and delight which one finds in music, nature, and elsewhere -- as “wounds of love,” for they point us toward their Maker:

In the vivid contemplation and knowledge of created things the soul beholds such a multiplicity of graces, powers, and beauty with which God has endowed them, that they seem to it to be clothed with admirable beauty and supernatural virtue derived from the infinite supernatural beauty of the face of God.... Hence, the soul wounded with love of that beauty of the Beloved... sings as in the following stanza:

“Oh! Who can heal me?
Give me perfectly yourself,
Send me no more
A messenger
Who cannot tell me what I wish.”
(from “A Spiritual Canticle of the Soul and the Bridegroom Christ,” Stanzas V and VI)

When we are deeply moved by a musical performance, or anything else, we must cling not to it, but to Him of whom the music is but a distant echo. If we insist on clinging to the music in itself, it becomes like the leftover manna, which “bred worms and stank” (Exodus 16:20).

The Moment passes. But if we receive it aright, we emerge from the cloud of glory and see Jesus only (St. Mark 9:8). And as we grow in grace, we may come to realize that the Moment has not passed from us at all; we see Him everywhere. He remains with us as He promised: “And lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world” (St. Matthew 28:20).

Great Performances

I could not sleep last night, for replaying the Bach in my mind. Tim Cuffman's performance of the Partita has changed the way in which I hear the piece and will probably improve my own playing of Bach. We musicians are a fellowship, and we must constantly learn from one another -- and more, I think, from those who play instruments different from ours.

Last night's recital put me in mind of other performances that have changed me. It is not a long list.

- a piano recital by Elaine Pao, a fellow student at the Choir College in the early 1980's. I do not now recall exactly what she played; Chopin, perhaps one of the Scherzos or Ballades. What I do remember is the exuberant joy of her playing.

- a series of performances by the Johnson City Symphony Orchestra in the later 1980's, directed in those days by Antonia Joy Wilson. She had the notion of taking this mostly-amateur community orchestra through the Beethoven Symphonies. I think that they made it through the first eight; the Ninth was beyond them, in part because of insufficient choral resources.

- a performance of the B Minor Mass by a choral society in Mobile, Alabama at an AGO regional convention, probably in the 1990's. I believe that John Gearhart was the director.

- later in the 1990's, a girls' choir from our city's sister community in Siberia visited through the good work of the local Rotary Club. They performed in our church, which had a good acoustic for them. I will never forget that night: these girls, none of whom had ever been out of Siberia and were more than a little intimidated by what they saw of the U.S., their clothes shabby (and probably the best that they had), not a scrap of printed music available to them -- I learned that they sang from mimeographs prepared by their conductor -- sang for almost two hours, all of it Znamenny Chant and folksong.

- more recently, Sam Stapleton and three graduate student colleagues performed the Quartet for the End of Time, our parish church lit by candlelight and their four music stand lights. I later heard a faculty quartet play the same work in the same room; it was excellent, but did not have the hair-raising electricity of Stapleton and his friends.

- about the same time, there was a D.M.A. piano recital that included an incandescent performance of the Liszt Sonata. The artist was an Asian woman whom I had not met and never saw again. I do not recall her name, but I will never forget her Liszt. Playing our dear old Steinway (years before its renovation, in the condition the rebuilder labelled "not suitable for serious work"), she made it sound like ten or twenty pianos, pouring forth a torrent of sound -- then whispering at the edge of audibility, as that piano did so well. Many who played the piano in those days did not understand how to draw Music from it; she did. The audience consisted of the following: a boyfriend (spouse?), her teacher and faculty committee, me.

- a few years ago, Carrie Beissler played the Franck Violin Sonata. She, like Tim Cuffman, was in the studio of Scott Conklin. Her playing left me speechless, in tears, and I will never approach the Franck organ music in quite the same way as before.

None of these people were famous, though Ms. Pao and Ms. Wilson have gone on to distinguished - though not "super-star" - careers. Elaine heads a music school in her native Malaysia and concertizes in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. Antonia directs an orchestra on the West Coast and has a long list of accolades and awards for her work. Mr. Stapleton now directs his own chamber orchestra and is prospering. Ms. Beissler is, I think, still a graduate student somewhere.

For many of these musicians, especially the players from the JCSO and the singers in Mobile -- and perhaps the girls from Siberia -- there was a sense that they would never again have an opportunity to perform as they were that night (or in that series, with the Beethoven). They sang and played from the heart in a manner that jaded professionals rarely achieve. I recall, for example, the end of the Beethoven Third, the Eroica. As the horns (who, I gather, had struggled mightily) played the fanfares in the final bars - nailing it, flawlessly - there was a palpable sense from the orchestra that "WE MADE IT!!!!!" One would never hear this in the work of, say, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the players going through the motions as they play the Erioca for the umpteenth time.

And none of these musicians who have changed my life with their performances were Organists.
I have ideas as to why that is so, but I will leave it there for now.

I omit from this list all the music that I have experienced as part of the Sacred Liturgy. Such music differs in so many ways that comparison is impossible, and sacred music properly draws much of its strength from its role and placement in the Liturgy. I cannot list the scores, probably hundreds, of times that the hymn singing of our parish church, or Hymn Society conferences, has changed me every bit as much as the performances I have listed. Nor can I describe the choral music I have experienced as singer or conductor -- Choral Evensongs at the RSCM Courses and in our own parish church, some of the music from our Advent Lessons and Carols services, some of the occasions when our combined youth and adult choirs have sung together, the plain ordinary week-to-week Psalmody that we sing. Even last night, before Mr. Cuffman's recital, we had sung Choral Evensong. There were some rough edges, but there were moments that were transcendent -- parts of the Smith Responses, the Howells "St. John's" Magnificat -- sung by the nine singers that we had on hand. It was amazing.

Nor can I assess my own playing. I think that I have played well at times; I hope that it has had a positive effect on some of the listeners. I keep trying, and I continue to learn.

Tim Cuffman, violinist

Just now, I did a Yahoo search on Tim Cuffman, and found almost nothing. In a few years, that will change.

He played a violin recital at our church this evening, and he may become one of the great musicians of our time.

Tim is a graduate student in violin at the University of Iowa, a student of Scott Conklin. His program tonight consisted of two pieces:

- Partita No. 2, in D minor (BWV 1004) - J. S. Bach
- Sonata No. 1, in G major (Op. 78) - J. Brahms

The Brahms was elegant and full of dignity, especially the beautiful and gentle ending of the final movement. But it was the Bach that amazed me.

This is the Partita that includes the famous Chaconne, a staple of the literature. It is the violinist's equivalent of the organ Passacaglia that I played at last month's Evensong. I have played a lot of Bach, and heard a lot of Bach performances. I do not think that I have ever heard one to equal tonight's -- not just on violin, but by any instrument, any ensemble. Cuffman played with a firm and individual grasp of this mighty work, in places very unlike the interpretations one commonly hears -- not simply different from the way others play it, but better, with more clarity of line, of formal structure. It was clear at every moment just how each phrase, each note, fit into the overall structure. This sort of playing is hard enough at the organ, as I well know. It is even harder in the solo violin and violoncello works, where all the counterpoint must be carried by the one instrument.

I could say more; his intonation was splendid, even in some of the passages that are notoriously challenging to play in tune. His tone was rich and warm, filling the room. His demeanor as a performer was terrific -- no microphones, no recording, no histrionics, no showmanship, no talking between pieces. Just a young man coming out with his violin, standing before the audience, and playing with intensity.

At the end of the Chaconne, I made a fool of myself, shouting "Bravo!!!!" like it was the greatest performance I had ever heard -- and, as I write this several hours later, I think that it was. Often at the student recitals, I chafe at the long intermissions -- tonight, I needed it. I had to go outside for a few minutes to breathe the night air.

I must say that Cuffman is not yet a finished musician. He is early in his doctoral studies, and will learn much in the coming years. I wished that the Brahms had been more passionate in places. It had the intellectual clarity of the Bach, which is indeed a critical element in Brahms, but Cuffman needs to continue his work with Brahms, and probably the other Romantics. I would love to hear him play some Beethoven; I think he would be outstanding in this repertoire. And if I were his teacher, I would turn him loose with composers like Paganini and Kreisler, to develop other sides of his musical personality. Maybe he does these things already; I would love to find out.

But even if he were to become a Bach specialist and never play anything else, he would be an artist of the first rank. I simply think that with time, and with the further growth as a musician that I am certain he will attain, he will play the major works of the repertoire, of all styles, with the intelligence and passion that we heard tonight in the Bach.

Die blaue Blume

The Blue Flower

This afternoon, after playing the Liszt Weinen Klagen, I received at my office a vase of blue irises, with a note. It was from the organbuilder, C.H., who was at the concert on this instrument that he designed and installed, thanking me for a “masterly reading and interpretation,” with reference to the “blaue Blume” as a Romantic ideal, claiming that I “achieved that ideal today...”

I do not recall anyone ever sending or giving me flowers after a performance. It made me as giddy as a teenager. I still am, several hours later: I put the flowers out in the choir room for all to enjoy.

Die blaue Blume

Ich suche die blaue Blume,
Ich suche und finde sie nie,
Mir träumt, dass in der Blume
Mein gutes Glück mir blüh.
Ich wandre mit meiner Harfe
Durch Länder, Städt und Au'n,
Ob nirgends in der Runde
Die blaue Blume zu schaun.
Ich wandre schon seit lange,
Hab lang gehofft, vertraut,
Doch ach, noch nirgends hab ich
Die blaue Blum geschaut.

(Joseph von Eichendorff, 1818)

Preparing for Liszt

Over the last three weeks, I have been practicing for the Liszt “Weinen, Klagen...” which is to be played at the Congregational Church on March 14. Most of the work has been at the piano, and a large share of it on one twenty-measure passage (measures 163-183). My lessons from Distler at Christmas have been helpful here: I have been working this up with the metronome as I did with parts of the Distler piece, four measures at a time, and there is a fair chance that it might be ready in time.

My first rehearsal across town at the church is scheduled for Friday, and I will only have perhaps one additional session before the recital – the minister over there has decided (sensibly) that we organists make too much noise for him to hold counselling sessions in his office, so Fridays are no longer available. This one is, because he is out of town. The other practice days which are available, Wednesdays and Thursdays, do not work very well for my schedule.

So, I need to use this Friday efficiently.

I became familiar with the instrument last year, and have the stoplist that I carefully noted down, with the locations of all the stops and the combination pistons. More importantly, I have a good sense of how the individual stops and combinations sound. So, an experiment: I spent about three hours today working out a fairly detailed registration scheme in my office. It will doubtless need tweaking when I hear it in the church, but that will take less time than creating the scheme from scratch.

There are between thirty and thirty-seven registration changes in this twenty-minute piece. Some of them can be made by hand; most of the rest can be made with manual pistons and adjustments to the couplers. I think I can get by with one general piston, which is used at the beginning and at two subsequent locations in the score. But I will be making heavy use of all of the manual pistons, setting them up from softest to loudest for each division. There are several places in the piece where Liszt intends a gradual crescendo from a fairly soft dynamic to pretty much full organ: the manual pistons will make this possible, along with judicious use of the Swell pedal.

Lessons from Liszt? The construction of a registration scheme such as this is one. Another is the pianistic nature of the piece, which has been good for my technical development. Perhaps most of all, there is the need for an all-out Romantic engagement with the music, full of rubato and expressiveness in a manner that makes Franck or Brahms or Mendelssohn (composers of the period with whom I am more comfortable) seem positively reserved. Liszt poured his soul into his music, and the performer must do the same.

Many moments in the piece feel Wagnerian, which would please Liszt. He was a staunch supporter of Wagner from the earliest days to the end, and arranged for the first productions of Tannhäuser and Lohengrin at a time when it was not at all a given that Wagner could get these operas performed. Liszt's daughter Cosima ended up as Mrs. Richard Wagner, though in a manner with which her father was not at all pleased: she jilted her husband (and Liszt's close friend) Hans von Bülow to run off with Wagner, doing this while von Bülow was preoccupied with trying as music director and conductor to bring Wagner's Tristan und Isolde to production, a monumental undertaking even now, and more so then when such music was beyond anything that had been experienced. Liszt refused to attend their wedding, though in the end he died at Bayreuth, Cosima (rather unwillingly) at his side.

I share Franck's suspicion of Wagner – Franck procured a copy of the score to Tristan, and after studying it scrawled across the first page “This is poison.” But Wagner did have a religious streak of sorts, as can be heard in Parsifal. Liszt had even more of one, and this piece, the “Weinen, Klagen...”, is one of the strongest expressions of it. As I work on this, I sense that Liszt was like many of us – full of conflicts and doubts, very far from perfection in morals or manner of life, but casting himself upon the mercy of the Lord, much like the publican: “God be merciful to me a sinner.”

In the Via Crucis, an organ solo version of which I will be playing at our parish as part of the March 6 Stations of the Cross, the vocal score ends with repeated cries of Ave, crux... and Crux fidelis, spes unica. In this, I join Liszt: there is no other hope for any of us. I will try to pour my soul into the “Weinen, Klagen” as he did, trusting in its final affirmation: Was Gott tut, daß ist wohlgetan.

Be careful what you ask for

I was wondering what to do about several options for this summer; I would need to decide pretty soon about one of them.

- Fortieth high school reunion. One of my high school classmates was kind enough to come to my Mother's funeral, and that put me in mind of these people with whom I shared those years. I would like to see them again.

- The Hymn Society of America conference, in Winnipeg. I love Canada, and have told myself that if the conference ever came to Manitoba or Saskatchewan, I would go. Well, here it is.

- A visit to my sister, as I did last year.

- A visit to my cousins and other family, and to the farm that we own “back home.” I cannot do both this and a visit to my sister, so I have not seen the rest of the family since the aforementioned funeral. I have only walked around on the farm once since it came into our possession quite a few years ago, and I would like to see it again. I wonder, too, about my responsibilities toward that piece of land. Family property or not, if I cannot be there to look after it, perhaps we should sell it to someone who can. Here is a bit more about the farm, wherein we had a "near miss" on selling the mineral rights. Fracking was in the background and was clearly the intent of the purchasers, though they carefully hid the consequences from the landowners and I did not then understand what was afoot. I continue to thank God that the deal fell through. My invitation still stands: "... when all things are made new, come and visit me. I will be up there in the hills, planting trees, or playing Bach, or sitting on the porch as the sun goes behind the hill drinking a cool glass of water from the spring. I'll pour one for you, too."

- Stay home and work. As much as I enjoy long highway trips, it is environmentally irresponsible to do any traveling that is not necessary. This applies to all of the options outlined above. The responsible thing to do would be to stay at home. I might then be better prepared for the fall choir season. I might even read some of the books that overflow my shelves at home.

- At my recent staff evaluation with the Rector, he asked that I select a date in the fall to play an organ recital, and inform him of the date. If I am going to do this, I will have to get all of the music “settled” and ready to play by mid-August, because I know from experience that there will be time for no more than maintenance practice once the choir season begins on August 22.

These decisions have been a matter of prayer, and seemed to come to the fore yesterday. Today brought me something of an answer. We had our spring planning day as a church staff, and I watched my summer pretty much disappear, especially the month of June. The first Sunday when I am not committed to duty is July 8, and that seems very distant.

Answers to prayer are not always what we want to hear. It is sounding to me like I need to stay home and work. Even if I do this, I do not see how I can prepare a fall recital. After today's news, it is clear that the whole month of June will be a matter of scrambling from one Sunday to the next, just like the rest of the year, so that leaves July and half of August – and RSCM takes a week out of that. So on that part of my prayers, I think I am hearing that I must aim for a later date. I would suggest fall 2013, but that is contingent on summer 2013 being better than summer 2012.

But I must not feel sorry for myself. Sunday night, I sought a quotation for the weekly Order of Rehearsal sheet for the adult choir, and saw this. It is a reminder that the sort of thing I have described is the normal lot of a musician, and that the work is important enough to persevere:

Often, when contending with obstacles of every sort that interfered with my work, often when my powers of both body and mind were failing and I felt it a hard matter to persevere in the course I had entered on, a secret feeling within me whispered: 'There are but few contented and happy men here below: grief and care prevail everywhere; perhaps your labors may one day be a source from which the weary and worn, or the man burdened with affairs, may derive a few moments' rest and refreshment.' What a powerful motive for pressing onward! (Joseph Haydn)

On another note, yesterday was the feast of King Charles the Martyr. I revere his saintly memory and his stand on behalf of the Church and the poor and needy of the realm, and that of his coworker and Archbishop William Laud. Mention of these two arouses strong negative reactions among some of my co-workers, so I will say no more. I will, however, provide two links:

Tobias Haller BSG

Kiefer's Bios

From Kiefer's biographical sketch:

In his struggle with his opponents, Charles considered himself to be contending for two things:
(1) the good of the realm and the liberty and well-being of the people, which he believed would be better served by the monarch ruling according to ancient precedent, maintaining the traditional rights of the people as enshrined in the common law, than by a Parliament that ended up denying that it was either bound by the law or accountable to the people; and
(2) the Church of England, preaching the doctrine of the undivided Church of the first ten centuries, administering sacraments regarded not as mere psychological aids to devotion but as vehicles of the presence and activity of God in his Church, governed by bishops who had been consecrated by bishops who had been consecrated by bishops... back certainly to the second century, and, as many have believed, back to the Twelve Apostles and to the command of Christ himself.

From Haller's essay:

Not that Charles was perfect. He was as flawed as any saint on the Calendar, the BVM excepted, of course. But in the day of decision, he stood for something — not only as a lay leader defending the episcopate, or as a pious Christian defending the Prayer Book, but in witness to a whole religious way of life, a way we call Anglicanism.

To play or not to play...

Coming soon: a recital in the Lenten series at the Congregational Church across town. For those who are local, it is Wednesday, March 14, at noon.

I played the Grande Pièce Symphonique in this series last year and wrote at length about it: this links to the last of several postings on the subject:

I wished that I had gotten the piece settled and thoroughly prepared at least a month in advance; instead, “my preparations were more on the order of cramming for a final exam.” I determined to do better this year.

I selected music for the program: the Variations on Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, by Franz Liszt. I had it fully fingered by August, with hopes of getting a First Workout through the piece, and taking it over to the church for registrations before the fall term. That did not happen. Nor did it happen during the January school break.

We are less than six weeks out from the concert, and I am not yet through the First Workout – in other words, it lay untouched through the fall, Christmas, and the first half of January. I have worked at it about six hours this week, and am about two-thirds through the workout (at the piano). I wonder if I can play it.

I was ready to give up on Wednesday, and went so far as to select an alternative program: one of the Franck Chorales and a piece by Howells. The Howells is solid; I played it for Evensong a few years ago. But the Franck is not yet fingered. I played it decades ago – it was the first “big”organ work that I learned, back in the late 1970's – but I was not careful of such matters in those days.

What to do? Take the time to start from scratch on the Franck, or press on with the Liszt? By spending most of today on Liszt, I have made my choice. There are essentially just two passages that are thoroughly virtuosic. If I can work steadily at these every day, I should be fine; the rest of the piece is well within reach – I think.

I am intentionally doing the First Workout at the pianoforte. Liszt was one of the great virtuosi at the piano, and carried that style of playing to the organ. My hunch is that solid work at the piano will be better at this point than a lot of work at the organ, which does not build strength and endurance in the same way.

And I must be patient. Even though I know better, I was speeding up on the passagework and getting sloppy. Unless the fingering is absolutely ingrained, I will not be able to play these passages. And that will happen only with lots of slow practice.

It is going to be another example of “cramming for a final exam.”

Here is a program note and a YouTube performance of the piece (in three parts):

Part I

Part II

Part III

The program will also include the Bach Fugue on a Theme of Corelli, BWV 579. I plan to play it considerably slower and more quietly than the organist on the YouTube clip. But his performance is convincing; I hope mine is, too.

As the program note above says, Liszt first composed the Variations for pianoforte. Here is a performance of that (much shorter) version by Vladimir Horowitz. I hope I can carry some of these ideas and the intensity of this rendition into the organ version when I play it.

[Edit 1/29/11 -- The Bach piece will have to wait: I added up the timings, and the combination of Bach and Liszt is three minutes over the time allotted to me. But I have something that will fit even better: a very short little piece from late in Liszt's life, "Resignation." It is only two minutes long (twenty-nine measures), very soft, and will serve as a good introduction before launching into the "Weinen, Klagen."

And I learned yesterday that I have a wedding to play on Saturday March 17. That will make for an interesting week.]

The Planning Cycle, and some Messiaen

Selection of music is a major part of the church musician's work. Most of us muddle through a week at a time, and this can be done effectively (e.g.: J. S. Bach in Leipzig, when he was composing a new Cantata every week). I have done too much of that lately, and not at the level achieved by JSB. It is hard to maintain a suitable overview of the Story when looking at it one week at a time; I do much better when I can plan a larger chunk of the year at one time, perhaps spread over several weeks. I must do this with the choral music, and ought to do so with the hymnody and organ voluntaries.

The “planning cycle,” as I call it, is so large a task that it can become paralyzing. All told, it accounts for several hundred hours of work each year. I think that this is one reason many church musicians have trouble addressing it in a healthy manner. The best way to tackle a large project of this sort is to break it into a number of smaller tasks. I have a list of these tasks on my computer: it is a nineteen-step process, with several of the steps being sizable in their own right, such as Number Nine: Plan the Eucharistic Psalms for the year; or Number Seventeen: Select the organ voluntaries for the Eucharistic services.

This last is a task I prefer to tackle in the summer, when I can try things out on the piano outside my office door. It is, in my view, less important by far than establishing good selections of choral music and hymns, and it cannot be done until both are in place, for most often the voluntaries are based on the hymns of the day. Thus, I have muddled through most of the current liturgical year, rarely getting more than a few weeks ahead on the voluntaries.

But after about six hours on the task this weekend, it is done! Not only that, but I have completed the final two short steps in the overall planning cycle, and it, likewise, is done, right through Christ the King 2011, some two months from now. I should have been to this point on the 2010-11 season a year ago and should instead be finishing up 2011-12 by now, but I nonetheless rejoice in getting as far as I have.

I am excited about many things that are coming up in these remaining two months, and have two large tasks before me at the organ:

Nov. 6: Fantasia on Sine Nomine, by Craig Phillips. This was commissioned for the retirement of my friend D.D. several years ago, and is a terrific piece, intended for a much larger instrument than our Pilcher. But I think that it will work. I have done nothing on it yet.

Nov. 23: Toccata and Fugue in F (BWV 540), J. S. Bach. I played this several times in the 1990's, but it needs to be carefully re-fingered, and I have not played it on a mechanical action instrument. It is time to do so, for it is one of the glories of the organ repertoire.

Looming ahead are three more challenges:

For the Advent Evensong: Partita on Nun komm der Heiden Heiland, by Hugo Distler. I have played most of Distler's organ music, but not this one. I ordered a copy of the score, and it arrived this past week.

For the Lenten Recitals at the Congregational Church:
Variations on Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, by Franz Liszt. I have never played any of the large-scale organ works of Liszt, and it is time to remedy that. This will involve some significant technical work, and I hope that I am up to the challenge. I have a battered old copy in the edition prepared by Marcel Dupré, complete with his printed fingerings. I have gone through and checked them, making revisions to fit my hands, and have this one ready for registration and its First Workout. I hoped to get that done in August, but it did not happen.

The Dupré edition of Bach is notorious, because his fingerings represent a style of playing that is no longer in vogue. But I have found his fingerings of the Liszt enormously helpful, and left about ninety percent of them in place.

Further ahead: one of the three large-scale movements that I have not yet learned from the Livre du Saint-Sacrement of Messiaen: L'apparition du Christ ressucité à Marie-Madeleine. This is a sprawling eighteen-page piece that may leave people scratching their heads when (Lord willing) I play it as the postlude for Easter Day. Much of it is is pianissimo, though it works up to a four-page toccata-like passage at full organ before a quiet ending on a long-held pianisssimo C major chord that makes me think of St. Julian's famous line: "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." With Christ risen from the dead, all shall indeed be well, forever. The final bars of this movement, a few quiet chords played "trés lent," express this in music about as well as can be imagined.

I would love to play the entire Livre in concert. It might be possible on the Casavant at the Congregational Church; I do not think that our Pilcher could carry it off, though I have played many of the individual movements on it.

I attended the first performance of this work at the AGO National Convention in Detroit: 3 July 1986. The performance of this piece, with Messiaen in attendance, was the reason I got in my rusty pickup truck and drove to Detroit for the convention, the only AGO National that I have attended. To some degree, it left the audience of organists in a muddle; I loved it, but I heard a good bit of scorn heaped on it in the conversations afterwards. That causes me to think that, were I to play the thing, all eighteen movements and 165 pages of it, an audience of (mostly) non-organists might not be receptive. It is not a piece that reveals its secrets immediately. But for those “with ears to hear,” the Livre is a spiritual journey like no other. It needed better program notes than it had in Detroit, and I think that I could write them, giving people a better window into the music.

Such a project is tangential to my duty, and will probably not happen. But I can at least play the movements individually on occasions when they fit the liturgy. I thought that this would be the way the piece would become established, as has happened with La Nativité du Christ and some of the other Messiaen cycles. But I do not think that there are many organists who play anything from the Livre. They ought to; many of the movements are not difficult, and are highly effective.

This evening, I celebrate the completion of the planning cycle. Tomorrow is a day at home for errands and shopping, and (hopefully) lots of time outdoors, for it is supposed to be a fine sunny day. Tuesday, it will be time to dig in and try to bring some of these ideas into reality. And next weekend, I had better start on 2011-12.

Acoustics, chamber music, and congregational song

Our parish recently hosted a chamber music festival, as mentioned in the previous essay. The church was filled to overflowing for three concerts of music. The first night was centered on the Quartet for the End of Time; the second featured the music of Webern and Schoenberg (“Verklärte Nacht”); the third consisted of an evocative Tenebrae by Osvaldo Golijov and Schubert's quartet “Death and the Maiden.” The musicians praised us as a venue for chamber music, especially in terms of acoustics. Most musicians find it rewarding to play or sing in the room, as do I.

Why?

Arthur H. Benade, in “Fundamentals of Musical Acoustics” (1976: Dover reprint 1990), comments: “Singers and instrumentalists enjoy performing in a reverberant environment.... Their confidence is heightened by such surroundings and so, as a matter of fact, is their accuracy in achieving the desired pitch relationships...” (p. 286). When the room has a sufficient reverberation time, the sound from a first note lingers long enough to overlap with a succeeding note. A musician unconsciously uses this overlap to gauge the intonation of the second note in relation to the first; it is as if the two notes were being played together rather than successively. The overlap need only be in the neighborhood of a half-second, though the longer the overlap, the better in terms of intonation.

On the other hand, in a really “large” acoustic with many seconds of reverberation, “there is an upper limit to the rapidity with which tones can follow one another and still show a relationship. This is because in rapid playing the remnants of several earlier tones may ... confuse the auditory picture.” It is not a problem for vocal polyphony of the Renaissance, which is thoroughly at home in such an acoustic. Nor is it a problem for a large part of the organ repertoire. The music of Franck and his successors in the French nineteenth and twentieth (and twenty-first) centuries is at its finest in such surroundings. Bach, Buxtehude, and Distler, on the other hand, are often less successful.

Reverberation time is traditionally related to room volume: large room, large acoustic. When architecture is honest, this relationship holds. But dishonesty is possible. The Chapel at Duke University is a fine neo-Gothic edifice, seating well over a thousand. It looks like a European cathedral. But for decades, it sounded more like a suburban living room. It felt dishonest as soon as one walked in the door; there were no echoing footsteps, no acoustical clues that this was a large space. The ceiling was covered with “Akoustolith,” a material that was used to mimic stonework and dry up the acoustic for the benefit of the clergy. The story is that Dirk Flentrop, a noted Dutch organbuilder who was contracted to build a new instrument for the Chapel, arrived from Europe in 1968, walked in the door, clapped his hands once, listened, said “This will not do,” walked out, and flew back to the Netherlands. (This essay glosses over the incident, which may be apocryphal, but describes the issues involved.) Flentrop would not build an organ unless the acoustics were improved. So, for almost a year, scaffolding worked its way through the Chapel as workers sprayed sealant over the “Akoustolith,” making it more reflective. I heard the room before and after, and the difference was remarkable; the reverberation time was increased from about three seconds to eight seconds. Once the acoustic matched the size of the room, Flentrop returned, built a fine instrument, and the Duke Chapel stands as one of the finest venues for music on a grand scale in the Southeast. Something like the “Resurrection” Symphony of Mahler or the Verdi Requiem would be magnificent in that room.

But it would not be a good place for a string quartet. In those days, the resident quartet played in the East Duke Music Room (now the Nelson Music Room), a fine old high-ceilinged room that seated about three hundred. Its reverberation time was around one or one-and-a-half seconds.

That happens to be about the same as our parish church. When empty, the reverberation time is around one second, and probably about two-thirds of that when full. For chamber music, this is ideal. There is sufficient reverberation for accurate pitch relationships, and the musicians can play or sing rapidly without fear of “outrunning” the room.

Congregational song is a form of “chamber music.” When we sing, we are a group of people who must listen to one another, and tune our voices to one another based on what we hear in a manner akin to a string quartet. In a large acoustic such as the Duke Chapel or the Basilica of Saint Louis, congregational singing is less successful than it is in a room such as our parish church. Even at the pace of a congregational hymn, the notes “outrun” the room, and it becomes difficult to maintain a rhythmic ensemble among people spread across the space. As a singer out in the nave, one hears plenty of sound, but it lacks coherence. “Drying up” the acoustics, as was done at Duke, does not help, for the people are still spread across a large space. In fact, it does not even help the clergy. Listening to a sermon in a large “dry” room is akin to listening to the radio. The sound is obviously artificial, disconnected from anything human. Even in the most resonant of rooms, a sound system which takes account for the precedence effect, first described by the physicist Joseph Henry in 1856 and which Benade outlines on pages 202-205, allows the preacher to be clearly understood and still perceived as a human being. But the preacher must speak speak slowly and distinctly – like the musicians, she must avoid “outrunning the room.”

A very large acoustic is less than ideal for congregational song. It is nonetheless better than the opposite extreme, often found in American churches: the dry room, swathed in carpet and padded pews – or nowadays, padded stadium seats with cupholders. In a dry acoustic, singers lose confidence. They cannot properly hear one another, or even their own voice. Churches with such an acoustic often compensate by having songleaders, equipped with microphones and backed by a “praise band.” The congregation can then sing along with the amplified music, each individual in relative aural isolation and subjugated to those “up front.” That is quite different from the community built by listening to one another as a congregation. The latter is more challenging, but more indicative of our standing in the Body of Christ. A room of appropriate size for chamber music proves to be a space which encourages such singing.

An abridged version of this essay appears in the August edition of our parish newsletter. For further study, I highly recommend Benade's book, alongside the classic text in the field of acoustics, “On the Sensations of Tone” by Hermann Helmholz (1877: Dover reprint 1954). Benade gives more attention to room acoustics and the construction of musical instruments, especially wind instruments; Helmholz more to the production and sensation of musical tone, especially the human voice and the physiology of hearing. His book is a primary source; in much of the book, he is writing of his own experiments and discoveries. In a footnote on page 273, Benade described Helmholz as one “whose name is as famous in acoustics as it is in optics, electromagnetism, and thermodynamics.” He was a pioneer in all of these areas, one of the great physicists of the nineteenth century.

Preaching, and the "Quartet for the End of Time"

Our church has hosted a Chamber Music Festival this weekend: three days, three concerts. I wish I could write at length about them, but (for once) I am speechless.

The best I can do is one tangential thought, stemming from their performance of the Quartet for the End of Time (O. Messiaen). It is based on a passage from the Revelation of St. John the Divine:

And I saw another mighty angel, come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was at it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire... and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth, And cried with a loud voice, as when a lion roareth: and when he had cried, seven thunders uttered their voices... And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heave, and sware by him that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things which are therein, that there should be time no longer... (10:1-6)

The Quartet is about an hour's music on this vision, with movement titles such as “Liturgy of crystal,” and “Abyss of birds,” and “Dance of fury, for the seven trumpets,” and “Praise to the immortality of Jesus.”

Those who preach tend to avoid the Revelation of St. John. Many in the liberal denominations such as my own seem embarrassed by it. At best, they dismiss it, as one liberal preacher did in my hearing, as a text that used the medium of apocalypse to give hope to communities oppressed by persecution, with the subtext that it has no meaning whatsoever for us, two thousand years later. The judgmental aspects are, of course, to be ignored, for “God is love” and would never pour out his wrath on the world in the manner described at length in the book.

Preaching fails with this book because it is, at its heart, mystical vision. Words, other than the direct and plain words of the text itself, fail to convey what is of significance. It may be that Music is the best form for exegesis of this great and wonderful document. Three examples come to mind, beginning with the Messiaen Quartet:

-- The final choruses of Messiah, from “Worthy is the Lamb” through the Amen (G. F. Handel: Revelation 5:12-14)
-- Quartet for the End of Time (Revelation 10:1-6)
-- “And I saw a new heaven” (Edgar Bainton: Revelation 21:1-4)

What better exegesis of these passages could there be?

Violin Day

Carrie and Samantha played their senior violin recitals yesterday in our parish church. They have attended services here for four years, and they are ready to graduate and move on. I will miss them.

We had the privilege of hearing the Bach Sonata in A minor (BWV 1003) twice. It is a piece which profits from repeated hearings, and from the different approaches taken to it by the two musicians.

Samantha played first, opening with Mozart and finishing with the Brahms Sonata, Op. 100. “Brahms is my favorite composer,” she said, before playing it with passionate intensity.

After a reception, it was Carrie's turn: Bach, Ernest Bloch, and, to my delight, the Franck Violin Sonata. Like Samantha, I love Brahms. But at this stage of my life, I love Franck even more, and his Violin Sonata is one of his finest works. Carrie's splendid rendition of it took me back into the imaginative world where I dwelt as I prepared the Grand Piece Symphonique last month, a world where it was still possible to believe in goodness and truth. I think that Romanticism succeeded better in music than in literature or any of the other arts, with poetry perhaps a close second to music. It succeeded so well that to a large degree the world of classical music continues to cling to its repertoire almost a century after its idealistic spirit died in the trenches of the Great War.

Except its spirit did not entirely disappear, thanks to composers such as Brahms and Franck. Every time we perform their music, their ideas are once again set loose in the world, visions of hope to carry us through the dark days of our new century.

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
(Emily Dickinson)

As I grow older, it is increasingly important to me that there are people like Sam and Carrie to keep the Song alive. Blessings be with them.

G.P.S. - Performance, and Epilogue

March 15: Tuesday (T minus 1)

Sunday night, I awoke several times with my fingers twitching, “playing” through parts of the piece. All day Monday, I was like a wound-up spring. It is a bringing-to-birth, an “incarnation.” I have mentioned Dorothy Sayers' book The Mind of the Maker. Her thesis is that our human creative work is one of the principal ways in which we are made in the image of God (c.f. Genesis 1:26-29). He creates, we likewise create on a limited scale, what Tolkien would call “subcreation.” Sayers does not explore this, but it occurs to me that the Satanic temptation “ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” is perhaps in part a temptation to burst the bounds of our creative finitude, to create on god-like scale. We would make a Gesamtkunstwerk, an all-encompassing work of art, a Tower reaching to the heavens. Such enterprises do not end well (c.f. Genesis 11).

Sayers quotes from her own play, The Zeal of Thy House:

For every work [or act] of creation is threefold, an earthly trinity to match the heavenly.

First [not in time, but merely in order of enumeration] there is the Creative Idea, passionless, timeless, beholding the whole work complete at once, the end in the beginning: and this is the image of the Father.

Second, there is the Creative Energy [or Activity] begotten of that idea, working in time from the beginning to the end, with sweat and passion, being incarnate in the bonds of matter: and this is the image of the Word.

Third, there is the Creative Power, the meaning of the work and its response in the lively soul: and this is the image of the indwelling Spirit.

And these three are one, each equally in itself the whole work, whereof none can exist without other: and this is the image of the Trinity. (p. 37-38).

In the work of the performing musician, the Idea is the first conception of the program, the vision of the Music in its finished perfection. It is also the composition itself, the fruit of another's labors (or one's own; once the musician turns from composition to performance of what he has written, it is in no way different from the playing of another composer's work). The Energy is the process which I have sought to describe in these entries; the “sweat and passion, being incarnate in the bonds of matter: and this is the image of the Word.”

Sayers speaks primarily of her own craft, that of Writer, but it applies to Music and the other arts. Later she writes:

The resistance to creation which the writer encounters in his creature [in my case, the Franck] is sufficiently evident, both to himself and to others – particularly to those others who have the misfortune to live with him during the period when his Energy is engaged on a job of work. The human maker is, indeed, almost excessively vocal about the perplexities and agonies of creation and the intractability of his material. Almost equally evident, however, though perhaps less readily explained, is the creature's violent urge to be created.... [T]hat a work of creation struggles and insistently demands to be brought into being is a fact that no genuine artist would think of denying.... whenever the creature's desire for existence is dominant, everything else will have to give way to it; the writer will push all other calls aside and get down to his task in a spirit of mingled delight and exasperation. (p. 140-1)

There are always some passages that weigh on the mind. In this case, there are two: the final page of the scherzo, and an eight-measure section of the pedal line in the finale, a passage which is notorious in the organ literature. These spots receive more than their share of careful practice, for they are evidences of “the intractability of [the] material.” But if one neglects the easier parts, they can come unglued in performance, too. Every note, every phrase must have its due share of attention.

One of the goals of the slow playing with rhythmic practice that I have described is to develop in a good way what is sometimes called “ballistic motion.” When one performs a physically complex action such as a basketball jump shot – or playing the Grande Pièce Symphonique – the larger action is comprised of many small steps. At first, one must consciously think about each step, but the action must soon become automatic. Thus, I begin slowly, working in “bite-sized” chunks of four measures – an amount of material which can be grasped by the mind as one unit – and build speed at first with little two-note groupings. Ballistic motion will develop whether one does it purposefully or not, but if left to chance, it is not likely to develop in an efficient way. Extraneous motions will be part of it, and wherever they exist, mistakes are likely to follow as the piece is brought to performance tempo.

In these final stages, I am no longer working primarily in four-measure phrases. Instead, the basic units are much larger, from one point of relative repose to the next. I continue to play the section slowly, then with the rhythms long-short, and short-long. From there, it varies: more difficult passages get the full treatment, while with easier passages I can go directly to playing in one-measure groups, and then to the full passage at tempo. My goal is for this entire passage, perhaps one or two pages or even more, to be one seamless unit, a ballistic motion as smooth as a perfect jump shot. There is a part of the brain that knows exactly what to do in every detail in order to play the passage, without conscious attention.

One sometimes hears young students play their recital pieces with “finger memory.” The ballistic motion is in place – the piece is “in the hands” -- but not necessarily in the conscious mind. If the ballistic motion is de-railed, it cannot continue without assistance from the consciousness which knows in what direction the music needs to go, and can put things back on track. Thus, I build in “starting places” where a new ballistic motion may begin. The first note of every measure is the most important of these – thus, the need to always practice in one-measure groups. Ideally, every note would be a new “starting place,” learned from the hours of practice in the two-note groupings.

My work today on Franck is limited to a three-hour session at the recital instrument, just enough for one final workout, beginning to end, the sixth and last. It goes well. At last, I am ready to play, and just in time.

March 16: Wednesday

In the university town where I work, there are over a thousand recitals and concerts annually. Each of them represents an undertaking that, for a time, has been all-consuming for the musicians involved.

So does the writing of a book, the production of a play, the making of a visual work of art, or a quilt, or a violin, or a barn. The effort and commitment are the same in kind for craft, folk art, and “high” art. This last differs perhaps in the path being less clearly charted, but even here, there are traditions that provide a place to begin.

Here at the end, it is important to me, as it was initially, that this is a “Lenten Meditation,” not a “Noontime Recital.” The Grande Pièce Symphonique is music of a spirit suitable for Lent. Perhaps it may direct the hearts of some of its listeners toward thoughts of a serious nature. It is not enough to play for oneself; the music must be shared, even if only with one or two others. The musician hopes that in some way it makes a difference.

Sayers describes this aspect of the work in chapter eight of The Mind of the Maker: “Pentecost.”

... a book has no influence until somebody can read it.

Before the Energy [which is incarnate in the book, or essay, or other writing] was revealed or incarnate it was, as we have seen, already present in Power within the creator's mind, but now that Power is released for communication to other men.... It dwells in them and works upon them with creative energy, producing in them fresh manifestations of Power.

This is the Power of the Word, and it is dangerous. Every word—even every idle word—will be accounted for at the day of judgment. (p. 111)

For the writer, this aspect, the “third person” of the creative trinity, is when the writing is published, read by others, and takes its own life in the world of ideas in small or large ways. For the musician, it is the performance. Music does not exist until it is performed—and heard—and ceases its audible existence as soon as the last notes die away. But the Idea expressed in the composition may take root and bear fruit in surprising ways, perhaps generations later. When a performer takes up a piece of Old Music such as the Franck, the Idea embodied in it, now almost a century and a half old, is brought to light anew.

This raises the question of whether or not the Classics in music, literature, and art have any lasting value. It is obvious to me that they do, but many would disagree. A local choral director whom I respect, active in music education circles, takes the view that Classical Music is simply a collection of “museum pieces,” and she rarely uses any of it in her work (implying as well that “museums” are places that are irrelevant to the lives of ordinary people). It is more important, in her view, that the music sung by her choirs be fresh and immediate, enjoyable to the singers, and constructive of community in the choir. She does not think that Classical Music can do these things in the twenty-first century.

Today, I made my small contribution to this interchange of artistic Ideas, giving the Grande Pièce Symphonique a fresh opportunity to do its work in the world. At best, it is likely to be a very small bit of work: my little half-hour “Lenten Meditation,” one of thousands of concerts in this town, heard by perhaps twenty or thirty persons, is not going to change the world in any large way. But small as it is, today's music will not be entirely without consequence, for a Song is every bit as dangerous as a Word, and every Song, along with every Word, “will be accounted for at the day of judgment.” One of my teachers used to say “Never play a note unless you mean it.”

The first and overwhelming impression when one finally gets around to performing the music which has taken so many hours to prepare is always how quickly it is over. As I began the last movement I thought “Am I here already? How can this be?”

The second impression is always that one has played horribly, made wreckage of this beautiful music. This is not a small thing, for every imperfection in performance weakens the power of the Idea and reduces its potential to achieve its work.

Upon a day of reflection (I write this on Thursday, the day after the concert), there were too many mistakes, but some aspects of the playing were good. I believe that I gave shape to the music as well as I am able to do in terms of phrasing, tempos, articulation of the form, and registrations. Wrong notes can distort this, but not entirely eradicate it.

But what about the wrong notes? I have tried for years to figure out how to play more accurately, and I believe that I have made some progress, most of all in adopting the practice regime outlined in this series. Of the two passages which most concerned me, one went smoothly; the other was a bit shaky, but I do not think that I actually missed any of the notes. All of the note errors were in other places, “easy” places, including one a mere thirteen measures into the piece and another at the final cadence of the (slow) fourth movement, both of them marring especially beautiful moments.

It would have been better to have the piece ready a month ago, using the final weeks for maintenance practice. My preparations, reaching a state of readiness only on the day before the recital, were more on the order of cramming for a final exam. But I believe that I did all that I could do without neglecting my other duties. The things which kept me from working more in December and January on the Franck were primarily:

- the Christmas services
- “Some Canonic Variations on Vom Himmel hoch” played at the January evensong – and played rather well, as I recall.
- Stanford in A for the February Evensong
- the Mozart Laudate Dominum

All of this was worthy of the time committed to it. And, since the difficult parts of the Franck went well, I am not sure that additional preparation would have improved the results.

This brings me again to the Satanic temptation: I cannot make my musical work larger or better than what I can do in the time and energy allotted to me in this life. I must, instead, adjust my expectations and not try to do so much that I do it badly. At the same time, I must avoid the opposite extreme of “playing it safe,” never taking the risks that are inherent in any music worthy of the name. Our Lord warned against this in St. Matthew 25:14-30, calling the one who buried his talent a “wicked and slothful servant,” casting him into outer darkness. “[T]here shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

I ate a leisurely lunch at an Indian restaurant, drank a cup of tea in my office, and turned my attention to the wedding music, the Messiaen for Sunday, and the evening's choir rehearsal.

Epilogue: Friday morning, March 18

This morning, my mailbox at the church contained a CD, a recording of the Franck. C.H., the organbuilder who was unable to attend the performance, arranged to have it recorded. I am glad for his sake that he did, because the Franck fits his instrument splendidly and shows its expressive possibilities in a way that may not often be heard.

Upon review, I find that I played both better and worse than I had thought. There were the four major note errors that I knew were there. With two of them, I was able to modify the voice leading so that to someone unfamiliar with the piece, they would be musically plausible (though inferior to what Franck wrote). The other two were simply wrong, both of them in a pedal statement of the theme in the latter part of the first movement. But both of these went by so quickly that they were not “train-wrecks,” the complete de-railing of the music which can all too easily happen. In short, the note errors which glared at me in my memory of the performance were not so bad as I had thought.

What was worse were some faults in interpretation. I was not smooth in my use of the Swell pedal at a couple of places; the amount of “breathing space” between several of the phrases was wrong, mostly too short; at the cadence ending the second movement, I made the rallantando too big; I rushed the tempo in part of the scherzo and had to pull it back in line; I failed to push the tempo slightly in the finale from the beginning of the fugue onwards. But there were many other interpretative outcomes through the course of the work which went very well indeed, or at least the way that I think they should.

All of the errors weakened the Idea, as I described earlier. “[N]ow we see through a glass, darkly: but then face to face ....” The Satanic temptation would say “You must be perfect.” The Gospel grace answers “You will be perfect.”

But not yet.

In retrospect, I am struck with what a vast and important Idea this piece embodies. The Cavaillé-Coll organ at St. Clothilde was hardly four years old in 1863 when Franck wrote this piece, which would have been impossible without this new type of instrument, an instrument whose potential Franck unveiled. Neither he nor anyone else in France had written anything remotely like this for the organ, and it must have been astonishing to its first hearers. We have the organ symphonies of Widor and Vierne and much other music of similar nature from the French symphonic organ tradition that began with Franck – indeed, with this piece – so it is less overwhelming to us. But the Grande Pièce Symphonique remains, I think, an Idea which continues to do its work in the world. I am honored to have helped that work along a little bit this week.

G.P.S. - an update

February 12

The Recital Dreams have begun.

I always have them. They always involve being unprepared, and rushing to get to the venue, usually in some hopeless manner, knowing that I will not make it. I will miss my own recital, and even were I to show up, I would be a laughing-stock for my complete lack of preparation. On the rare occasions when I make it as far as playing the programme, sometimes people are throwing rotten tomatoes at me; sometimes they are booing, or walking out as I play. More often, I wake up before that.

This time, I was practicing on the recital instrument – the spinet piano back in my old family home, but it had been pushed into the hallway against the wall. This is where the recital was to take place. And there was music that I had never seen, and could not play.

But I probably wouldn't get there anyway. Later in the dream, I was travelling to the venue. I was riding a sort of cargo-carrying skateboard down the West Virginia Turnpike, south of Flat Top Mountain. It is a steep downhill grade of several miles, with a wicked curve at the bottom. I was on my skateboard, organ shoes and music in hand, trying to steer it around the curves (and I don't even know how to ride a skateboard), going faster and faster, and knowing that I would not make that curve at the bottom.

February 7-14

The fingering is now complete: five hours of work, most of it done at home with the paper “keyboard.” I am ready for the First Workout. Or I would be, except there remain a number of things that stand ahead of it in line.

As noted previously, Real Life intrudes on an effort such as this. Even in the limited aspect of Real Life that is involved with playing the organ and piano, recital music must take second place behind the ongoing services of the church. Several musical items have kept me busy in recent weeks:

- the Anthem for Jan. 23, “How lovely are the messengers” (Mendelssohn)
- several items for Evensong on February 6: Stanford in A and the “Prelude, Fugue, and Variation” of Franck – another of the Six Pieces from which the G.P.S. is drawn.
- the Mozart “Laudate Dominum,” mentioned in these pages
- Bach Prelude and Fugue in C (BWV 545) for last Sunday's postlude
- an organ concerto of Handel for the March 6 Evensong

One might wonder whether I neglect our church's contemporary service by paying so much attention to my duties as Organist. The contemporary service is larger in attendance than the traditional service, and it deserves a large share of my efforts.

It is not that simple, for the rhythms of preparation for the contemporary and traditional services differ. The selection of music takes about the same amount of time for the two services. I spend much time with the adult choir (and most of the work cited above was with anthem and canticle accompaniments, not preludes and postludes) – but I spend an equal amount of time in preparation and rehearsals with the youth choir, which sings for the contemporary service more than it does for the traditional service. I spend time preparing voluntaries for the traditional services of the Eucharist and monthly Evensong, and working on the hymn accompaniments. With the contemporary service, I improvise postludes and occasional preludes, and I try to play the congregational songs with imagination, not just parroting what is on the page. Practice for this is more a matter of skill development than specific preparation for a given Sunday morning, so it is hard to compare with the work at the organ. And my work on music such as Bach, Mozart, and Handel helps develop the technical proficiency to play the piano for the contemporary service.

Even my preparations for the recital on March 16 contribute indirectly to my duties at both services. Music faculty are expected to present annual recitals. The reason is that serious engagement with the work of performance will make them better teachers. The same applies to me; I would quickly grow sloppy in my playing if I never played the sort of music that one finds in a Bach prelude and fugue – or the Grande Pièce Symphonique.

But I do wonder whether I should undertake something like this again. Part of being an Organist-Choirmaster is never having the time to do either part of the work satisfactorily. Perhaps it means that I should not attempt to play outside of my immediate service-playing duties, both contemporary and traditional, not until I am fulfilling all of the duties assigned to me – something that has never happened in my ten-plus years in this place, and never will; it is a bigger job than I can do with integrity. I have presented arguments for (and against) playing recitals, but does this carry a priority high enough to keep me from other duties?

At least I am tacking one-third of the hypothetical programme I drew up in the linked essay back in 2008. It is a start. And I still have no answer to this:

“The question of utility is one that I cannot answer, any more than Messiaen's apple tree; it makes apples, whether they are of any use to anyone or not. Perhaps God can put my music-making to some use; I hope so. But that part of it is up to Him."

--
Footnote: Those who follow the link to the essay from 2008 might notice my comments about the university organist. At that point, he had just been hired to begin work that fall. I had not met him, and knew of him only by hearsay from some then-current organ students. He has turned out to be a fine organist, and he has done much to re-establish the organ department under conditions made almost impossible by the Flood later that year. I think well of him, and repent of my previous comments.

Another Footnote: I mentioned in that same essay that I had not played a proper organ recital for over a decade. Since then I have: March 2009 as a way to raise money for the repair work on the organ and the LEED certification of the construction project. The programme featured the Brahms Eleven Chorale Preludes, plus a large and challenging piece by William Mathias. That experience will help me with the G.P.S., for I got that programme ready in less than a month, following my current practice methods -- which is what I have left for this one, and it is only a half-hour of music. I hope to get a solid start on it this weekend.

Grande Pièce Symphonique: a journey

January 13

Today, I ventured across town to the Congregational Church. They have invited me to play a half-hour recital in their Lenten noontime series. [For readers of these pages who are local, it is scheduled for Noon on Wednesday, March 16.] It is the newest instrument in town, a two-manual Casavant, and (as I found) very nice. But despite repeated invitations, I had never played it; I cannot afford the time away from my duties.

The role of “concert artist” is one that I play infrequently, especially “guest artist,” playing somewhere other than my own congregation. It is intoxicating; no wonder that many people aspire to such a life. While playing this role, one is fully immersed in great music. What could be better?

Some might be interested in the details of what an organist does to prepare for a concert on an unfamiliar instrument, so I will try to keep a diary for this event. It will also provide opportunity to describe my practice methods.

---

The secretary led me upstairs to the chancel. “There it is. I don't know a thing about it,” she said. The console was under a bed sheet like a piece of furniture in an old house. I unveiled it, and set about the first task: figuring out how to turn it on.

Methods vary. With luck, there is a switch in an obvious location on the console. Sometimes not; it might be controlled by a circuit breaker back in the Sacristy, or out in the hall, or (in one church I know) next door in the adjoining Rectory. This is a new instrument; surely it would not be hard to find.

It only took me ten minutes, poking around and thinking of whom I might call to ask as I grew slightly desperate. As it turned out, there is a keyed switch under the keybed. I found the switch readily enough, but the key took some hunting. It was on the stop jamb, but under some papers, and not labeled for its purpose.

An adjustable bench! What luxury! Ours at home is “one size fits all” (or not). And an AGO standard pedalboard! Our instrument was built some twenty years before the AGO decided that pedalboards ought to be standardized, and its pedalboard is flat rather than the concave layout in the AGO standard. This is not unusual, and not only with old instruments; many modern builders of mechanical action instruments routinely thumb their nose at the AGO console standards, in the name of “historical accuracy.” I view it as an effort to make their instruments as hard to play as possible.

And a combination action. It has been quite a while since I have dealt with one of these. I have become suspicious of them, old relic that I am – especially of combination actions with dozens of levels of electronic memory. But its presence is one of the reasons for my choice of repertoire. I hope to play the Grand Pièce Symphonique of César Franck, and it would be almost impossible to do it on the mechanical stop-action organ at home. Here, it can be done.

For an instrument of reasonable size, I like to take a few minutes and copy down the stoplist, in the order that it is laid out on the console. That way, if I get home and think “now where was that Great to Pedal coupler?” I will know. Often (and possibly on this instrument, since I may well play it again someday), I will transfer the list to my computer, making a full-page chart, then making multiple copies of it. For any given combination setting, I can circle the stops I am using, with a fresh sheet for each piston. With these in hand, I can set the combinations on the day of the concert quickly and accurately. When I regularly played an instrument with a combination action, I had a thousand copies run off by a print shop and used them for hymn registrations as well as for the repertoire.

At last, I am ready to sit down and start playing: Elapsed time for the above: about a half-hour.

But I can't start in on the Franck, not until I know the instrument better. The best method I have found for doing so is to improvise, starting on individual stops, then building ensembles, right on up to full organ and then back down. I spend about a half-hour doing so, discovering a number of delights such as a fine Grand Cornet on the Great and an Oboe on the Swell that is suitable for “that sound” - 8' foundations and reeds – without which Franck is virtually unplayable.

Now, I can open the score book and see what I can do.

I play through the piece. At this point, I do not care about accuracy; I simply want to get a sense of how the piece will sound on this instrument. If it does not work, I can try some of the other pieces that I brought along – music by Bach, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Alain. But the Franck is my first choice, and from what I have already heard in my improvising, it ought to work fine.

I get to the final pages, making complete hash of the F-sharp Major passagework in the pedals. Yes, this is the piece; it will sound terrific.

So, back to the beginning: now it is time for serious work. I make my way through the piece again, working out the registrations in detail and writing them all down – not yet in the score, but on a pad of paper, with references by measure number. This takes the next three hours, and is all that I need to do at the instrument for now.

January 25-26

One of the frustrations of any artistic endeavor is that the work is invariably interrupted by Real Life. I returned to my parish church full of excitement about working on the Franck – and I was unable to touch it for a fortnight. My other duties took precedence. But I managed to find a half-hour on the 25th and almost an hour on the 26th to work on it, transferring the registrations to post-it tape flags in the score (so that they can be removed after I play the piece) and beginning to work on the fingerings.

I have played this piece several times before, most recently in 1998. But in those days, I was casual about fingerings. Now, I am not; I write them all down. I am faced with thirty-two pages of score, some twenty-five or thirty minutes of music, all of it needing to be fingered before I can do anything else.

When I was in my twenties, I read Arthur Rubenstein's autobiography, “My Many Years,” an excellent book. He was a larger-than-life personality, a Concert Artist of the highest order, one of the greatest of the twentieth century. But he led me astray; he wrote that he paid little attention to fingerings, often changing them on the fly in performance. I was all too ready to follow suit; in those days I valued spontaneity above what seemed the mechanical drudgery of writing fingerings into the score. He said: “At every concert I leave a lot to the moment. I must have the unexpected, the unforeseen. I want to risk, to dare. I want to be surprised by what comes out. I want to enjoy it more than the audience. That way the music can bloom anew.” (quoted in Wikipedia, s.v. “Arthur Rubenstein”)

I can see where Rubenstein's approach could work at the piano, especially in the Romantic repertoire of which he was a master. But it took me thirty years to fully understand that it does not work at the organ. The added complication of the pedals and the absence of the piano's sustaining pedal demand greater accuracy from the organist than is needed at the piano. The organ demands what Dr. Delbert Disselhorst calls the “firm foundation” of a thoroughly defined and ingrained fingering. Thus, I now write down a finger-number for every note. I practice the music with these fingerings, carefully. And I play more accurately as a result.

I could say more about fingerings, but for now I will simply commend the Essay on the True Art of Playing the Clavier by C.P.E. Bach. It is the definitive guide to this subject.

February 2: Candlemas

A snow day! It is Wednesday, and we can ill afford to miss choir rehearsals with Evensong coming up this Sunday, but last night's wild ride home on the bus was convincing evidence that the blizzard was sufficient reason for everyone to stay at home today. I had only a short walk from the bus stop to our apartment, and I was wondering if I would make it. I can well understand how some of the old-time farmers could be lost in such weather between their house and the barn, unless they had tied a rope from door to door to guide them.

This day is my opportunity to get the fingering done. I have a paper tracing of the organ keyboard that permits such work away from the instrument. I spent several weeks in 2009 doing much work with it when the church construction project and jazz department left me holding forth from a desk in the downstairs hallway.

I am not entirely starting from scratch; I have a few written fingerings in place from the past, and these are the spots where I have had the most difficulty. What remains is the more routine work. As I have learned, these must be written down, too.

And so, to work: five hours of it. It it sufficient to finish the first movement. I find that I have better ways now to play some of the difficult passages that are already in the score, so I have changed more than half of the old fingerings.

I did not reach my goal. In part, I ran aground on the difficulties of working at home, where domestic responsibilities call. My wife also was home, so we had three square meals together, two of which I cooked and for all of which I washed dishes. And I shoveled snow from around our Honda; that took over an hour. But I faced the choice: continue work after Evensong? Work on Thursday, which I try to take as a Sabbath? I did neither, with hopes of tackling the later movements on my next day off from the church, this coming Monday.