Church Music: an essay

A lot of young church musicians do not survive the transition from school to church. Some of the fault is with the way organists and choral musicians are trained. They are schooled almost exclusively toward the goal of becoming the finest performers possible at the organ, and toward working with highly skilled young adult choristers, all of them with fabulous voices and quick and active minds. They sing and play only the finest literature; the pipe organs at their disposal are of the highest quality. They work at minutiae to bring their work to the highest possible standard. Unless they are very fortunate, they learn very little about working with children, or with teenagers, or with amateur adult singers of all ages, more elderly than otherwise. They learn nothing about "contemporary music" (meaning “anything with guitars”) except that it is to be avoided at all costs. They learn nothing about working with difficult clergy or parishioners, which probably is the downfall of more young church musicians than any other factor.

****

You graduate. You get a part-time position in a typical parish. The organ is a Baldwin electronic, circa 1970, with several of the pedal contacts corroded into dysfunction. The choir is, well, a typical parish choir: let's say eight persons, one of whom is under the age of sixty. There is one baritone who can sing tenor, sort of, in a pinch -- but he works every other Sunday morning. There is one other bass, age seventy-six, who has had three heart attacks and now has a large, wobbly voice because his cardiovascular fitness is barely enough to allow him to walk into the choir room. And he does not see very well. The other six are women. One of them played clarinet in her high school band (that was in the 1950's), so she reads music, sort of. The others all sing "by ear." Sort of.

A variety of vocal and other problems are in evidence; "white" tone, bleaty vibratos, no head voice. One woman has vocal nodules (as it proved) which she got, she tells you, from when she was in a mental hospital after her husband died "and I screamed, night and day." Another woman (the one who is under sixty) is epileptic, and more likely to have a seizure when she is stressed -- like, for example, in the middle of the anthem during the Christmas Eve service the previous year.

Since you have never worked with any singer who has any vocal problems whatsoever, you are at a loss. You want the choir to sound like your college choir, which had sung the B Minor Mass that spring before graduation. You want to do music like that: Bach and Palestrina and Schutz and Byrd and Tallis and all the rest. But the music library consists entirely of illegal Xeroxes, and one of your first moves is a day of carting it all off to the recycling depot.

"We would like a children's choir." That is what they told you in the interview, and is one of the reasons you accepted the position, for you studied the RSCM method at college and observed the excellent choral program at the local Episcopal parish near the campus. They neglected to mention that there are currently no children in the parish. None. There is not one soul in the parish under the age of thirty-five. And the community, a small Pennsylvania town, is dying; unemployment is near twenty percent, and anyone who was able moved away years ago, so there is not a plethora of children anywhere in town.

"Hmmm.... I guess I'll have to put that on the back burner, for now."

And here comes Sunday morning with that Baldwin. You have never played an electronic organ, much less one of that vintage -- early transistor/printed circuit, where every "stop" sounds pretty much the same, and pushing down a whole row of stop tabs does little to change the sound, either in volume or timbre. You pull out the Bach Orgelbuchlein; it sounds horrible. You try a Mendelssohn sonata movement: ditto.

You are, again, at a loss.

I will spare you a discussion of the Vicar, who is entirely innocent of any sound training or experience in liturgy, homiletics, or, most of all, music -- though he considers himself an expert in all of these fields. His idea of good church music is "On Eagles' Wings." His idea of good liturgy is when he "improvises" the Eucharistic prayer, or "paraphrases" the Gospel reading from memory, leaving out some of the important bits. The first words spoken in the liturgy each Sunday are a cheerful "Good morning!!!!"

But I had best not spare you the Contemporary Service on Sunday evenings. "We have a praise band," they said in the interview. It proves to consist of three Boomer-age lady guitarists (now in their seventies) who think they are the second coming of Joni Mitchell. They know the basic three chords and play with what is commonly called the "Catholic strum." That is all they can do; they cannot handle other chords, or other strumming techniques, or (heaven forbid) finger-picking. You did not take Guitar Methods 101 at school -- indeed, it was not offered -- so, again, you are at a loss. But, being a good soldier, you join them on the electric piano (a twenty-year old Clavinova with a few dead notes), and do your best. You learn the eight songs which are the complete repertoire of the Service. About a dozen people show up on Sunday evenings, mostly ex-Cursillistas. The Vicar is in his element, loving the "casual informality" of the atmosphere.

After a year or so of this, many a young church musician decides that a career in restaurant table service and dishwashing would be more to his liking. Or maybe truck driving.

****

The secret, if there is one, lies in that woman who wants your help in learning how to somehow sing again after screaming her voice away in the mental hospital. And that bass, who has sung in choirs since childhood and loves music and has watched his voice, his strength, and his health disappear, and is just trying to hang on and finish what he has carried thus far, a life which the Psalmist described thus: "I will sing to the LORD as long as I live; I will praise my God while I have my being." And that woman with the epilepsy, who loves God -- indeed, God is her sole reliance -- and wants to sing, and does not want to make a scene this Christmas. But if making a scene is what is going to happen, she is still going to be there, because it her choir, and her parish, and most of all her Lord who was born that night.

Despite yourself, if you are lucky (or better, "blessed"), you care about these people. It is not because you are supposed to (though you are); you just do. You can't help it. You recognize that you have been given the responsibility of helping these individuals grow into the fullness of the stature of Christ. The tools at your disposal, such as the Baldwin and the choral library, are not the best, but they are what you have.

You pray a lot.

There is nothing else for it; you pray so much that you become known for it. You teach the same things over and over, and it appears that it makes no difference -- but, sometimes, after many repetitions, it does. You send cards to your choristers when they are sick; you visit them in the hospital when you can (an aside: this is much harder to do than it used to be, because they often do not permit people like choral directors, who are neither family nor authorized church professionals, to so much as discern what room the person is in, or even if they are in the hospital at all.) I emphasize that this is not because you are supposed to, or with any end in view (such as building your choir); you can't help it.

You figure out how to get the best possible results out of the Baldwin -- a task for which your academic training has given you no preparation whatsoever -- and you play with care and integrity for every service. You learn how to play your eight Cursillo songs with the "Joni Mitchell girls" -- and you find that, despite yourself, you care even about them. And the people who show up at the Sunday evening service. You find that they, with the handful who attend the traditional morning service, are the lifeblood of that little town, fighting to keep it alive.

And, just maybe, the hardest of all, the Vicar. You come to recognize that he is as clueless as you are, and that is the source of much of his bluster. To him, this is a dead-end parish in a dead-end town, and a dead-end for his career. No bishopric or cushy suburban parish for him, because now that he is middle-aged, all of a sudden the ideal bishop is in his forties. His seminary training prepared him for the work of ministry about as well as your conservatory training did for church music, and he has been trying to figure it out "on the job" ever since.

****

Lest you think that this essay is autobiographical, it is not. For one thing, my first post-graduate instrument was an Allen, not a Baldwin. And I have never lived or worked in Pennsylvania. And I had worked as a part-time church musician for some years before going to graduate school; this was of inestimable value. Nonetheless, I made many, many mistakes. I still do. Two of the persons I described are more-or-less based on choristers with whom I had the privilege of working at previous parishes where I have served, and who taught me much by their glorious witness to the power of God.

And I have entirely given up on hospital visits.

****

Perhaps you stay in the parish, despite everything. One day, a vestry member says "Gee, maybe we should think about a pipe organ!" Over time, you assemble a choral library of sorts. Your choir grows from eight to eleven. A family with children moves to town and joins the church; you incorporate the children into the choir (and figure out how to work with them in this setting), and now the choir is fourteen persons. A new Vicar comes, and she is a little easier to work with, partly because she sang in a church choir when she was a child and it was essential to her vocation.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps you play that Baldwin to your dying day. Perhaps the Vicar retires, and the parish cannot afford to hire a replacement. Perhaps they cannot afford to keep you on staff, either. Perhaps the place closes down altogether. Perhaps the whole community closes down.

None of this matters. What matters is each one of those singers, and the people out in the pews, and even that Vicar. Their spiritual growth and welfare matters. On the Day of Doom, the Baldwin, the illegal Xeroxes, the guitars, the vestments, the church building, even the town in which you lived -- all of it will have been calcined to dust. What will remain is the people, your brothers and sisters, standing with you and singing the glories of the Lamb. You are given a small part in preparing them for that Day.

No one said it would be easy.

****
(Adapted slightly from my old LiveJournal, Nov. 25, 2009)

Finish then thy new creation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matins: some Considerations

The Holy Eucharist, the principal act of Christian worship on the Lord’s Day and other major Feasts, and Daily Morning and Evening Prayer, as set forth in this Book, are the regular services appointed for public worship in this Church. (Book of Common Prayer p. 13, the first sentence of the Book after its contents, certificate, and preface)

Earlier this summer, I suspended the public weekday observance of Matins (Morning Prayer). There were reasons for this, and reasons why I thought the suspension would be permanent.

For our parish, the story began with Fr. Sanderson in the autumn of 2000 when he arrived as interim priest-in-charge. He was determined to pray Matins and Evensong every day in the parish church as is meet and right, and in obedience to his ordination vows in the Church of England. The Vestry opposed him on this, claiming (with some justification) that the establishment of times for worship was their prerogative. He ignored them, noting that he would open the doors and pray the Office whether they liked it or not and whether they listed the Offices on the calendar as public services or not.

Several parishioners joined Fr. Sanderson for the Daily Office, most of them from the Brotherhood of St. Andrew and Daughters of the King, with the best attendance at daily Evensong which at times ran to five or six persons. Matins settled into a regular gathering of three: Fr. Sanderson, Bill (a member of a neighboring parish who worked in our city at the university), and me.

When Fr. Sanderson departed, several of us took the responsibility of continuing the Office. Charles, Delbert, and Grace (may she rest in peace) led the daily Evensongs; I led Matins, excepting two Saturdays a month when the Brotherhood and DOK prayed the Office and had their meetings. After Bill’s retirement, he no longer came into town for Matins so it was just me, with occasional visitors. One of those was the diocesan Bishop. On Sundays, I am regularly joined by Fr. H., our distinguished retired priest and canon, with (again) occasional visitors.

Evensong has dwindled until the weekday version no longer happens. All that remains is Choral Evensong on the First Sundays of the month during the academic year. And Matins, until this summer.

I was to be out of town for several occasions in July and August, most notably the RSCM Course. Getting the Matins service on to the official printed church listing of events (and website) is complex, as is its removal, so it seemed best to remove it altogether rather than moving it on and off to fit my travels.

And I am tired.

Not of the Offices, mind you; I continued to pray them. But I was tired of doing them at a fixed hour, of being accountable for it no matter how I felt, no matter what else I had to do. I was tired of the responsibility of having the door open to all comers, most often street people who know that I am there at that hour (and no one else) and they can ask for money. Even though it was not every day that anyone showed up, or even every week, the prospect of it has worn me out.

But there are other considerations.

For one thing, those street people, just a few of them in truth. Two of them have been around enough so that they join in the prayers when they show up. Perhaps it makes a difference for them.

For another, this fall’s confirmation class is making a special emphasis on Morning and Evening Prayer. Many of these young people are in our Choir and I have known them since they were small children. How can we tell them “This is important,” but by example say “No, it’s not. We can’t be bothered to have this as a regular service of the church.” It was this consideration that carried the day for me; I cannot put into words how much I want for these young people that they establish the habit of daily prayer and attentive reading/hearing of the Psalms and Holy Scripture. If I can aid them even a little by example, that would be worthwhile.

This morning, I sent a Slack message to the secretary and sexton that we will be starting Matins next week. Three mornings a week, plus Sundays.

We shall see how long I can carry it forward. At most, I have but a few years remaining in this place. Perhaps someone else will pick it up in this parish. Or perhaps not.

But “the voice of prayer is never silent.” In one form or another, liturgical prayer has been offered to our Lord and God every morning and evening since He commanded his servant Moses that it be so, and more informally clear back to when He used to walk in the Garden “in the cool of the day” with Adam and Eve. It was the rupture of this fellowship which signaled that something had gone horribly wrong (Gen. 3:8-19), and it was only His grace that healed the breach.

It is given me to have a small part in this for a while. When I am gone, the prayer will continue. That much is certain.

[Update, Sept. 8: One of the aforementioned street people joined me for Matins this morning. He is struggling with addiction and doing well for now, trying to put his life back together. Among the things he is doing: turning himself in for a short jail sentence in lieu of a fine, which he is unable to pay. "I might as well take care of it," he told me, and came to Matins seeking strength to carry it through.

And here I am, barely willing even to open the door and offer this little service as a public liturgy. Kyrie eleison.]

RSCM Report, part three: Taking it Home

I have taken choristers to RSCM courses for upwards of thirty years. Most of those years, it has been just a few young people, a fraction of the choir back home. Where I now work, it began with two little girls entering the fourth grade, the minimum age for the course. They came home with a vision of the possibilities and did all that was in their power to make the parish youth choir better. As did I, year after year.

This year we took fourteen choristers and a proctor. It is almost the entire Youth Choir, plus Tom (who now sings with the adult choir). No longer do we need one or two people to show the others how it is done; they all know, and several of them were among the leading choristers vocally and musically. All of them know what it is like to sing this kind of music well, with connection and intensity and total commitment, among a group where everyone is at that level. All of them surely want to keep singing this way.

It is an opportunity unique to my decades of church music, and unique to the choirs participating in the course this year. I do not think that any of the other directors are returning home to as strong of a group as I will face in our first rehearsals a month from now - not even Mr. Buzard, our course director, who has the task of building a program for young singers from scratch at a distinguished cathedral where there have been choirs, but no young singers for almost a century. I am sure he would love to start with a group such as what we will have back in Iowa City.

It is a test for me. How can I help these choristers maintain the level of work that they have done this week? Here we have six hours or more of rehearsal a day; at home, it amounts to one hour a week, and many of the choristers cannot be there for all of that. That is the issue, a perennial issue for most church choirs of all ages. One rehearsal a week is not sufficient; it is like trying to play the organ by practicing one day a week.

But the choristers (and adults) have busy lives, of which choral music is only a part, and it is right that it be so. On the wider scale, is choral music at a high level going to be solely for the handful of places with choir schools, daily rehearsals, daily choral services, semi-professional and highly trained singers on the ATB parts? Is music at this level a closed door to everyone else?

The answer to that comes down, in microcosm, to what I do with these choristers back home, starting on Wednesday, August 23. We repeat the Bruce Neswick anthem “The Invitation” for a service with the bishop on Friday, September 8. Can we sing that anthem and that service with the intensity we gave to choral evensong at the RSCM? Can we then carry this forward into the fall and winter? We plan to sing the Vaughan Williams setting of “Lord, thou hast been our refuge” on Christ the King; can we make this as strong as the Howells canticles and “Rejoice in the Lamb” at the course? And in doing such things, can we incorporate new first-year choristers and give them a good start?

I can and must do some things at home which are not feasible at the course. Can I do better about teaching them solfege and making them independent musicians? Can I work with our young choirmen? They are not maintaining good posture at all times in rehearsal. Several of them need to open their mouths for a taller vocal space. Can I help them make these things habitual? Many of the choristers, trebles and teens alike, are not marking their scores. That is because I have not taught them to do this, and that is one of the ways in which choristers - or any professional musicians - can remember what they have rehearsed when it has been a week since they last met. Can I help them make music an essential part of their lives for the rest of their days, and beyond that through the ages of eternity? And most of all, can I through the music we sing and rehearse do my part in bringing them into the full maturity of the image of Christ?

And can we do all of this in that one little hour per week? For me, it is now or never. I will be judged on this at the Day of Doom. Will it be recorded in the presence of my Lord and the holy angels that I gave it all that I have, leaning ever on the Holy Paraclete for guidance and strength? Or will the record state that I slacked off, allowed the choristers given into my care to slack off, and squandered the opportunity? “Where much is given, much is required.”

Jesu, juva.

----------------------
I acknowledge Mike Wagner for his sermon at one of the weekday evensongs at the Course, which I think he titled “Taking it home.” Mike sings in one of the finest choirs in America (the Nordic Choir of Luther College), and described how another collegiate director said to his director “this choir has ‘it,’” meaning by “it” what I call “connection.” Our RSCM director of a few years ago, Andrew Walker, called it “attitude.”

Back at the Choir College, Dr. Flummerfelt described it as Connection, and I will probably use that word, though Attitude needs less explanation. When singing, are you connected to the text and musical line with all of your being? Or are you going through the motions? It might be possible for instrumentalists to sometimes get away with the latter, but the voice is so thoroughly a window into the soul that it is immediately obvious if the singers are not Connected -- and, if the other basics are in place and the group has done its homework, Connection makes it possible for the song to touch the hearts of the listeners. This will never happen if the hearts of the singers are not likewise touched by the Song and absolutely committed to it.

Whatever we call it, we had it at the Course, and now we must take it home. Tomorrow’s essay will describe an example of how this is done.

Ignition

Christianity is caught, not taught. (old RSCM saying)

In “The Talent Code” [see the previous essay], Daniel Coyle writes that what he calls “ignition” is “the set of signals and unconscious forces that create our identity; the moments that lead us to say ‘this is what I want to be’” (p. 108, author’s emphasis). It is the realization that “I’d better get busy” (p. 111), and it is often a sense of wanting to belong to a group: “Those people over there are doing something terrifically worthwhile” (p. 108). It is what Steven Pressfield calls “Turning Pro.”

Coyle is speaking of music, athletics, and other endeavors of the sort that demand the effort of “deep practice” and years of commitment. This is all very true; it is one reason that I take choristers to the RSCM summer course in St. Louis. I hope that for some of them, it will be a defining event. It is one reason that when we are doing something big for our parish at home, such as the Beethoven chorus from “Mount of Olives” a year ago, or “Worthy is the Lamb” from Messiah, I seek to include the youth choir. For some of them, singing such music might be the key that unlocks their vocation.

But music and athletics are not the only things that demand effort and long-term commitment, nor are they the most important:

And he saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men. (St. Matthew 4:19)

St. Clare of Assisi is a good example. She heard and saw Francis, and as Coyle would say, she thought “this is what I want to be.” The fire burned strongly enough in her to overcome every obstacle.

How can we live in such a way as to ignite such a flame in those around us? How can our parishes become places that will cause people to think that “Those people over there are doing something terrifically worthwhile?” This is the center point of evangelism. No amount of talk will do it.

One of our teenage choristers showed up at this morning's warmup rehearsal with a friend. I could have told her to sit out in the congregation while her friend sang in the choir, and come to our next rehearsal if she wanted to sing. That would have been sensible, and would have respected the rehearsal time that the other choristers had put into their work. But I knew that this girl was a singer, and the moment would have passed by the next rehearsal. So I invited her to put on a vestment and sing with us. Perhaps nothing will come of it. Or perhaps it might be a beginning.

We need a lot more of this.

See also this, from my online friend Tim Chesterton:
“What does discipleship look like?”

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

For those who are nearby, I am playing a noontime recital at the Congregational Church on Wednesday, March 8, starting at noon. Here is my program, with notes (I have spent much of the evening writing them). There is a lot of work ahead: I have struggled with the Vaughan Williams fugue, applying my “deep practice” methods to it and finally completing a First and Second Workout. It took so long that I have neglected its prelude (which I played in December, but which needs to be practiced). One of the Messiaen movements is new to me, and starting to frighten me. It is fingered, but must be learned by next Sunday, when it is to be the postlude. To say nothing of March 8, about ten days from now. Jesu juva.

***************
Prelude and Fugue in C minor (Ralph Vaughan Williams)

Four movements from Livre du Saint Sacrement (Olivier Messiaen)
1. Adoro te (I adore thee)
2. la source de Vie (the source of Life)
3. le Dieu caché (the hidden God)
6. la manne et le Pain de Vie (the manna and the Bread of Life)

***************
Notes:

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) was a towering influence in British musical life through the first half of the twentieth century. Although he was a prolific composer, he wrote little for the organ; today’s work, the Prelude and Fugue in C minor, is the most substantial of his organ works. He wrote it in 1921, revised it in 1923 and again in 1930, when he also arranged it for orchestra.

The prelude is in rondo form, with the principal theme and its massive chords separated by two quieter, flowing sections. The fugue is characterized by constant two-against-three motion, established immediately by its subject and countersubject, building to a grand conclusion. Both movements are colored by modal and pentatonic harmonies, as is characteristic of much of his music.


Olivier Messiaen (1908-92) was equally significant in the musical life of France in the twentieth century. His music strikes many as strange. I believe that this is accurate; it is strange because it is holy. Two key elements appear constantly: birdsong and color. None of his music, aside from one unaccompanied motet, is “liturgical.” He considered that the only acceptable liturgical music is plainsong. While Messiaen occasionally quoted plainsong, he preferred to quote birds, considering them to be the greatest of musicians. An avid amateur ornithologist, he transcribed their songs into notation in the field wherever he traveled, and incorporated them into virtually all of his music from the 1960’s onward.

In my opinion, Messiaen can be compared only with J. S. Bach in his ability to depict matters of faith by means of music. Yet, Messiaen would be the first to say, as he wrote in the preface to his “Quartet for the End of Time,” that “All this is simply striving and childish stammering if one compares it to the overwhelming grandeur of the subject.”

Livre du Saint Sacrement (Book of the Blessed Sacrament) was his final composition for the organ, commissioned by the American Guild of Organists for their national convention in Detroit, 1986. In eighteen movements with a duration of about an hour and a half, it is an extended meditation on the central mystery of the Christian faith.

The cycle begins with Adoro te. Messiaen writes: “[the first three movements are] acts of adoration to the Christ who is invisible, but genuinely present in the Blessed Sacrament.” Adoro te is quiet, warm,and sensuous. Messiaen draws the title from the first words of a hymn by Thomas Aquinas: "Humbly I adore thee, Verity unseen…" See also Colossians 1:15: “He is the image of the invisible God…”

la Source de Vie is gentle, a quiet depiction of the Water of Life. Messiaen quotes St. Bonaventure: “My heart is ever thirsting for you, O fountain of life, source of the eternal light!”

le Dieu caché juxtaposes a plainsong Alleluia; a unison melody as a reply to it; the song of the bird Onycognathus tristrami (Tristram’s grackle, notated by Messiaen at Engedi, between Masada and the Dead Sea); and a slow descending chordal figure, like a meditation. These are presented in block form, each element extended as it reappears. Near the end, we hear the song of Hippolais pallida (Olivaceous Warbler, notated at Lod, near modern-day Tel Aviv.) Messiaen quotes:

My eyes could not bear to behold the splendor of your glory. It is with regard for my weakness that you veil yourself in the Sacrament. (from "The Imitation of Christ," Book IV, chapter 11)

On the Cross only the divinity was hidden. But here [in the Sacrament] is hidden also the Humanity. In confessing and believing both, I ask that which the repentant thief asked. (St. Thomas Aquinas, from the hymn Adoro te)

In la manne et le Pain de Vie, the sounds are those of a desert, with silences and waiting, and frightening things scurrying about, and the calls of two birds, both native to the deserts of Judea: Oenanthe lugens (Mourning Chat) and Ammomanes deserti (Desert Lark). Again he uses block form, extending each musical element as it reappears. The movement ends in repose, with a final two measures that could be from Debussy. Messiaen quotes:

You gave your people food of angels, and without their toil you supplied them from heaven with bread ready to eat, providing every pleasure and suited to every taste. For your sustenance manifested your sweetness toward your children; and the bread, ministering to the desire of the one who took it, was changed to suit everyone's liking. (Wisdom 16:20-21)

The life that Christ gives us by communion is all of his life, with the special graces he has deserved, living for us each of his mysteries. (Dom Columba Marmion, “Christ in His Mysteries,” chapter 18)

I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world. (John 6:51)

Cookies and Coffee Hours

“Hospitality,” they call it. Cookies and coffee. “A little something.” Wine and cheese and a few crackers. Snacks for youth choir rehearsal. Or sometimes it is more substantial: a sit-down luncheon after a funeral, a church dinner for Maundy Thursday, a picnic.

The ideal that I think lurks in people's minds: smiling grandmotherly ladies baking tens of dozens of scrumptious homemade cookies and pastries and pies, bringing them to the church, serving them to the congregation at coffee hour in their smiling grandmotherly way, then cleaning up, washing all the dishes, putting everything away. Week after week, year after year, all for free.

This may have been possible sixty years ago, when there were a lot of women who did not work outside of the home and who took Church Work very seriously. My aunt Geneva was one of them; as a volunteer, she and one other lady cleaned her little country church every Saturday from top to bottom. And whenever they needed cookies, or baked goods, or something more substantial, she would pitch in. And stay with the task until the last person had departed, the kitchen was spotless, and the floors swept and vacuumed. All for free, because she loved the Lord – and, if one were to scratch the surface a little, she did have some pride in a job well done, and enjoyed having a chance to show off her cooking.

The modern Aunt Geneva works two part-time jobs and can barely cook for her own family, much less for church events.


It has become fashionable to disdain “inward-focused” activities in a church. Everything is supposed to be geared toward Mission, whether that be social service activities, or (around here) political activism on behalf of the environment or any number of other Liberal Causes. Baking cookies for coffee hour is not part of this. Nor is anything else that pertains to the ongoing maintenance and nurture of the congregation. Last Sunday, one of our young men put out a plea for people to help him mow the lawn this summer. The results: Zilch. Not a single person volunteered.

Sometimes it devolves on the church staff. On Maundy Thursday, our director of Christian Formation and her eldest daughter prepared a soup-and-bread supper for about forty people, with linen tablecloths, the church's good china, candlelight. It was splendid. But she did all of this because no one else would.

To be fair, several of the older women saw the situation and pitched in to help the two of them wash dishes and clean up afterwards (I did, too). Otherwise, I don't know how they could have gotten it done – and that was at the front end of four very busy work days for all of us – including the older women who helped, for all of them are on the Altar Guild – another “inward-focused” activity that struggles to find enough people to carry it forward. Pretty much all of them here are elderly, in their seventies and eighties and beyond; I suspect it is that way everywhere.

Times have changed. But one thing remains: these “inward-focused” maintenance activities that are essential to healthy congregational life, these activities that are humble, mostly out of the spotlight, and very often involve hard work and long hours – they are, every one of them, the work of a Servant. A slave, if you will. Just like the one whom we call Master and Lord.

Verily, verily, I say unto you, The servant is not greater than his lord, neither he that is sent greater than he that sent him. If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them. (St. John 13:16-17)

I cannot leave this without saluting those people who DO follow their Master in this; in our congregation, we have several ladies (and a few men, such as C.C. who does most of the Shrove Tuesday pancake supper every year) who do all that they can.

It is worth noting that while Mary sat at His feet and this “good part” is not to be taken away from her (St. Luke 10:38-42), it was Martha whom Jesus loved the most (St. John 11:5). And he said that on the last day, “he shall gird himself, and make them to sit down to meat, and will come forth and serve them.” (St. Luke 12:37).



Music for the Week:
Improvisation on O filii et filiae (O sons and daughters, let us sing)

“My pierced side, O Thomas, see:
My hands, my feet, I show to thee;
Not faithless, but believing be.”
Alleluia.
(Jean Tisserand, tr. John Mason Neale)

Speak the Language (Part Two)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

To this it added two verses from Psalm 97:

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

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

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

Here is the improvisation.

The Day After the Epiphany

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

What of us?

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

What next? How do we go on from here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mary journeys...

My friend Catherine Q-E, Priest and Chaplain, commissioned some tee-shirts for her campus ministry. They were supposed to say “Many journeys,” but they came back with a misprint: “Mary journeys.” She made these available free of charge for interested persons, one of them being me.

My friend Nora, Fellow-Laborer in Christ, prepared Advent baskets for the parish. On this Fourth Sunday of Advent, I took one. The concept is that the little icons of Mary and Joseph journey with us for the week, and we journal about it in the little notebook (blue, of course). In this spirit, I hope to likewise write here in the Music Box about my journeys this week and on through the Twelve Days.

We beseech thee, Almighty God, to purify our consciences by thy daily visitation, that when thy Son our Lord cometh he may find in us a mansion prepared for himself; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. [Collect for the Fourth Sunday of Advent]

Advent IV is the neglected child, last and overlooked in the rush toward Christmas. We have its Collect for only a few days – on Monday, it is displaced by the Feast of St. Thomas, so we have it only today, Tuesday, and for Wednesday Matins.

This Sunday was neglected in my work, as well. A busy and frustrating week was altogether focused on Monday's impending funeral with its bulletin, the Christmas Eve bulletins, and (on Friday) the bulletin for the First Sunday after Christmas Day, with due attention in the meantime to Wednesday's choral rehearsals. Until Saturday, I gave not the slightest thought to preparations for Advent IV. Or rather, I thought of it, and worried about it, but did not make it to the Bench. And even on Saturday, most of my work was on organ music for the funeral and Christmas Eve. My total preparation for today's Holy Eucharists: perhaps one hour, most of it on the prelude improvisations.

This is shameful.

But the Fourth Sunday of Advent is a crucial part of the journey which we dare not neglect. We are not there yet. Oh how truly are we not there yet. The wolf does not dwell with the lamb. They torture, hurt, and destroy on God's holy mountain. The earth is not filled with the glory of God. We have read and seen of the killing of more Holy Innocents. The duplicity of our Congressmen and Senators and President would make King Herod blush with shame.

The Collect reminds us that for now, the Journey is interior. It is hidden from the world.

But Mary and Joseph, and the One who is as yet known by faith and not by sight, they journey with us.

And blessed is she that believed: for there shall be a performance of those things which were told her from the Lord. (St. Luke 1:45)

******
Some may be interested in comparing my prelude improvisations on Veni Emmanuel at the two services. Their preparation was shared; I had the same plan for them – variations, in A minor. Here is the one played on the organ. The artwork is from a fine Spanish-language blog that I found in searching for images. “Misericordiam Tuam” is a Priest in Argentina, and appears to be a young man deeply devoted to Our Lord and the Mother of God. My Spanish is not very good, but I linked to the blog as one of his ten followers, and I will try to read some of his material. Upon first encounter, it is terrific. The art for the second recording (below) is from a Flickr site by a German photographer, Harald Henkel. Again, it is very fine, with over 6,000 photographs.

The Internet is filled with garbage. I gather that the largest single category of material is pornography. Increasingly, the Net is being subverted for commercial purposes and data-harvesting, which I consider almost as bad. But among all the rubbish, there is much good – so much that one could hardly do more than sample it over a long lifetime, with more added every day. Where else could I encounter these two people and their ideas, both of them thousands of miles away from me?

I think that I played better at the piano earlier, at the middle service. Here is that version. At about the four-minute mark, a young mother and her small child, carried in her arms, lit the four Candles. It was a moment filled with grace, and I sought to react to that in my playing.

******
To my delight, I found when I opened the little blue notebook to write today's entry that this Advent Basket was previously visited by Claire, a Chorister and the Daughter of my friend Jean. In her little-girl handwriting, Claire recounted her week with Mary and Joseph, a week that involved much Baking of Cookies. It is for the sharing of such experiences that Nora intended these baskets. I am the last for this year, but perhaps my words may please someone next Advent.

From the sermon of my friend Raisin, Priest and Campus Minister: a quote from Meister Eckhart

We are all meant to be mothers of God. What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly but does not take place within myself? And, what good is it to me if Mary is full of grace if I am not also full of grace? What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to his Son if I do not also give birth to him in my time and my culture? Then, then, is the fullness of time: When the Son of God is begotten in us.

In sorrow that the ancient curse...

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

I want to be that kind of organist.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And we sang Hymn 60, Conditor alme:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christmas Carols: the Short List

Some of our families are going Christmas Caroling after Evensong tomorrow evening. There used to be songsheets somewhere, but with M.W.'s retirement, they seem to have disappeared.

Thus, I cheerfully volunteered to “print something up.”

How long can it take? Ten minutes, maximum. I will look through the Christmas section of the Hymnal 1982, go to the Episcopal software “RiteSong,” and export the text files for a selection of carols.

The Christmas section runs from 77 to 115, thirty-eight selections. And that is omitting such hangers-on as “O come, O come Emmanuel” (Advent) and “We three kings” (Epiphany). No space for such things: we are going Christmas Caroling, not Advent Caroling. Even though it is in the middle of Advent. Many of these songs are unknown to our congregation; some of the others can be omitted with no shedding of tears.

I have sixteen songs, which in full text runs nine pages. I put them into two columns: it is still five pages. I start trimming stanzas – we don't really need six stanzas of “O come, all ye faithful” for our purposes; two or three stanzas at most will suffice. That is hard with the ones that tell a story, such as “The First Nowell.”

Four pages. And I do not want it to exceed one sheet, front and back. I remove the title, “Christmas Carols.” They can figure out what the sheet is without a title. Neither do I title the songs; I put the first line in 16-point and boldface; that will suffice. But it is still three and a half pages.

Now it becomes hard.

“Angels we have heard on high” is loads of fun. But it is a little light on substance. Delete.

“While shepherds watched their flocks by night” is in my opinion essential for Episcopalians. It was included with Tate and Brady; it was bound into the old Prayerbooks. With difficulty, I hit Delete.

I would happily delete “Go tell it on the mountain,” but for reasons peculiar to our parish, I cannot. They would lynch me. Nonetheless, I trim it to one stanza and the refrain.

I love “God rest ye merry, gentlemen.” But it has to go. It is either that or “Good Christian men friends rejoice.” I keep the latter.

So close... all I need to do is find room for two stanzas of “Silent Night” that are bleeding over to page three. They really would lynch me if I left that one out.

I chop one more stanza from “The First Nowell.” Three more lines of text and we've got it.

Time to finagle the layout. I try reducing the font size to 12 point. But it is going to be unreadable under Caroling Conditions; back to 14 point. I reduce the side margins: Bingo!!!! That does it! “Silent Night” now falls nicely into the last page, all three stanzas of it. The page turn even works: the front side finishes with “Go tell it on the mountain” (groan!), the back side begins with “Joy to the world” (hooray!)

Total editing time: 36 minutes.

Here is my list of Ten Essential Christmas Carols:

O little town of Bethlehem
O come, all ye faithful
Hark! The herald angels sing
Angels we have heard on high
Go tell it on the mountain
Joy to the world
Away in a manger
Good Christian friends rejoice
The first Nowell
Silent night

Be thou our guide while life shall last

Our God, our help in ages past,
our hope for years to come,
be thou our guide while life shall last,
and our eternal home.

Today is the spiritual birthday of Dr. Isaac Watts, who passed from this life on November 25, 1748. We owe him much, but I am not going to write about that today.

He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches. (Revelation 2:29)

Advent is crazy. All who work for a church find it so; too much to do, too many demands. Observing signs of stress in a colleague after this morning's staff meeting, we prayed a few moments ago, seeking that God would prompt us to do what He considers important.

And that set me to thinking of the first three chapters of the Revelation of St. John the Divine. I consider these Letters to the Seven Churches to be essential in the understanding of the church in the world. He sees what is going on. “I know thy works” he says repeatedly: some good, some faulty, some that he would prefer to spue out of his mouth (3:16). He “walketh in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks” (2:1), which we were told in the previous verse are the Seven Churches, and by extension all of the congregations committed to His care. It might be one of the great cathedrals. It might be a little mission church on a reservation with three old ladies all that is left of the congregation. It might be a “street church” community with no building at all. And it might be us, respectable downtown Episcopal congregation in a college town. He walks among us, He knows our works.

That frightens me when I consider all that we have left undone. But it is a comfort as well, indeed our only comfort. As C. S. Lewis wrote in his lecture “The Weight of Glory”:

A cleft has opened in the pitiless walls of the world, and we are invited to follow our great Captain inside.

These chapters of Revelation conclude with a promise sufficient to sustain us through anything, a promise addressed to any person in any of the congregations throughout the world, whether bishop or vicar or sexton or choirmaster or altar guild lady or baker-of-cookies or church school teacher or child or old person or secretary or senior warden or barely-hanging-on occasional visitor:

Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.

We could be in the most dysfunctional of parishes, or places far worse (and there are many of them, I remind myself: prisons, hospital wards, parts of northern Iraq and Syria) and if He is with us, all is well. “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of those who trouble me.”

May you hear the soft but persistent knock at your door, open to Him, and sup with Him this Advent.

A bit more of Dr. Watts, from number 100 in the Hymnal 1982:

No more let sins and sorrows grow,
nor thorns infest the ground;
he comes to make his blessings flow
far as the curse is found.

From Harmony, from heavenly Harmony...

But oh! what art can teach
What human voice can reach
The sacred organ's praise?
Notes inspiring holy love,
Notes that wing their Heav'nly ways
To mend the choirs above.

Orpheus could lead the savage race;
And trees unrooted left their place;
Sequacious of the lyre:
But bright Cecilia rais'd the wonder high'r;
When to her organ, vocal breath was giv'n,
An angel heard, and straight appear'd
Mistaking earth for Heav'n.

(John Dryden, “A Song for St. Cecilia's Day”)
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173449

Thursday, November 20: St. Edmund

As a church musician, I find that I cannot keep the Real Sabbath, not if I am to play on the following day. And the Lord's Day is most decidedly not a day of rest. So, I do what I can by observing Thursday as a day of rest, set apart from the others.

I have recently read a fine little book: “The Sabbath,” by Abraham Joshua Heschel. He introduced me to the concept of welcoming the Holy Day as a visiting Queen, or a Bride, and expanded on what I already knew of the sanctification of Time, which we Christians carry forward by means of the Daily Office. A quote:

Holiness in space, in nature, was known in other religions. New in the teaching of Judaism was that the idea of holiness was gradually shifted from space to time, from the realm of nature to the realm of history, from things to events.

And that brings us to St. Edmund. King of East Anglia in a time of darkness, he strove to keep his people and the holy Faith alive in the face of overwhelming odds. And, so the story goes, he did: not by sword or victory, but by martyrdom, setting an example that no infidels could erase from the hearts of the people.

For we sanctify Time not only by prayer, but by action.

Friday, November 21: Tallis, Byrd, Merbecke

Here are men that I should certainly emulate. I am not so certain of their sanctity as the framers of the Episcopal Calendar in “Holy Men, Holy Women” seem, but they, and the other great composers, remind us that this work is not easy:

The Song does not come without cost; to do it well, it requires all that you are, every part of your being.... It is, in short, a little “martyrdom.” We give ourselves over to the Song, without regard for where it will lead us.

Friday is normally a good working day: the Rector has the day off, the office is usually quiet – and by this time in the week, I am most often desperately scrambling to prepare for Sunday. Top of the list: a full workout of the Bach, beginning to end.

But first... After Matins, I go to the kitchen. We had a dinner on Wednesday evening, and the youth group is selling Thanksgiving pies, delivering them this Sunday. They need refrigerator storage space, and the church refrigerator is packed. I begin pulling things out – almost-empty juice bottles, an uncovered pitcher of iced tea that has been in the back corner long enough to grow a layer of mold, bags of grapes many months old, salad dressings and milk and coffee cream (“half and half”) well beyond their “best by” date, much more. I end up with two trash bags full. I empty the dishwasher and dish drainer, I wash the cups and glasses left in the sink. I appropriate some of the Wednesday leftovers for my dinner. I try to think holy thoughts. This is important work: it is the Lord's House, and this is His kitchen. These cups and plates, this refrigerator, are as holy as the vessels of the Altar (as I think St. Benedict says, more or less). As children of the household, if we neglect to do our chores now, what will happen when we are There?

It is now 10:45, and I have not done any of my Good Habits (except Matins, and on this day the Great Litany). They are not going to happen today; Bach awaits.

I get my Full Workout, beginning to end, starting with the Fugue. It is solid, but the Toccata, untouched since Sunday evening, is not. I must “brush off the cobwebs” as I often tell the choir. It is enough; there is now the possibility of being ready to play the piece on Sunday.

The Toccata begins with a long tonic pedal point, fifty-four measures. Then (after a pedal solo) there is a dominant pedal point, another fifty-four measures. At the end of the Toccata, there is a majestic descent down the scale in the pedals to the low C, the dominant, and another pedal point, this one thirty measures (counting the octave leaps on C with which it ends), and Bach takes us toward the final cadence. With all this preparation, we need a thoroughgoing resolution, perhaps another pedal point on the tonic. We do not get it; all we have is one chord. At least it has a fermata.

The balance is not restored until the end of the Fugue, which (in the context of Sunday's liturgy) will be over an hour later, as the postlude. The final entry of the main fugal subject in the pedal is sufficient. When that pedal comes in on the low F with full organ, we have Arrived. It is a place where the organist always wishes there were one more stop, perhaps a 32' Montre like they have at the Tabernacle in Salt Lake City: they are the large pipes you can see in this photo.

For we have not in truth Arrived: that will happen only on the Last Day, when the sanctification of Time is complete: “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.” (Revelation 22:13)

Saturday, November 22: St. Cecilia

Sing for the morning's joy, Cecilia, sing,
In words of youth and phrases of the Spring;
Walk the bright colonnades by fountains' spray,
And sing as sunlight fills the waking day;
Till angels, voyaging in upper air
Pause on a wing and gather the clear sound
Into celestial joy, wound and unwound,
A silver chain, or golden as your hair.
(from "A Hymn to St. Cecilia" by Herbert Howells: text by Ursula Vaughan Williams)

I keep a Holy Card of this great Lady on the organ console to remind me of her every day when I climb onto the bench. This day especially, I seek her intercessions; there is Work to Do. But I open the day with what proves a grievous error: not only do I skip my Good Habits for yet another day, but I skip Matins in my haste to get on the bench.

The Toccata does not go well. I work on it for three hours. In the final slow playthrough, which is supposed to settle me down, I cannot play one passage at all (measures 223-4). Not even at half tempo. I am forced to stop and work on it with the rhythms and try to patch things up. The place may well be a Train Wreck tomorrow, a place where the piece comes apart and I am forced to stop. Shortly after, still in the playthrough, D. comes in the church. When I realize that he is there, I stop, though I do not want to, not in the middle.

In my evaluation on Tuesday, my lowest score was for displaying Poor Judgment, mostly in regard to these men from the street that I have helped. The Rector correctly observed that many of them are not genuine in their requests for help, and that they have caused me considerable emotional distress. And my friend N., who has helped me much in going Cold Turkey on helping these people financially, pointed out to me that the Diocesan Policy on sexual boundaries that we studied this Tuesday says that we are not to give money to anyone with whom we are in a ministry relationship. That includes D.

Lately, he has mostly come for prayer, not money: his mother died of cancer about a week ago, and he has other problems, such as an uncertain roof over his head and his constant struggle with drug addiction (he is doing fairly well these days, but “Every day is hard,” he says. I believe him. I think that his bereavement has been a strong push back toward the drugs, for they would ease the pain. So far, I think he has resisted.) Today he wanted money: I said no, telling him of the reasons above.

But I thought of tomorrow's Gospel, and St. Elizabeth, and St. James, whose Epistle we read this past week in the Office (chapter 2, verse 17: Faith without works is dead.)

I finish the Toccata's playthrough, exhausted in mind, body, and spirit.

Elizabeth, pray for us, that we may be Generous.
Edmond, pray for us, that we may be Brave.
Cecilia, pray for us, that we may Sing.

After some food and a cup of tea, I am back on the bench for the Fugue. It goes well; about an hour's work and it is done.

I see that this is my three hundredth post in the Music Box. Thank you all for reading it.

(to be continued)

Dust thou art...

Our Youth Choir rehearsed on the afternoon of Ash Wednesday. On a whim, I had them get out the BCP and locate the Ash Wednesday service. Volunteers among the children read aloud the first two pages of it, down to the imposition of ashes, and we talked about it.

After the Lessons, the service has what I call a "Dearly Beloved" statement (the first words of the Marriage service, which begin an explanation of why we have gathered. Many Anglican services include such a statement, and Ash Wednesday is one). In this case it is "Dear people of God..." but the intent is the same: it is an explanation of why we observe Lent, and why we begin with this liturgy:

I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God's holy Word. (BCP p. 265)

My whim arose from a sense that children do not attend this service. I asked: only one of the choristers had ever been to an Ash Wednesday service. And when we had it later on, there were no children that I saw. There were several college-age young adults, but no one younger. And there was a parent who always brings her infant child to church, who may well have been there with her.

One of the results of this was apparent as we talked in the rehearsal: they were appalled at the concept that "you are dust, and to dust you will return" -- that is, that we are all going to die. My impression is that no one had ever suggested the idea to them. One of the girls in particular was very upset. "I don't want to think about death. It is horrible."

Yes, it is.

And our culture does not want to think of it. And that brings me to my point:

These children, all of them from active church families, do not usually attend anything beyond Sunday Eucharist, Christian Formation class, and our once-a-year choral evensong. With a few exceptions, they are not at the Great Vigil of Easter, nor the services on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, nor Ash Wednesday.

Yes, Wednesday is a school night. If the children come to choir in the afternoon and then the liturgy shortly after, it will be maybe 8:30 by the time they get home, with homework still on the agenda. Many of them also have other activities: dance class, volleyball practice, show choir to name three.

I am not a parent, so I cannot fully understand. But it seems to me that it would send a message for a parent to say: "Ash Wednesday is more important than homework." Or if she said to the coach, "My daughter is not going to be at practice tonight. She has a special church service she must attend."

That would be incredibly counter-cultural.

Perhaps the issue is that our parents, deep down, consider their child's progress in school and their socialization and development in after-school activities more important than their spiritual growth.

And that is a challenge for us all.

But it is hard, precisely because Ash Wednesday is countercultural. These choir parents are amazing people, the best group of parents I have ever worked with. Our director of Christian Formation, herself a choir parent, has tried to address this problem. For several years, she sponsored a dinner between choir rehearsal and the Ash Wednesday liturgy to encourage families to stay. Many did -- for the dinner, but not for the service.

Perhaps there is something to this that I do not understand at all.

----
Partly because of the girl who rightly appreciated the enormity of the statement "You are dust and to dust you shall return," I did talk about the rest of the story: Yes, we will die. But Jesus died too. He overcame death, and because of him, we will live forever.

From the prayer consecrating the ashes (BCP p. 265):

... that we may remember that it is only by your gracious gift that we are given everlasting life; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

[Edit: see the next posting in this blog for some second thoughts]

Bulletin Night

It is roughly 11 pm. I have just spent most of the last nine hours selecting hymns and working on church bulletins: thirteen of them, so we now have bulletin files for the next four Sundays, with Ash Wednesday and a Choral Evensong for good measure. The liturgical texts are in place, and all of the music except the prelude and postlude for 11:00 on March 16.

I won't go into the (very good) reasons why we need to get so far ahead, but I do want to note the problem with this approach. I get confused, and my work is not up to standard. I forget which service is at hand, and put the wrong music in the wrong place. Or the wrong liturgical text. Or I leave stray Alleluias hanging on into Lent.

The worst error (at least that I caught) was when I started with the March 9 bulletin for 11:00 to adapt it into March 16 (with some changes: on March 9 we do the Great Litany, on March 16 the Penitential Order and Trisagion). But I did not save it as a new file; I saved it right over the March 9 file. When I had completed the bulletin and could not find it as a March 16 file, I realized what I had done. Of course the bulletin I had overwritten (March 9) had a complicated structure with cut-and-paste music notation, etc. It took about a half-hour to re-create it, when all I wanted to do was to go home and go to bed.

Bulletins are perhaps the most time-consuming part of my work. Today was unusual, but this week I have spent more than twice as much time on bulletins and the liturgical decisions behind them as I have on the organ bench, including the playing of services.

I can only hope that today's work will somehow be to the glory of God. Right now, I don't see it.

Knowing the Tune: an Example

As an example of what I wrote a fortnight ago, my procedure for tomorrow's prelude improvisation was this:

It is our Parish Meeting Sunday, with our three usual services combined into one, most often sparsely attended – many people skip church and show up for the annual meeting that follows. Seeking to honor the traditions of our contemporary service, I am playing most of the service at the piano, and about half of the songs are from their repertoire.

One of them, “You have come down to the lakeshore” (number 758 in the supplement “Wonder, Love and Praise”) will be unfamiliar to the congregation from the two traditional services, so I began with this. By using it as the basis for the prelude, I hope to plant the tune in people's ears. It is beautiful, and I want them to hear that it is so. Then, when they sing it in the liturgy, they will hopefully recognize it, and be glad to sing it.

I began playing the tune, in thirds and sixths because it very naturally falls into that pattern. I sang along on the sol-fas. I played it in various keys, and began adding accompaniment – just simple chords, arpeggios. The tune is so lovely in itself that I do not want to do any more than that to it.

I played around with fragments of the tune, again in various keys, and now in various registers – the tenor, with the right hand doing figuration above it; the high treble, very quietly; all voices in the tenor register, the tune on top.

I turned to another tune from the service: “St. Andrew,” the David Hurd tune for “Jesus calls us” (The Hymnal 1982, number 549). This is the opening hymn, and will be unfamiliar to the contemporary congregation. I worked with it in similar fashion for a while, and tried combining the two tunes, with the idea of an A-B-A form. It was not working, because the tunes are too similar – though that in itself was a useful insight. I played around with various combinations of fragments from the two tunes, and some of this might show up in tomorrow's improvisation.

I turned to a third tune: “St. Dunstan's,” the American tune for “He who would valiant be” (The Hymnal 1982, number 564). This is the closing hymn, part of the traditional congregation's repertoire – though not sung for many years; the previous rector banned the hymn because of his notions about inclusive and militaristic language. Tomorrow's service ends with a big organ postlude on “St. Dunstan's” by Leo Sowerby, but it deserves mention in the prelude as well.

This was what I needed. “You have come down to the lakeshore” is delicate, gentle, beautiful. “St. Dunstan's” is bold, vigorous. Perfect!

After playing around with the tune as I did with the others, I developed a Plan.
The prelude will be an A-B-A form as I had intended, with “You have come down to the lakeshore” as the foundation of the A section, in F major. “St. Dunstan's” will be the second theme, beginning in D flat major, which quickly turns into C sharp minor, and (if it goes the way it did today) becomes rather dark. The main part of this B section will hopefully be the tune in the left hand, octaves, in the middle register, with toccata-like figuration in the right hand above it, much of it bitonal against the tune for added dissonance.

This comes to an end, and the A section returns like a spring morning (I hope). If there is time (it is, after all, the prelude, and I must aim for it to end at the stroke of 9:30 am), “St. Andrew” will be a little coda, laying the ground for the opening hymn, which is in F major – thus the choice of overall key center for the prelude.

The point of “knowing the tune” is to be able to do all of this without the tunes written out in front of me, and in keys that I would not have considered before working on this project. F major is fine (though “You have come down” is in D major in the hymnal supplement), but C sharp minor? That is why one should at least sometimes play the tunes in the more obscure keys.

I will add that it was a delight to do this work today, playing our beloved Steinway in the quiet church, the sunlight streaming through the windows. I stayed with this work longer than I should have, for I was having such a good time.

Thanksgiving Day

I do here both acknowledge and declare that the LORD God, of his tender loving-kindness, hath granted us a bountiful harvest in this good land which he hath given us. And, in the company of the faithful, I worship him: for he is good, for his mercy endureth forever. (see Deuteronomy 25:1-11)

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

Our parish is in the midst of what is probably the most agricultural state of the Union. When it goes badly here, food prices rise and those on the margins go hungry. It was that way last year in the Midwest. But this year, the season has been as nearly perfect as could be, and the harvest is bountiful. Thanks be to God.

We children of the Age of Science do not often give God sufficient credit for good weather, for healthy crops and livestock. We have outgrown such superstitions. Weather is essentially random, we claim (though affected for the worse by global warming). We depend more on the laboratories of Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland than we do on the vagaries of prayer and faith. [A large percentage of the crops grown in this state are genetically modified. I have heard numbers of over ninety percent, basically everything except the crops raised by organic farmers.]

There is, therefore, no reason for thanksgiving, and no one to thank. Or so they would have us think. Instead, this is a day to eat too much and gear up for tomorrow's shopping. Or to go ahead and get started; many of the big retailers are open today.

But hidden from the scientists (so-called) and the Big Ag people is the Hand of God.

We plow the fields and scatter
the good seed on the land,
but it is fed and watered
by God's almighty hand;
he sends the snow in winter,
the warmth to swell the grain,
the breezes and the sunshine,
and soft refreshing rain.

About twenty of us gathered this morning for the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist. We sang hymns – songs such as the above, “Come, ye thankful people come,” and “Now thank we all our God.” We heard the words of Holy Scripture. We prayed, and gave thanks. After that, we had Thanksgiving Dinner in the parish hall, a potluck with lots of good food. Better still, good people.

It sometimes bothers me that I cannot be like normal people, who have Thanksgiving with their family. For thirteen years, every Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day have been at the church, on duty. But when I consider it more closely, I am grateful that I can help give voice to the praises of Holy Mother Church on these days on behalf of the larger community of this parish, this city, this state, this nation and world. The people who gathered today, many of them the same ones who come to this service and dinner every Thanksgiving, are my family.

I believe that the dark days will come, days of gnawing hunger, when fossil-fuel based Industrial Agriculture has been swept away and our grandchildren are sharecroppers or peasants working the land in the way that it has been worked for thousands of years – hand tools, hard labor, and most of its fruits going to the wealthy few in faraway cities.

But for this day, we are well-fed. The grain elevators are full. And we rejoice in the one who has made it so.

And thou shalt rejoice in every good thing which the LORD thy God hath given unto thee, and unto thine house, thou, and the Levite, and the stranger that is among you. (Deuteronomy 25:11)

Conference Notes: Taizé

As with my previous essay, this one is an attempt to organize my thoughts about another aspect of the Hymn Society conference: the workshop on the music and worship of the Taizé Community, and the evening prayer service in the spirit of Taizé. I write my notes in this form in order to provide a space for links to online resources.

I wrote last week that my encounter with Taizé last month showed me that there is more to it than I had realized. Taizé was started by Brother Roger in 1940 as an ecumenical community of reconciliation and peace. "The defeat of France awoke powerful sympathy. If a house could be found there, of the kind I had dreamed of, it would offer a possible way of assisting some of those most discouraged, those deprived of a livelihood; and it could become a place of silence and work." Their small cottage in the desolate village of Taizé, where Roger was joined by three others, the first Brothers of the movement, became a sanctuary for many displaced persons during the early years of the war, until the Gestapo occupied it in November 1942. After the war, the four Brothers returned from Switzerland to the village and resumed their life of "simplicity, celibacy, and community." At first, their worship was in the village church. In the early 1960's, the community began to attract large numbers of young pilgrims, and they built their own church, the Church of Reconciliation, with the work of volunteers and pilgrims.

Should the coming decades bring what I expect, the quiet witness of these Brothers, just Brother Roger at first and then for many years fewer than ten of them, stands as a model for those facing times of famine, death, tumult and war. No matter what the circumstances, it is always possible to live the Christian life in community, and to serve as Christ's hands in the healing of the nations.

More specifically, we church musicians must keep the Taizé songs and their manner of worship in mind. There may be more strength to these songs, these prayers, than one might think.

----
The workshop and the evening prayer at the Hymn Society conference were led by David Anderson (davida@giamusic.com), who is an editor at GIA Publications. They are the U.S. agent for the Taizé publications, and all of the music is under their copyright for the U.S. and Canada. Several collections of music are available from GIA; recordings as well.

The Taizé website is this:
http://www.taize.fr

At this site, the most useful aspect for our purposes is the menu item "Prayer and Song." This takes you to a page with many subheadings; all of them are very important.

There is a page with mp3 files recorded live and quite unpolished (and thus, more real. For example, the cantors sometimes sing flat, the instrumentalists fluff notes, the congregation coughs and drops things on the floor and is sometimes not "with it." But there are times when it is all incredibly splendid. As with real worship, these moments are unpredictable.) There is a link to a weekly broadcast of the Saturday evening prayer service at Taizé, by a Catholic radio station in Cologne. There are many older services on the page as well as the one for the current week; each of the recordings runs about one hour and fades out in mid-song when the hour is expired.



The basic resources that Mr. Anderson recommended as a starting place are these:
- Songs and Prayers from Taizé (G-3719 for the basic edition) - 50 chants, guidelines, prayer texts and litanies.
- Taizé: Songs for Prayer (G-4956S for the vocal edition)
- Christe Lux Mundi (G-7101S for the vocal edition)
- Prayer for Each Day (G-4918) - this is text only; prayers for various seasons, a general introduction to worship in this manner.

Also two DVDs:
- Praying with the songs of Taizé (DVD-391). This is helpful because it is hard to enter the spirit of Taizé worship without seeing it. And it is done badly in many places, so badly as to turn people away from it. A similar result can be achieved from the broadcast recordings noted above.
- Life at Taizé (DVD-481) - a sixteen-minute video introducing the Community and its life.

---------
What should I make of all this?

There is already a weekly Taizé service in our community, so it would be wrong to try and start another one at our parish. Besides, we have the form of daily prayer that is proper to our tradition: Rite One Matins and Evensong, and especially Choral Evensong. We should nurture this rather than looking to Taizé for a model.

Still, it is worth noting that the Taizé form of evening prayer is based on the same model of monastic prayer that lies behind Roman Catholic Vespers, Lutheran Vespers, and Anglican Evensong: a beginning, psalm, Bible reading(s), prayers including the Our Father, song [in the basic tradition, the anthem or office hymn. In the Taizé form, this element is considerably expanded]. Perhaps there are lessons that we could carry over into Choral Evensong -- much longer silences after the readings, use of candles and icons, more opportunity for meditative prayer toward the end of the service (where our rubric says "Authorized intercessions and thanksgivings may follow" [BCP p. 71]), including ten or fifteen minutes of silent prayer, and then an open-ended conclusion to the service?

The result would feel very different from a traditional Choral Evensong, and probably very different from anything that is being done anywhere. I surely am not aware of any place where one might hear the Smith Responses, Anglican Chant psalmody, a Stanford Mag and Nunc, and end up with a couple of hours of Taizé songs, prayers, and meditation by candlelight. I would attend such a service; one of my problems with our Choral Evensong services is that when they are finished, what I want to do is to spend another hour or so in the church, in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament, contemplating what we have sung and continuing the prayer.

Of more interest is the question of incorporating elements of this into the Sunday morning Eucharist, specifically our 8:45 "contemporary" service. The practice at this service is to sing a Taizé song or other repetitive song during the administration of the Blessed Sacrament. (We use songs from other sources, such as the Iona Community, and more of these than the genuine Taizé songs. But the ones we use are in a similar style, and aim for similar effect.)

There are many problems with this. The most notable is that it requires a mental shift from the discursive to the meditative. And this is supposed to happen in a service where the clock is ever-present. We have to be done by 9:45 so that people can go to their church school classes. A secondary problem is that silence is just as important to the Taizé spirit as the music, and there is often not so much as thirty seconds of silence at any point in the 8:45 service -- again, the clock is the ruling factor. We must press on from one thing to the next in a headlong rush. One cannot easily flip the switch from this mindset to one of stillness. Even if we were not in such a hurry, the people would have to learn to tolerate silence.

A third problem is that the effect of the songs is cumulative. In a proper Taizé service, there are many songs in a row after the concluding prayer -- in the service broadcast that I am hearing as I write this, almost a half-hour of songs. We have time for only one song, perhaps five minutes, eight or nine minutes at the most.

Nonetheless, with all these obstacles, it sometimes works. Or (I am guessing) it works for some people some of the time, while simultaneously for others it falls flat. And on another Sunday, it might work for other people. It depends on what the people are bringing to that day's worship from their lives -- and, very much so, it depends on the work of the Holy Ghost who prays with and among us and can never be predicted or pinned down or planned, and does always what is best, and what we need.

There was a man who is a notable author who used to attend our 8:45 service. He would sit in the back row with his young daughters. In those days, someone else (Thomas W., who reads this blog) was leading the music, and I sat in the back row with them. In one of his books, he wrote of a particular day when we sang a Taizé song -- and how it changed everything for him. I remember that song and that day, and even sitting beside him, I had no idea what was going on in his heart. It is well to remember such things as these. We (especially we who plan worship and music) may think we know what is going on, but we do not.

What I am getting at is this: the Taizé song during the distribution of communion is the most unpredictable part of our 8:45 service. And it must remain so. All I can do is to pick a good song, lead it with some degree of sensitivity to the feel of the congregation, and stay out of the way. When it "works," the song takes on what Brother Robert called "a flow of inner life animat[ing] the singing," and it becomes like a little bird, or a butterfly.

----------
A practical note: One easily gets the impression that the instruments are more important than they are in fact. There are books of instrumental parts for all sorts of things -- flutes, trumpets, cellos, guitar (classical-style, not the "thrash and bash" type guitarist that so often appears in church settings). Mr. Anderson reminded us that they don't actually make that much use of the instruments at Taizé. In the off-season when there are not so many pilgrims, there may be only the guitar which seems to be their basic instrument, or a keyboard, and this is perfectly legitimate. Even in the peak season, there will likely be only one or two additional instruments at a given service. In the one I am listening to -- in August, a peak time with lots of pilgrims -- there is a trumpet, not very well played, and he or she only plays in perhaps one-quarter of the songs, maybe less.

What there are at Taizé, and what we lack: cantors. We have some people who sing at the 8:45 service, but none of them have vocal ranges that correspond to the written Taizé parts. Many of the songs benefit greatly from the solo descants.

Still, the song can and should be simple. If leading from the piano as I do, a good bit of improvisation is helpful, and it would be quite deadly if the pianist simply were to repeat the written accompaniment, over and over. I begin with the written accompaniment, and after a few times start to play descants, or change registers (e.g., revoice the chords into the tenor register), or reduce the texture to just the bass line, or just a descant line, or stop playing altogether, just giving a hint at the end of each repetition that we should continue. Or arpeggiate, or play what the old composers called "doubles" -- variations in eighth note motion. Brother Robert again: "Variations in intensity are desirable, to match the variations in the prayer itself. At times it will be calmer, and at other times more urgent." The piano and other instruments can give cues as to the changes in intensity -- but the pianist must not force this on the people; he must sense what is appropriate from moment to moment. If Brother Robert is correct (and I think he is), the pianist is sensing "the variations in the prayer itself" and through his playing helping the congregation likewise to sense the variation, the ebb-and-flow of the prayer.

I have tried accompanying the songs at the organ, and it has been a miserable failure. The piano is much better for this - though the organ could work with the strongest and most outgoing of the songs, such as "Laudate Dominum," if there is a large and vigorous congregation.

And the large congregation helps all of the songs. There is a special magic when hundreds of people are singing this music in a good acoustic, as we had at the Hymn Society service. We sang the Magnificat canon, which is one of the older songs, and got the four-part canon going plus the four-part secondary canon, and kept singing for about ten minutes. It was spine-tingling (not at all like the recording, which is a studio recording with a small group of singers -- much cleaner, but not like a real congregation). It is something that is not possible for our congregation of fifty or sixty people, most of them not especially interested in singing.

Here is a song that was new to me. I think it will be effective at our 8:45 service. The YouTube link is more of a real congregation, and shows the use of the guitar to accompany:
Let all who are thirsty, come

----------
I am left with many more questions than answers.
But that is true of almost every aspect of my work as a church musician, and my life as a Christian.