I asked myself in the previous essay why it would be inappropriate to play the Craig Phillips setting of Sine Nomine as a prelude because of its virtuosity, but the Bach Toccata in F is perhaps more appropriate.
Most often, my decisions about the appropriateness of an anthem, hymn, or voluntary are based on an inarticulate sense of the rightness or wrongness of an item for a particular point in the liturgy, based on my experience with music and the liturgy, my sense of the people in this place, and the capabilities of choir, organist, and congregation.
But, after further thought and practice on the Bach, I think I can articulate the way in which it differs from the Phillips. In the latter, there is a sense in which some of the virtuosity is for its own sake -- “showing off,” if you will. It was composed for an occasion for which that was appropriate. Because it is firmly based on a hymn tune, I considered it appropriate for the Sunday on which we sang the hymn, but not as a prelude. A postlude allows somewhat more scope for virtuosity, mostly because those who are not interested in music can escape to the coffee hour. The Bach is equally virtuosic (and more difficult), with its two extended pedal solos early in the toccata. But every note of the Bach is in service of the musical idea that is laid out in the opening two-voice canon over tonic pedal point, and my sense is that this musical idea is appropriate for the Last Sunday after Pentecost, Year A.
In fact, I am unable to name any mature work of Bach that exhibits virtuosity for its own sake. If there is any virtuosity present, it is a virtuosity of compositional skill in the execution of the underlying ideas, not in the exterior aspects of the performance. This is one characteristic that separates J. S. Bach from a perfectly serviceable composer such as Craig Phillips. To put it in terms of Bach's contemporaries, this is one way in which Bach differs from Telemann, a good musician whom the city fathers of Leipzig would have preferred to Bach. He would not have demanded as much of them as listeners.
So what idea is this that Bach is communicating, and that I consider a good fit for the Last Sunday of Pentecost, Year A? The phrases that come to mind are from Psalm 47: “Clap your hands, all you peoples; shout to God with a cry of joy.... For God is King of all the earth; sing praises with all your skill.” This Sunday is the end of the liturgical year, wherein thoughts turn to the end of days. In the Daily Office, we have made our way to the end of the Revelation of St. John the Divine; in the Sunday Gospel, we hear of the Day of Doom, “when the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him” (St. Matthew 25:31). There will in this day be weeping and gnashing of teeth as the wicked go away into everlasting punishment (v. 46), but it will be as well a day of victory, when the last Enemy, death, is overcome forever (Revelation 20:14). And it will be the day of final and complete answer to the daily prayer of Holy Mother Church: “Thy kingdom come.”
The Bach Toccata in F, with its Fugue, is the best response to this that I can make with the music available to me. The Toccata is boundless joy, the serious and all-consuming joy that is characteristic of the praise of God, the working out of one of the grandest ideas in all of Bach's music. The Fugue is more solemn. In the context of this service, I hope that it can be an expression (insofar as humanly possible) of the majesty of our Lord Jesus Christ at the right hand of God, sitting as righteous Judge of all the earth. When the two subjects combine in the final pages of the fugue, it is inexpressibly majestic, and causes me to consider the completion of the purposes of God, determined before the foundation of the earth.
These words are but a stammering and inadequate attempt to say what cannot be said. Yet, dust and ashes that we are, we must say something. No: we must sing something, and in this case, instrumental music has the advantage that it sings without words. And we cannot, for this occasion, play it safe; we must “sing... with all [our] skill.” This piece is right on the edge of my capabilities; that makes it just about right.
As Bach would say – and did say, at the end of nearly every one of his scores:
Soli Deo gloria.
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Here is a performance of the toccata by Helmut Walcha. For those who attend my parish, he was the teacher of D.D., and this is a much better performance than what you will hear on Sunday.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Friday, November 4, 2011
Apparition of the Eternal Church
I am playing this on Sunday.
I am nervous about it – not so much about getting through it, as about how people will respond to it. I have played it before, and no one has killed me yet. But this is a piece that elicits strong reactions. I love it. But I must remember that many will not.
Is it appropriate to inflict something like this on a congregation? They have come to worship, to pray, not to listen to loud spiky music. I do not have a proper answer to this, whether for this piece or any of the other strange things that I play. This morning after I practiced it, I considered moving it from its place as the prelude to postlude, which would mean moving the Craig Phillips setting of Sine Nomine to prelude. It is a more comfortable piece, but it is long and virtuosic. I do not like playing such a piece as a prelude, especially when it ends with a big loud toccata-like flourish that, in the context of a church prelude, is the wrong way to begin the Eucharistic service. It would be better as a postlude, and there is nothing virtuosic about the Messiaen. Power, yes; virtuosity, no.
(Having said that, I plan to play the Bach Toccata in F as the prelude a fortnight from now. How is that different from the Phillips?)
A few years ago, a gentleman by the name of Paul Festa made a video about the Messiaen piece (the Apparition of the Eternal Church). The body of the 50-plus minute documentary consists of watching thirty-one people listen to this piece with headphones, without being told what it is or what to expect. Their reactions are amazing.
I will not link to the video's website, because some of the content of the website (and the video) is graphically sexual and laced with lots of profanity – but that is how some of the people reacted to the music.
Is it fair to do something like this to a church congregation?
Is it fair not to do something like this, that does everything possible within the musical art to bring the spiritual vision into visceral reality? Too many times, church musicians back off from the edge and play it safe. We stay in nice cozy major keys, Andante religioso from beginning to end.
But Christianity is not safe.
Here is a YouTube performance of the music:
Link
“A crescendo in granite... the pedal marks the blows of the hammer of grace … chisel, hammer, suffering, and trials cut and polish the elect, living stones of the spiritual edifice.” (from Messiaen's program notes: cf. I Peter 2:5, Revelation 21:2-3)
I am nervous about it – not so much about getting through it, as about how people will respond to it. I have played it before, and no one has killed me yet. But this is a piece that elicits strong reactions. I love it. But I must remember that many will not.
Is it appropriate to inflict something like this on a congregation? They have come to worship, to pray, not to listen to loud spiky music. I do not have a proper answer to this, whether for this piece or any of the other strange things that I play. This morning after I practiced it, I considered moving it from its place as the prelude to postlude, which would mean moving the Craig Phillips setting of Sine Nomine to prelude. It is a more comfortable piece, but it is long and virtuosic. I do not like playing such a piece as a prelude, especially when it ends with a big loud toccata-like flourish that, in the context of a church prelude, is the wrong way to begin the Eucharistic service. It would be better as a postlude, and there is nothing virtuosic about the Messiaen. Power, yes; virtuosity, no.
(Having said that, I plan to play the Bach Toccata in F as the prelude a fortnight from now. How is that different from the Phillips?)
A few years ago, a gentleman by the name of Paul Festa made a video about the Messiaen piece (the Apparition of the Eternal Church). The body of the 50-plus minute documentary consists of watching thirty-one people listen to this piece with headphones, without being told what it is or what to expect. Their reactions are amazing.
I will not link to the video's website, because some of the content of the website (and the video) is graphically sexual and laced with lots of profanity – but that is how some of the people reacted to the music.
“That‘s a piece of music that just rips right through you. It just feels like my whole body was vibrating, it kind of started in my head and then it moved through into my chest and I even felt it in my legs … Which makes sense for an organ player, right? Because it’s so hyper-embodied. And the tension of the piece must be felt in just every fiber of your being … He clearly did not care what people thought. I mean, what is that? It’s literally assaultive …
Paradoxically, for a musician so associated with theology he’s one of the most sensual and physical and I think corporeal of musicians.” (comments from the transcript of the video, available on the website. The last comment is after the listener(s) have been told the title and composer of the piece)
Is it fair to do something like this to a church congregation?
Is it fair not to do something like this, that does everything possible within the musical art to bring the spiritual vision into visceral reality? Too many times, church musicians back off from the edge and play it safe. We stay in nice cozy major keys, Andante religioso from beginning to end.
But Christianity is not safe.
Here is a YouTube performance of the music:
Link
“A crescendo in granite... the pedal marks the blows of the hammer of grace … chisel, hammer, suffering, and trials cut and polish the elect, living stones of the spiritual edifice.” (from Messiaen's program notes: cf. I Peter 2:5, Revelation 21:2-3)
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Lord, thou hast been our refuge
October 23, 2011 - I have anticipated this day for a long time:
The Old Testament lesson for today was the last chapter of Deuteronomy, the ascent of Moses to the top of Pisgah, where the LORD showed him “all the land... unto the utmost sea.” The account says that “there arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face.”
In response, the Lectionary appointed a selection from Psalm 90, whose superscription reads: “A prayer of Moses the man of God.”
There are two settings of Psalm 90 that surpass all others: one is the setting by Charles Ives with its incomparable quiet ending, “as church bells, from a distance” (notation in the parts for orchestral bells, measure 93). The entire piece is over a C pedal point in the organ, and is “as evolution: quiet, unseen and unheeded, but strong fundamentally” (notation in choral parts, measure 14). Ives worked on this piece for over thirty years, and “Mrs. Ives recalled his saying that it was the only one of his works that he was satisfied with.”
Shortly before Ives brought this to completion in 1923-24, Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote his setting of the same text: “Lord, thou hast been our refuge.” It incorporates a stanza of St. Anne, “O God our help in ages past,” the metrical setting of Psalm 90 by Isaac Watts. At first this is pianississimo while the semichorus (the youth choir, in our rendition today) sings the first verses of the prose text. The hymn tune returns later, in other guise.
RVW wanted everyone to make music, and he gave options with this piece for performance by limited forces – the semichorus can be replaced by a solo baritone, and the trumpet is “ad lib,” and can be omitted – though with considerable loss to the effect. It seemed appropriate to me for our Youth Choir to sing the semichorus part, with the Adult Choir on the “full chorus,” and both choirs joining for the final pages. It works splendidly in the grandest of settings, but it also works in our little parish church, with our amateur choristers, young and old. Although our performance was far from perfect, I believe that RVW would be pleased with the way that we sang it. I certainly was.
I do not know if I can do this piece again; I barely made it through this day. After our one-and-only combined rehearsal with trumpet, organ, and both choirs, I was an emotional wreck. But I was saved by three things: the children, the congregation, and the trumpet.
After the rehearsal, one of the boys (Tom) complained about how loud it was: “I can't even hear myself.” “Yes. Isn't it grand?” I answered. One of the little girls (Elise) said pretty much the same thing, expressing her delight in it. They brought me back to earth with their reminder of the sheer practical childlike joy of making Real Music that is splendid and overwhelming. This is, I think, what Holy Scripture is expressing in passages such as II Chronicles 5:13-14 and Revelation 5:11-14.
Part way through the piece, I noticed the congregation. The youth choir filled the choir loft, relegating the adult choir to the front three pews. And behind them – the congregation, by this point listening intently. They too were part of the music, as was their inner response to it, a response that for some of them may echo for years to come. Dorothy Sayers explores this at length in “The Mind of the Maker,” to which I have referred in these pages. This is even more important when the audience/congregation and the musicians are one community, as we were today. The listeners enter into the music-making more fully, for they know the people from whom the music comes. Although the performance from Westminster Abbey linked above was from a much grander occasion, it too was “one community,” representing an entire nation on an important day of remembrance. This connects (again) with II Chronicles 5:13-14 and Revelation 5:11-14, where music serves this function on two of the most important occasions in history (past and future), and where, in the latter passage, the community encompasses “every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them.”
The trumpeter does not play until the hymn tune St. Anne returns on page twelve, more than five minutes into the piece. Her part appears to be simple, all of it in long notes, playing once through the hymn tune. But it is not; she needed careful and accurate cues from me, as did the trebles for their entrances, and the tenors for one key passage on page fourteen. And it was the hymn tune and my responsibility for it that carried me through the final pages.
Psallam spiritu et mente – I will sing with the spirit, and with the understanding also (I Cor. 14:15, the motto of the RSCM).
I become emotional at moments such as these, and the “understanding” must remain in control, else I would fail in my duty. A conductor has to do only one thing: give the ensemble what they need to get through the piece. The music-making comes from the singers and instrumentalists, not the conductor.
It was a Good Day. The choirs of this parish made this anthem their own, and sang it from the heart.
At the furthest reach of my plans: Oct. 23, 2011 - "Lord, thou hast been our refuge" (RVW), with the Youth Choir doing the semichorus part. This will be unorthodox, but I believe that RVW, practical musician that he was, would approve. The young people will sing the lines "The years of our life are threescore years and ten..." to the adults; I get chills imagining it, and contemplating a whole semester of living with Psalm 90 and this magnificent music alongside the young people. Singing it will teach them the Psalm more thoroughly than any words could do. (from the Music Box, June 9, 2010)
The Old Testament lesson for today was the last chapter of Deuteronomy, the ascent of Moses to the top of Pisgah, where the LORD showed him “all the land... unto the utmost sea.” The account says that “there arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face.”
In response, the Lectionary appointed a selection from Psalm 90, whose superscription reads: “A prayer of Moses the man of God.”
Lord, thou hast been our refuge from one generation to another ...
There are two settings of Psalm 90 that surpass all others: one is the setting by Charles Ives with its incomparable quiet ending, “as church bells, from a distance” (notation in the parts for orchestral bells, measure 93). The entire piece is over a C pedal point in the organ, and is “as evolution: quiet, unseen and unheeded, but strong fundamentally” (notation in choral parts, measure 14). Ives worked on this piece for over thirty years, and “Mrs. Ives recalled his saying that it was the only one of his works that he was satisfied with.”
Shortly before Ives brought this to completion in 1923-24, Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote his setting of the same text: “Lord, thou hast been our refuge.” It incorporates a stanza of St. Anne, “O God our help in ages past,” the metrical setting of Psalm 90 by Isaac Watts. At first this is pianississimo while the semichorus (the youth choir, in our rendition today) sings the first verses of the prose text. The hymn tune returns later, in other guise.
RVW wanted everyone to make music, and he gave options with this piece for performance by limited forces – the semichorus can be replaced by a solo baritone, and the trumpet is “ad lib,” and can be omitted – though with considerable loss to the effect. It seemed appropriate to me for our Youth Choir to sing the semichorus part, with the Adult Choir on the “full chorus,” and both choirs joining for the final pages. It works splendidly in the grandest of settings, but it also works in our little parish church, with our amateur choristers, young and old. Although our performance was far from perfect, I believe that RVW would be pleased with the way that we sang it. I certainly was.
I do not know if I can do this piece again; I barely made it through this day. After our one-and-only combined rehearsal with trumpet, organ, and both choirs, I was an emotional wreck. But I was saved by three things: the children, the congregation, and the trumpet.
After the rehearsal, one of the boys (Tom) complained about how loud it was: “I can't even hear myself.” “Yes. Isn't it grand?” I answered. One of the little girls (Elise) said pretty much the same thing, expressing her delight in it. They brought me back to earth with their reminder of the sheer practical childlike joy of making Real Music that is splendid and overwhelming. This is, I think, what Holy Scripture is expressing in passages such as II Chronicles 5:13-14 and Revelation 5:11-14.
It came even to pass, as the trumpeters and singers were as one, to make one sound to be heard in praising and thanking the LORD; and when they lifted up their voice with the trumpets and cymbals and instruments of musick, and praised the LORD, saying, For he is good; for his mercy endureth for ever: that then the house was filled with a cloud, even the house of the LORD; so that the priests could not stand to minister by reason of the cloud: for the glory of the LORD had filled the house of God.
And I beheld, and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne and the beasts and the elders: and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands; saying with a loud voice, Worthy is the Lamb that was slain...
Part way through the piece, I noticed the congregation. The youth choir filled the choir loft, relegating the adult choir to the front three pews. And behind them – the congregation, by this point listening intently. They too were part of the music, as was their inner response to it, a response that for some of them may echo for years to come. Dorothy Sayers explores this at length in “The Mind of the Maker,” to which I have referred in these pages. This is even more important when the audience/congregation and the musicians are one community, as we were today. The listeners enter into the music-making more fully, for they know the people from whom the music comes. Although the performance from Westminster Abbey linked above was from a much grander occasion, it too was “one community,” representing an entire nation on an important day of remembrance. This connects (again) with II Chronicles 5:13-14 and Revelation 5:11-14, where music serves this function on two of the most important occasions in history (past and future), and where, in the latter passage, the community encompasses “every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them.”
The trumpeter does not play until the hymn tune St. Anne returns on page twelve, more than five minutes into the piece. Her part appears to be simple, all of it in long notes, playing once through the hymn tune. But it is not; she needed careful and accurate cues from me, as did the trebles for their entrances, and the tenors for one key passage on page fourteen. And it was the hymn tune and my responsibility for it that carried me through the final pages.
Psallam spiritu et mente – I will sing with the spirit, and with the understanding also (I Cor. 14:15, the motto of the RSCM).
I become emotional at moments such as these, and the “understanding” must remain in control, else I would fail in my duty. A conductor has to do only one thing: give the ensemble what they need to get through the piece. The music-making comes from the singers and instrumentalists, not the conductor.
It was a Good Day. The choirs of this parish made this anthem their own, and sang it from the heart.
[When we sing,] we express ourselves and become vulnerable to God and to one another in our song in a unique way.... [There is] something intangible, something about health and healing that congregations and choirs experience in their innermost beings....
The point is that any music that bears repetition, music on which time and effort are worth being spent, will be fine art. The point is that music in worship, the highest activity of humankind, will of necessity invoke the finest craft and that, in turn, has the potential to issue in the finest art. Precisely because music serves a greater good than itself gives it the best chance to be the finest art. Gregorian chant, Palestrina motets, Bach cantatas, black spirituals, and innumerable hymns with their tunes are prime examples [as is this day's anthem] – amazing art and amazing gifts to the whole human race.
(Paul Westermeyer, “The Heart of the Matter,” p. 50-52)
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
"Old times there are not forgotten; look away, look away ..."
It's all now you see.... For every southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and ... yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time. [William Faulkner, from “Intruder in the Dust”]
When I was a lad, I often visited the graveyard near home, especially the lichen-covered stone marker set flat in the ground in one corner at the highest point of the yard. In worn letters, it recorded the names of the Confederate home-guard militia soldiers who died on that hilltop, defending their home town in 1862. (There is now a fine modern monument, erected a few years ago by the Sons of the Confederacy. I left some flowers on it the last time I was there.) It was just a skirmish, not worthy of being called a battle, and the handful of boys and old men who fought there were not even soldiers of the regular Army. Their opponents in blue were indeed “real” soldiers, a nineteen-year-old future president (McKinley) among them. Despite opposition they could not hope to overcome, the militia men of the community fought as best they could and did their duty as they understood it. I doubt that slavery, or states' rights, or any of the other reasons given in history books for the war, figured in their minds that spring day.
Our county, at that time so sparsely populated and remote that it was considered a “wilderness,” sent eleven companies of men into the Army of Northern Virginia. I have stood on Seminary Ridge at Gettysburg and read the names of these eleven companies where they waited through the artillery bombardment that July morning. I have stood, and wept, beside the statue of General Lee astride Traveller looking across that field, much as he was that day in 1863 as the shattered army streamed back past him, defeated.
One of my friends, an African-American musician serving a historic church in the South, related his victory in getting the Confederate Flag removed from his church. He threatened them with a lawsuit because, he said, the Flag constituted harassment, creating a threatening and unwelcoming workplace. I did not even try to explain; I could not, not in terms that he would understand. Even my wife, who knows me better than anyone, does not understand. Her take: “The war is over. You lost. Get over it.”
I will never get over it.
The legacy of the Confederate States of America is a mixed bag. Yes, slavery was part of it. The racism of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan that followed the war must be counted as part of it. In this, the CSA was no better, and in my opinion no worse, than the USA, or any other nation of the earth. For every nation and people of the earth, history and culture amount to a mixed bag, with shameful deeds alongside moments of glory; men and women who would be better forgotten, and those whose names should live forever.
A certain indescribable freedom was lost when Old Dixie went down. I have felt the evanescent spirit of it lingering among gatherings of my older relatives, and in conversation with neighbors and co-workers “back home,” especially the more backward and uneducated among them. I have tasted it in the moonshine at my uncle's funeral, and in my mother's corn bread and beans, made just the way her mother, and her mother's mother, made it. Some of it can be heard in the old “hillbilly” songs, and to a lesser degree in the bluegrass and country music that descended from them, or in the “shape-note” singing that has survived mostly in the Old South.
The victory by the North was a victory for Yankee capitalism, for centralized government, for the “robber barons” that would follow the war, for the tenement and factory over the hardscrabble hill and delta farms of the South. It was, as well, the emancipation of a people who should never have been enslaved. It was when the United States became a nation. Shelby Foote noted in his three-volume study of the War that before 1860, people would say “the United States are . . . .” After 1865, it became “the United States is . . . .” We are no longer a collection of states, but one nation, and I am glad of it.
I came to better appreciate the men who fought to save the Union by reading Walt Whitman, and from a courthouse monument in northern New York. The men from that little town and the countryside around it were among the men who were behind that stone wall across the field from my people on that July afternoon. One can read it there on the monument, where the names of battles were engraved. Almost from beginning to end, these men of the Army of the Potomac were badly led, driven off battlefield after battlefield, or sent to their deaths in ill-conceived assaults that should never have been attempted. One can read of those horrors graven on the monument in names such as “Fredericksburg. . . Chancellorsville. . . Cold Harbor. . . .” Yet, they persevered, and almost in spite of their commanders, won the war.
And above all, there was Abraham Lincoln.
But my heart will always be in the South. I will always revere Robert E. Lee, Thomas Jackson, J.E.B. Stuart, James Longstreet, A. P. Hill, Dick Ewell, “Allegheny” Johnson, Albert Sidney Johnston, Patrick Cleburne, Bedford Forrest, William Lamb, Raphael Semmes, Jefferson Davis and his cabinet, and many others who were faithful in their duties to home and country. I will try to live up to their example. But it is not only leaders such as these, the ones whose names are in the histories, whose example I emulate. . . .
In the South, there was no money for monuments after the War. Confederate monuments are almost always smaller than those in the towns across the North. The one in the county next over from where I grew up is smaller even than most. It can be found behind an old church on the edge of the little town that is the county seat, and dates from about 1910, when the people of the county finally scraped up enough money to hire a local stonecarver to make it. It is a boy, a teenager, in slouch hat and ragged clothes, barefoot, musket in hand. He looks across the field to the hills that he doubtless loved, and perhaps never saw again after he marched off to the war. I will try, as well, to live up to his example, and the example of those home-guard militiamen buried on the hill near my home, stubbornly persevering in duty and love of country even in defeat.
Inscribed on the monument is just one sentence, a quote from Lee: "There is a true glory and a true honor: the glory of duty done -- the honor of integrity of principle."
Northern politicians will not appreciate the determination and pluck of the South, and Southern politicians do not appreciate the numbers, resources, and patient perseverance of the North. Both sides forget that we are all Americans. I foresee that our country will pass through a terrible ordeal, a necessary expiation, perhaps, for our national sins....
The truth is this: The march of Providence is so slow and our desires so impatient; the work of progress is so immense and our means of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope. - Robert E. Lee
----
I wrote this several years ago on my LiveJournal page. It is perhaps worth revisiting today in honor of Mr. Lee, who passed from this mortal life on October 12, 1870.
O God, who hast brought us near to an innumerable company of angels and to the spirits of just men made perfect: Grant us during our earthly pilgrimage to abide in their fellowship, and in our heavenly country to become partakes of their joy; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. (BCP p. 198)
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Libraries
The library for my home town occupied a small room in the War Memorial Building with a Sherman tank in the front yard by the flagpole, exactly one mile from our house. To a little boy, the War Memorial Building was vast, smelling of times long disappeared, with high ceilings and dark wainscoting and dust and flies buzzing and adults going about their business (for some of the county offices were there, spilling over from the court house across the street). My mother used to bring me to the room in the back that said in black letters painted on the frosted-glass window: “Public Library.”
Inside, there was a small wooden desk with an ancient white-haired lady seated behind it; she must have been at least fifty years old (and closer to seventy by the time I left high school). As I would learn, she was kind to children so long as they were quiet, and I was, partly because I never encountered another child there. Normally, my mother and I (and perhaps my sister) were the only patrons in the room, but occasionally there would be other ladies whom my mother always knew, and they would exchange pleasantries (in whispers, of course). There was one goodly-sized oak table in the middle of the room with wooden chairs around it, and a ceiling fan turned lazily on high.
And there were books. Three walls of the room were shelved from floor to ceiling, with a ladder that could be used for the higher shelves. Tall books, short books, paperbacks (not many of those), hardbacks, most of them old, some of them (I would now realize, were I to return) dating to the mid-nineteenth century.
In the book “Rocket Boys,” which was set in a nearby county and in a time just a bit earlier than that of which I speak, one of the teenage “rocket boys,” Quentin Wilson, had read every book in the McDowell County Library. That made me feel better, for by the age of seventeen I had at least opened and sampled every book in our library, and had been forcibly impressed by my experiences at school that this was Not Done, not by anyone who had hope of a social life.
Some of the books in the library, especially the adult contemporary fiction of the time, I quickly laid aside as “boring.” Some of the books were so far over my head that I found no connection with them. But I believe that many books have their own time and place for us, and wait until we are ready for them, and early experiences may pave the way.
I especially devoured anything that had to do with science or mathematics -- thinking back, I do not recall anything whatsoever about music, my other passion as a teenager, not even a music dictionary. Nor do I recall anything in a language other than English. The card catalogue, guarded by the ancient librarian on her desk, was one unit of three side-by-side drawers: Subject, Title, Author.
In truth, I spent relatively little time in that room, except when I would take one of the reference books over to the big table and read for a while; mostly, I checked books out to take home, armloads at a time.
From there, I went to college. Not just any college, but a school with one of the major research libraries in the United States. My chief memories of freshman orientation are three: the fine gothic Chapel, the quarters of the music department (a dilapidated pile that would be condemned as unfit for human occupation the next summer), and the card catalogue room of the library, with the circulation desk nearby: a roomful of cards, several times the size of our entire library back home. The ancient and kindly librarian at her desk was replaced by squadrons of busy work-study students, processing books in and out and with no time for nonsense from callow freshmen. And the “real” librarians, those in charge? They would no more notice a lowly undergraduate than a gnat.
I spent little time there; it was not a place to linger, and the music library (where I later became one of those busy work-study students) was on the other campus. But I still dream of that place sometimes, usually in one of my frantic-search-for-something dreams. And I found one little corner that I liked. It was the Classical Studies collection, which was in the furthest corner of a sub-basement with utilitarian metal shelving, and at the end of some of the rows against the wall, small metal desks and chairs of (probably) World War II vintage. It was a good place to get away from everyone, for almost no one ever visited these old books, row upon row of them in Latin and Greek, with more scholarly commentaries than there were primary texts, and shelves full of journals, covered with years of dust. I hope they haven’t been consigned to a landfill, for we might still need what is in these dusty old books.
In later years, I used to visit another small town Appalachian library, the only one in the county. It was on the ground floor of what had once been a bank, and had more enthusiasm and space than money or books. Despite their limits, they served as the cultural focus for the county in many and creative ways, which were lost on most of the people in the community. But it was a haven for the score or so of us who cared about books and ideas. When I moved away from that county, I donated most of my books to them, including some that I wish I had kept.
My graduate school was strictly a music school, with an excellent (if specialized) library, clean and modern and efficient, and the finest reference librarian I have encountered. She is retired now, and I still see her at Hymn Society conventions. As always with every library since my first, I lacked the time to do more than sample the riches that were in the collection -- the tall bound volumes indexed in Historical Collections and Monuments of Music -- things like the Denkmäler Deutscher Tonkunst or Tudor Church Music, or the collected works of Beethoven, and Bach, and Mozart, and Haydn, and pretty much anyone else that would come to mind. I remember one fine spring day, my exams complete, every paper submitted, my degree work complete, when I spent the entire day there, browsing. It was heavenly.
Later still, there was yet another small town. Its library was a fine Victorian mansion, donated to the town some years before. The large central reading room on the ground floor, with newspapers and other periodicals, had comfortable high wingbacked chairs. One could settle in with a magazine or book and read for hours, with the tall windows, their glass wavy with age, overlooking a flower garden and tree-shaded lawns sloping down to the river. It was on the way home from work, and I stopped there almost every day to read the news, both in print and online. For they had computers, two of them, with Internet connections, something we did not have at home or at the church.
This library was an unmatched place to browse, for the collection was divided up into the many rooms of the old house, all with their tall windows and wide windowsills. One room that was perhaps unique was what the librarians called the “Little Boys’ Room.” It was in the basement, and housed books that had been bequeathed by an engineer in the town and maintained as a special collection in his honor. I loved it: a whole room of books on science and technology, with special emphasis on architecture, boat-building, automobiles, motorcycles, airplanes, and space travel.
Nowadays, I have cards for two libraries. The one close to the church is larger and has an excellent collection; the one in the nearby town where I live is friendlier. I love that place, and wish I could spend days there. It is filled with comfortable places to read or work; there is a little cafe right there, and a natural-foods cooperative five minutes’ walk away with excellent sandwiches. It is a sufficient collection with pretty much anything I would want -- and if it doesn’t have it, I can try the larger library by the church.
Finally, there is our own library at home, or I should say two libraries -- for my office at the church is more library than office. At home, my wife and I each have our own desks, both of which she made. Hers is a genuinely fine piece of furniture; mine is smaller and utilitarian, but still, being from her hand, priceless to me. There are plenty of books within reach without rising from my chair, and my computer (on which I write most of these Music Box essays) is to the right. There is almost always a cat nearby -- as I write, she is sleeping on the cherry chest to my left. There is a fine view of the sky, and all the comforts of home are close at hand.
Most of all, there are books. Many of these books are my old friends -- though there are, when I think about it, far too many books that I own but have not yet read, probably more than I can ever read. I still want to read them just as much as the day I bought them, but other things have taken precedence.
The books overflow the library into the front room, where the Harvard Classics reside next to my rocking chair. They came into my life after college where I bought the whole (incomplete and somewhat battered) set at a Planned Parenthood booksale. For the years that followed, they were the core of my “collection.” My wife made a bookcase out of scrap wood specifically to fit them, along with my Classics Club volumes. That was a mail-order book club to which I subscribed in the late 1970’s; every two months brought a shipment of two volumes until the set was complete, and at the outset one selected which volumes were desired. I used it to fill in the gaps in the Harvard set. I got behind on the Classics Club books, and still have not quite read them all (six remain, all of them nineteenth century novels), but I did make it through the Harvard Classics and know them well enough to find what I want in them readily enough.
Every good book, even the non-fiction books on technical subjects (such as Strong’s Concordance, mentioned a few weeks ago), takes its reader into its own universe. It may be the world of King David and Asaph and the Sons of Korah which one enters through their language, or (to name a few titles within reach) Marcus Aurelius, or Anton Bruckner (a biography), or Aesop’s Fables, or the Army of Northern Virginia (“Lee’s Lieutenants” by Douglas Southall Freeman, the companion volume to his biography of R.E.L.) and the wider scenes of that conflict (Shelby Foote’s three-volume history, “Civil War”), or A Field Guide to Trees and Shrubs, or the Federalist Papers, or T. S. Eliot, or the fictional land of Chalion, with Cazaril and the Five Gods (Lois McMaster Bujold, with Miles Vorkosigan and his friends beside the Chalion books), or Flatland, or the Catechism of the Catholic Church, or The Food and Drink of Mexico.
In some respects, books make civilization possible. And disdain for books hastens its decline. This puts librarians, along with booksellers, readers, and others who love books, on the front lines.
Inside, there was a small wooden desk with an ancient white-haired lady seated behind it; she must have been at least fifty years old (and closer to seventy by the time I left high school). As I would learn, she was kind to children so long as they were quiet, and I was, partly because I never encountered another child there. Normally, my mother and I (and perhaps my sister) were the only patrons in the room, but occasionally there would be other ladies whom my mother always knew, and they would exchange pleasantries (in whispers, of course). There was one goodly-sized oak table in the middle of the room with wooden chairs around it, and a ceiling fan turned lazily on high.
And there were books. Three walls of the room were shelved from floor to ceiling, with a ladder that could be used for the higher shelves. Tall books, short books, paperbacks (not many of those), hardbacks, most of them old, some of them (I would now realize, were I to return) dating to the mid-nineteenth century.
In the book “Rocket Boys,” which was set in a nearby county and in a time just a bit earlier than that of which I speak, one of the teenage “rocket boys,” Quentin Wilson, had read every book in the McDowell County Library. That made me feel better, for by the age of seventeen I had at least opened and sampled every book in our library, and had been forcibly impressed by my experiences at school that this was Not Done, not by anyone who had hope of a social life.
Some of the books in the library, especially the adult contemporary fiction of the time, I quickly laid aside as “boring.” Some of the books were so far over my head that I found no connection with them. But I believe that many books have their own time and place for us, and wait until we are ready for them, and early experiences may pave the way.
I especially devoured anything that had to do with science or mathematics -- thinking back, I do not recall anything whatsoever about music, my other passion as a teenager, not even a music dictionary. Nor do I recall anything in a language other than English. The card catalogue, guarded by the ancient librarian on her desk, was one unit of three side-by-side drawers: Subject, Title, Author.
In truth, I spent relatively little time in that room, except when I would take one of the reference books over to the big table and read for a while; mostly, I checked books out to take home, armloads at a time.
From there, I went to college. Not just any college, but a school with one of the major research libraries in the United States. My chief memories of freshman orientation are three: the fine gothic Chapel, the quarters of the music department (a dilapidated pile that would be condemned as unfit for human occupation the next summer), and the card catalogue room of the library, with the circulation desk nearby: a roomful of cards, several times the size of our entire library back home. The ancient and kindly librarian at her desk was replaced by squadrons of busy work-study students, processing books in and out and with no time for nonsense from callow freshmen. And the “real” librarians, those in charge? They would no more notice a lowly undergraduate than a gnat.
I spent little time there; it was not a place to linger, and the music library (where I later became one of those busy work-study students) was on the other campus. But I still dream of that place sometimes, usually in one of my frantic-search-for-something dreams. And I found one little corner that I liked. It was the Classical Studies collection, which was in the furthest corner of a sub-basement with utilitarian metal shelving, and at the end of some of the rows against the wall, small metal desks and chairs of (probably) World War II vintage. It was a good place to get away from everyone, for almost no one ever visited these old books, row upon row of them in Latin and Greek, with more scholarly commentaries than there were primary texts, and shelves full of journals, covered with years of dust. I hope they haven’t been consigned to a landfill, for we might still need what is in these dusty old books.
In later years, I used to visit another small town Appalachian library, the only one in the county. It was on the ground floor of what had once been a bank, and had more enthusiasm and space than money or books. Despite their limits, they served as the cultural focus for the county in many and creative ways, which were lost on most of the people in the community. But it was a haven for the score or so of us who cared about books and ideas. When I moved away from that county, I donated most of my books to them, including some that I wish I had kept.
My graduate school was strictly a music school, with an excellent (if specialized) library, clean and modern and efficient, and the finest reference librarian I have encountered. She is retired now, and I still see her at Hymn Society conventions. As always with every library since my first, I lacked the time to do more than sample the riches that were in the collection -- the tall bound volumes indexed in Historical Collections and Monuments of Music -- things like the Denkmäler Deutscher Tonkunst or Tudor Church Music, or the collected works of Beethoven, and Bach, and Mozart, and Haydn, and pretty much anyone else that would come to mind. I remember one fine spring day, my exams complete, every paper submitted, my degree work complete, when I spent the entire day there, browsing. It was heavenly.
Later still, there was yet another small town. Its library was a fine Victorian mansion, donated to the town some years before. The large central reading room on the ground floor, with newspapers and other periodicals, had comfortable high wingbacked chairs. One could settle in with a magazine or book and read for hours, with the tall windows, their glass wavy with age, overlooking a flower garden and tree-shaded lawns sloping down to the river. It was on the way home from work, and I stopped there almost every day to read the news, both in print and online. For they had computers, two of them, with Internet connections, something we did not have at home or at the church.
This library was an unmatched place to browse, for the collection was divided up into the many rooms of the old house, all with their tall windows and wide windowsills. One room that was perhaps unique was what the librarians called the “Little Boys’ Room.” It was in the basement, and housed books that had been bequeathed by an engineer in the town and maintained as a special collection in his honor. I loved it: a whole room of books on science and technology, with special emphasis on architecture, boat-building, automobiles, motorcycles, airplanes, and space travel.
Nowadays, I have cards for two libraries. The one close to the church is larger and has an excellent collection; the one in the nearby town where I live is friendlier. I love that place, and wish I could spend days there. It is filled with comfortable places to read or work; there is a little cafe right there, and a natural-foods cooperative five minutes’ walk away with excellent sandwiches. It is a sufficient collection with pretty much anything I would want -- and if it doesn’t have it, I can try the larger library by the church.
Finally, there is our own library at home, or I should say two libraries -- for my office at the church is more library than office. At home, my wife and I each have our own desks, both of which she made. Hers is a genuinely fine piece of furniture; mine is smaller and utilitarian, but still, being from her hand, priceless to me. There are plenty of books within reach without rising from my chair, and my computer (on which I write most of these Music Box essays) is to the right. There is almost always a cat nearby -- as I write, she is sleeping on the cherry chest to my left. There is a fine view of the sky, and all the comforts of home are close at hand.
Most of all, there are books. Many of these books are my old friends -- though there are, when I think about it, far too many books that I own but have not yet read, probably more than I can ever read. I still want to read them just as much as the day I bought them, but other things have taken precedence.
The books overflow the library into the front room, where the Harvard Classics reside next to my rocking chair. They came into my life after college where I bought the whole (incomplete and somewhat battered) set at a Planned Parenthood booksale. For the years that followed, they were the core of my “collection.” My wife made a bookcase out of scrap wood specifically to fit them, along with my Classics Club volumes. That was a mail-order book club to which I subscribed in the late 1970’s; every two months brought a shipment of two volumes until the set was complete, and at the outset one selected which volumes were desired. I used it to fill in the gaps in the Harvard set. I got behind on the Classics Club books, and still have not quite read them all (six remain, all of them nineteenth century novels), but I did make it through the Harvard Classics and know them well enough to find what I want in them readily enough.
Every good book, even the non-fiction books on technical subjects (such as Strong’s Concordance, mentioned a few weeks ago), takes its reader into its own universe. It may be the world of King David and Asaph and the Sons of Korah which one enters through their language, or (to name a few titles within reach) Marcus Aurelius, or Anton Bruckner (a biography), or Aesop’s Fables, or the Army of Northern Virginia (“Lee’s Lieutenants” by Douglas Southall Freeman, the companion volume to his biography of R.E.L.) and the wider scenes of that conflict (Shelby Foote’s three-volume history, “Civil War”), or A Field Guide to Trees and Shrubs, or the Federalist Papers, or T. S. Eliot, or the fictional land of Chalion, with Cazaril and the Five Gods (Lois McMaster Bujold, with Miles Vorkosigan and his friends beside the Chalion books), or Flatland, or the Catechism of the Catholic Church, or The Food and Drink of Mexico.
In some respects, books make civilization possible. And disdain for books hastens its decline. This puts librarians, along with booksellers, readers, and others who love books, on the front lines.
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
A prayer for Rosh Hashonah
Hidden from our sight are the events of the future.
But we trust in Thee and fear not.
Open unto us in mercy the portals of the new year,
and grant us life and health,
contentment and peace.
Amen.
(from the Evening Service; it is followed by Psalm 90: Lord, thou hast been our refuge from one generation to another...)
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
St. Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist
I do not have time to write at length about St. Matthew, whose feast is today. Instead, I will but mention my favorite passages from his Gospel:
Chapter 1: “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” The wording of this first verse echoes the great histories and lineages of the First Book of Moses: Gen. 5:1 - “This is the book of the generations of Adam...”; 10:1 - “Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah...”; 25:19 - “And these are the generations of Isaac, Abraham's son: Abraham begat Isaac.” [What a remarkable “book of generations” that is: just that one verse, that one son of promise]; 36:1 - “Now these are the generations of Easu, who is Edom...”; 37:2 - “These are the generations of Jacob.” As if it were not enough to establish Jesus Christ as “the son of David, the son of Abraham,” heir to the promises given to these two friends of God, and legal heir of the throne of David (by the royal lineage, unlike St. Luke's genealogy), we have the second half of the chapter: “Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise...” It is brief, only seven verses (plus the subsequent action in Chapter 2), and magnificent.
The Sermon on the Mount (Chapters 5-7): This is, perhaps, the “stump speech” of our Lord, reflective of his teachings in village after village. There is nothing better to say about it than what St. Matthew writes at the end: “And it came to pass, when Jesus had ended these saying, the people were astonished at his doctrine: for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.” (7:28-29)
The Parables (Chapter 13): When I was twelve years old, my neighbor friends Keith and Darrell drug me along to the Vacation Bible School at their church. The school that week was based on the parables (these, plus the Good Samaritan from St. Luke). I had never heard anything like this, and by the grace of God these parables brought me to repentance and conversion, with baptism following a few weeks later. “I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see.” As the years have passed, these little stories have taken on increasingly great meaning for me, and are windows into the kingdom, awakening the holy desire for its fulfillment. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.”
More Parables (Chapter 25): These are more frightening, in their warnings to “Watch... for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh” (v. 13). I have special affection for the first of these parables because of the hymn Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme.
The end of the Sabbath (Chapter 28): This passage is appointed as the Gospel for the Great Vigil of Easter. I look forward each year to its majesty as the fitting climax to that greatest of all liturgies, as well as the final word of promise:
“... and lo, I am with you alway even unto the end of the world. Amen.”
The Collect of the Day:
Afterword:
I would be remiss were I to overlook the St. Matthew Passion setting by J. S. Bach. As I grow older, I have more of a love for the St. John Passion, especially its final sections, but my astonishment at the St. Matthew Passion is greater, especially in the use of the Passion Chorale and other chorales, always at precisely the right moment in the story, and most of all in the opening, Kommt, ihr Töchter, for triple chorus. Even by Bach's standards, it would be hard to name any passage more astonishing than this.
Chapter 1: “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” The wording of this first verse echoes the great histories and lineages of the First Book of Moses: Gen. 5:1 - “This is the book of the generations of Adam...”; 10:1 - “Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah...”; 25:19 - “And these are the generations of Isaac, Abraham's son: Abraham begat Isaac.” [What a remarkable “book of generations” that is: just that one verse, that one son of promise]; 36:1 - “Now these are the generations of Easu, who is Edom...”; 37:2 - “These are the generations of Jacob.” As if it were not enough to establish Jesus Christ as “the son of David, the son of Abraham,” heir to the promises given to these two friends of God, and legal heir of the throne of David (by the royal lineage, unlike St. Luke's genealogy), we have the second half of the chapter: “Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise...” It is brief, only seven verses (plus the subsequent action in Chapter 2), and magnificent.
The Sermon on the Mount (Chapters 5-7): This is, perhaps, the “stump speech” of our Lord, reflective of his teachings in village after village. There is nothing better to say about it than what St. Matthew writes at the end: “And it came to pass, when Jesus had ended these saying, the people were astonished at his doctrine: for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.” (7:28-29)
The Parables (Chapter 13): When I was twelve years old, my neighbor friends Keith and Darrell drug me along to the Vacation Bible School at their church. The school that week was based on the parables (these, plus the Good Samaritan from St. Luke). I had never heard anything like this, and by the grace of God these parables brought me to repentance and conversion, with baptism following a few weeks later. “I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see.” As the years have passed, these little stories have taken on increasingly great meaning for me, and are windows into the kingdom, awakening the holy desire for its fulfillment. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.”
More Parables (Chapter 25): These are more frightening, in their warnings to “Watch... for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh” (v. 13). I have special affection for the first of these parables because of the hymn Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme.
The end of the Sabbath (Chapter 28): This passage is appointed as the Gospel for the Great Vigil of Easter. I look forward each year to its majesty as the fitting climax to that greatest of all liturgies, as well as the final word of promise:
“... and lo, I am with you alway even unto the end of the world. Amen.”
The Collect of the Day:
We thank thee, heavenly Father, for the witness of thine apostle and evangelist Matthew to the Gospel of thy Son our Savior; and we pray that, after his example, we may with ready wills and hearts obey the calling of our Lord to follow him; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Afterword:
I would be remiss were I to overlook the St. Matthew Passion setting by J. S. Bach. As I grow older, I have more of a love for the St. John Passion, especially its final sections, but my astonishment at the St. Matthew Passion is greater, especially in the use of the Passion Chorale and other chorales, always at precisely the right moment in the story, and most of all in the opening, Kommt, ihr Töchter, for triple chorus. Even by Bach's standards, it would be hard to name any passage more astonishing than this.
Sunday, September 18, 2011
The Planning Cycle, and some Messiaen
Selection of music is a major part of the church musician's work. Most of us muddle through a week at a time, and this can be done effectively (e.g.: J. S. Bach in Leipzig, when he was composing a new Cantata every week). I have done too much of that lately, and not at the level achieved by JSB. It is hard to maintain a suitable overview of the Story when looking at it one week at a time; I do much better when I can plan a larger chunk of the year at one time, perhaps spread over several weeks. I must do this with the choral music, and ought to do so with the hymnody and organ voluntaries.
The “planning cycle,” as I call it, is so large a task that it can become paralyzing. All told, it accounts for several hundred hours of work each year. I think that this is one reason many church musicians have trouble addressing it in a healthy manner. The best way to tackle a large project of this sort is to break it into a number of smaller tasks. I have a list of these tasks on my computer: it is a nineteen-step process, with several of the steps being sizable in their own right, such as Number Nine: Plan the Eucharistic Psalms for the year; or Number Seventeen: Select the organ voluntaries for the Eucharistic services.
This last is a task I prefer to tackle in the summer, when I can try things out on the piano outside my office door. It is, in my view, less important by far than establishing good selections of choral music and hymns, and it cannot be done until both are in place, for most often the voluntaries are based on the hymns of the day. Thus, I have muddled through most of the current liturgical year, rarely getting more than a few weeks ahead on the voluntaries.
But after about six hours on the task this weekend, it is done! Not only that, but I have completed the final two short steps in the overall planning cycle, and it, likewise, is done, right through Christ the King 2011, some two months from now. I should have been to this point on the 2010-11 season a year ago and should instead be finishing up 2011-12 by now, but I nonetheless rejoice in getting as far as I have.
I am excited about many things that are coming up in these remaining two months, and have two large tasks before me at the organ:
Nov. 6: Fantasia on Sine Nomine, by Craig Phillips. This was commissioned for the retirement of my friend D.D. several years ago, and is a terrific piece, intended for a much larger instrument than our Pilcher. But I think that it will work. I have done nothing on it yet.
Nov. 23: Toccata and Fugue in F (BWV 540), J. S. Bach. I played this several times in the 1990's, but it needs to be carefully re-fingered, and I have not played it on a mechanical action instrument. It is time to do so, for it is one of the glories of the organ repertoire.
Looming ahead are three more challenges:
For the Advent Evensong: Partita on Nun komm der Heiden Heiland, by Hugo Distler. I have played most of Distler's organ music, but not this one. I ordered a copy of the score, and it arrived this past week.
For the Lenten Recitals at the Congregational Church:
Variations on Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, by Franz Liszt. I have never played any of the large-scale organ works of Liszt, and it is time to remedy that. This will involve some significant technical work, and I hope that I am up to the challenge. I have a battered old copy in the edition prepared by Marcel Dupré, complete with his printed fingerings. I have gone through and checked them, making revisions to fit my hands, and have this one ready for registration and its First Workout. I hoped to get that done in August, but it did not happen.
The Dupré edition of Bach is notorious, because his fingerings represent a style of playing that is no longer in vogue. But I have found his fingerings of the Liszt enormously helpful, and left about ninety percent of them in place.
Further ahead: one of the three large-scale movements that I have not yet learned from the Livre du Saint-Sacrement of Messiaen: L'apparition du Christ ressucité à Marie-Madeleine. This is a sprawling eighteen-page piece that may leave people scratching their heads when (Lord willing) I play it as the postlude for Easter Day. Much of it is is pianissimo, though it works up to a four-page toccata-like passage at full organ before a quiet ending on a long-held pianisssimo C major chord that makes me think of St. Julian's famous line: "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." With Christ risen from the dead, all shall indeed be well, forever. The final bars of this movement, a few quiet chords played "trés lent," express this in music about as well as can be imagined.
I would love to play the entire Livre in concert. It might be possible on the Casavant at the Congregational Church; I do not think that our Pilcher could carry it off, though I have played many of the individual movements on it.
I attended the first performance of this work at the AGO National Convention in Detroit: 3 July 1986. The performance of this piece, with Messiaen in attendance, was the reason I got in my rusty pickup truck and drove to Detroit for the convention, the only AGO National that I have attended. To some degree, it left the audience of organists in a muddle; I loved it, but I heard a good bit of scorn heaped on it in the conversations afterwards. That causes me to think that, were I to play the thing, all eighteen movements and 165 pages of it, an audience of (mostly) non-organists might not be receptive. It is not a piece that reveals its secrets immediately. But for those “with ears to hear,” the Livre is a spiritual journey like no other. It needed better program notes than it had in Detroit, and I think that I could write them, giving people a better window into the music.
Such a project is tangential to my duty, and will probably not happen. But I can at least play the movements individually on occasions when they fit the liturgy. I thought that this would be the way the piece would become established, as has happened with La Nativité du Christ and some of the other Messiaen cycles. But I do not think that there are many organists who play anything from the Livre. They ought to; many of the movements are not difficult, and are highly effective.
This evening, I celebrate the completion of the planning cycle. Tomorrow is a day at home for errands and shopping, and (hopefully) lots of time outdoors, for it is supposed to be a fine sunny day. Tuesday, it will be time to dig in and try to bring some of these ideas into reality. And next weekend, I had better start on 2011-12.
The “planning cycle,” as I call it, is so large a task that it can become paralyzing. All told, it accounts for several hundred hours of work each year. I think that this is one reason many church musicians have trouble addressing it in a healthy manner. The best way to tackle a large project of this sort is to break it into a number of smaller tasks. I have a list of these tasks on my computer: it is a nineteen-step process, with several of the steps being sizable in their own right, such as Number Nine: Plan the Eucharistic Psalms for the year; or Number Seventeen: Select the organ voluntaries for the Eucharistic services.
This last is a task I prefer to tackle in the summer, when I can try things out on the piano outside my office door. It is, in my view, less important by far than establishing good selections of choral music and hymns, and it cannot be done until both are in place, for most often the voluntaries are based on the hymns of the day. Thus, I have muddled through most of the current liturgical year, rarely getting more than a few weeks ahead on the voluntaries.
But after about six hours on the task this weekend, it is done! Not only that, but I have completed the final two short steps in the overall planning cycle, and it, likewise, is done, right through Christ the King 2011, some two months from now. I should have been to this point on the 2010-11 season a year ago and should instead be finishing up 2011-12 by now, but I nonetheless rejoice in getting as far as I have.
I am excited about many things that are coming up in these remaining two months, and have two large tasks before me at the organ:
Nov. 6: Fantasia on Sine Nomine, by Craig Phillips. This was commissioned for the retirement of my friend D.D. several years ago, and is a terrific piece, intended for a much larger instrument than our Pilcher. But I think that it will work. I have done nothing on it yet.
Nov. 23: Toccata and Fugue in F (BWV 540), J. S. Bach. I played this several times in the 1990's, but it needs to be carefully re-fingered, and I have not played it on a mechanical action instrument. It is time to do so, for it is one of the glories of the organ repertoire.
Looming ahead are three more challenges:
For the Advent Evensong: Partita on Nun komm der Heiden Heiland, by Hugo Distler. I have played most of Distler's organ music, but not this one. I ordered a copy of the score, and it arrived this past week.
For the Lenten Recitals at the Congregational Church:
Variations on Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, by Franz Liszt. I have never played any of the large-scale organ works of Liszt, and it is time to remedy that. This will involve some significant technical work, and I hope that I am up to the challenge. I have a battered old copy in the edition prepared by Marcel Dupré, complete with his printed fingerings. I have gone through and checked them, making revisions to fit my hands, and have this one ready for registration and its First Workout. I hoped to get that done in August, but it did not happen.
The Dupré edition of Bach is notorious, because his fingerings represent a style of playing that is no longer in vogue. But I have found his fingerings of the Liszt enormously helpful, and left about ninety percent of them in place.
Further ahead: one of the three large-scale movements that I have not yet learned from the Livre du Saint-Sacrement of Messiaen: L'apparition du Christ ressucité à Marie-Madeleine. This is a sprawling eighteen-page piece that may leave people scratching their heads when (Lord willing) I play it as the postlude for Easter Day. Much of it is is pianissimo, though it works up to a four-page toccata-like passage at full organ before a quiet ending on a long-held pianisssimo C major chord that makes me think of St. Julian's famous line: "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." With Christ risen from the dead, all shall indeed be well, forever. The final bars of this movement, a few quiet chords played "trés lent," express this in music about as well as can be imagined.
I would love to play the entire Livre in concert. It might be possible on the Casavant at the Congregational Church; I do not think that our Pilcher could carry it off, though I have played many of the individual movements on it.
I attended the first performance of this work at the AGO National Convention in Detroit: 3 July 1986. The performance of this piece, with Messiaen in attendance, was the reason I got in my rusty pickup truck and drove to Detroit for the convention, the only AGO National that I have attended. To some degree, it left the audience of organists in a muddle; I loved it, but I heard a good bit of scorn heaped on it in the conversations afterwards. That causes me to think that, were I to play the thing, all eighteen movements and 165 pages of it, an audience of (mostly) non-organists might not be receptive. It is not a piece that reveals its secrets immediately. But for those “with ears to hear,” the Livre is a spiritual journey like no other. It needed better program notes than it had in Detroit, and I think that I could write them, giving people a better window into the music.
Such a project is tangential to my duty, and will probably not happen. But I can at least play the movements individually on occasions when they fit the liturgy. I thought that this would be the way the piece would become established, as has happened with La Nativité du Christ and some of the other Messiaen cycles. But I do not think that there are many organists who play anything from the Livre. They ought to; many of the movements are not difficult, and are highly effective.
This evening, I celebrate the completion of the planning cycle. Tomorrow is a day at home for errands and shopping, and (hopefully) lots of time outdoors, for it is supposed to be a fine sunny day. Tuesday, it will be time to dig in and try to bring some of these ideas into reality. And next weekend, I had better start on 2011-12.
Friday, September 16, 2011
RSCM 2010 revisited
Weezer posted this YouTube clip, from last year's RSCM course:
Kyrie, from Messe Solennelle (L. Vierne)
That, my friends, would be us. In that place. Singing.
Soli Deo gloria.
Here is an account of one aspect of that day. Listening to the recording brings back the sound of Jenna, Kyle, and Meara singing beside me that morning on the risers “with spirit, excellent diction, musical phrasing, and tone so beautiful as to melt my heart.” And Laura, in her first Course since her auto accident. And Mike, Mark and Spencer in the row behind me on tenor. And the fine elderly Roman Catholic African-American brother in the parking lot afterwards, chatting with Judith and me about our Lord and our Blessed Virgin Mary and how good it was to be Christians together.
And myself, singing Alto (I am in the back row in the picture). I do not expect that I will do that again, for in the year since that course, I find that I can no longer reliably sing alto for extended periods. I hinted at this in the passage linked above, for my voice was pretty much gone by Evensong that day in 2010. Between then and the 2011 Course, I made an effort to sing the Daily Office in my alto voice, and to work on it in my daily vocal warmups. But it got worse instead of better, and I believe that it is the result of old age. I was glad that there were strong female altos at this year's course to carry the load, and glad to sing tenor.
I will be sixty in a few years. I wonder how many RSCM Courses I have left wherein I can be a contributor and not a burden. I hope I have the sense to step aside when the time comes.
But that time is, Lord willing, not yet.
Kyrie, from Messe Solennelle (L. Vierne)
That, my friends, would be us. In that place. Singing.
Soli Deo gloria.
Here is an account of one aspect of that day. Listening to the recording brings back the sound of Jenna, Kyle, and Meara singing beside me that morning on the risers “with spirit, excellent diction, musical phrasing, and tone so beautiful as to melt my heart.” And Laura, in her first Course since her auto accident. And Mike, Mark and Spencer in the row behind me on tenor. And the fine elderly Roman Catholic African-American brother in the parking lot afterwards, chatting with Judith and me about our Lord and our Blessed Virgin Mary and how good it was to be Christians together.
And myself, singing Alto (I am in the back row in the picture). I do not expect that I will do that again, for in the year since that course, I find that I can no longer reliably sing alto for extended periods. I hinted at this in the passage linked above, for my voice was pretty much gone by Evensong that day in 2010. Between then and the 2011 Course, I made an effort to sing the Daily Office in my alto voice, and to work on it in my daily vocal warmups. But it got worse instead of better, and I believe that it is the result of old age. I was glad that there were strong female altos at this year's course to carry the load, and glad to sing tenor.
I will be sixty in a few years. I wonder how many RSCM Courses I have left wherein I can be a contributor and not a burden. I hope I have the sense to step aside when the time comes.
But that time is, Lord willing, not yet.
O God, you have taught me since I was young, *
and to this day I tell of your wonderful works.
And now that I am old and gray-headed, O God, do not forsake me, *
till I make known your strength to this generation
and your power to all who are to come. (Psalm 71:17-18)
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Where were you on 9/11?
I was on the organ bench. It was a fine September morning, and I remember starting the work day full of energy. The secretary came in and told me what had happened, and shortly after my wife called.
It became clear that we needed to have a church service that evening. Our priest in residence, Fr. Sanderson, organized a simple service of Evening Prayer and we posted it on the website. Quite a few people came. I played the organ arrangement of Barber's “Adagio for Strings,” and we sang a couple of hymns.
This last came back to me with remarkable force when I sat down a fortnight ago to begin preparing one of them, “America the Beautiful.” As soon as I opened the hymnal, I was carried back to that evening.
One of our parishioners suggested we sing “America the Beautiful” in this morning's Eucharist. For reasons I won't describe, we sang it last Sunday instead of today. There is a former State Senator in our congregation, a veteran of many political battles. After the service last Sunday, she told me that she has probably heard and sung the song hundreds of times, but that day, hearing the congregation sing it, she could not sing for the tears.
Today, we sang no patriotic hymns. But for the postlude after the contemporary service, I played a long introduction and slipped quietly into “My country, 'tis of Thee.” One of the ladies on duty for Altar Guild stopped what she was doing and listened, obviously in prayer. When I finished, she reminded me that we had sung that hymn ten years ago at that little evening service. She remembered the gist of Fr. Sanderson's sermon, as did I.
Our youth choir sang at today's contemporary service. Most of them have lived their whole lives under the shadow of 9/11 and its aftermath. My prayers this day were mainly for them:
“Save us from the time of trial, and deliver us from evil...”
It became clear that we needed to have a church service that evening. Our priest in residence, Fr. Sanderson, organized a simple service of Evening Prayer and we posted it on the website. Quite a few people came. I played the organ arrangement of Barber's “Adagio for Strings,” and we sang a couple of hymns.
This last came back to me with remarkable force when I sat down a fortnight ago to begin preparing one of them, “America the Beautiful.” As soon as I opened the hymnal, I was carried back to that evening.
One of our parishioners suggested we sing “America the Beautiful” in this morning's Eucharist. For reasons I won't describe, we sang it last Sunday instead of today. There is a former State Senator in our congregation, a veteran of many political battles. After the service last Sunday, she told me that she has probably heard and sung the song hundreds of times, but that day, hearing the congregation sing it, she could not sing for the tears.
Today, we sang no patriotic hymns. But for the postlude after the contemporary service, I played a long introduction and slipped quietly into “My country, 'tis of Thee.” One of the ladies on duty for Altar Guild stopped what she was doing and listened, obviously in prayer. When I finished, she reminded me that we had sung that hymn ten years ago at that little evening service. She remembered the gist of Fr. Sanderson's sermon, as did I.
Our youth choir sang at today's contemporary service. Most of them have lived their whole lives under the shadow of 9/11 and its aftermath. My prayers this day were mainly for them:
“Save us from the time of trial, and deliver us from evil...”
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