Wounds of Love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Great Performances

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Cuffman, violinist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pope Francis: Paschal Homily

Here is the Holy Father's homily for the Great Vigil of Easter.

First, it is short. One page. I would estimate it at about five minutes, maybe more like two or three minutes.

Second, he saw the same thing that struck me from St. Matthew's account of the resurrection: "He goes ahead of you into Galilee."

Third, this homily is evangelical. In this, it is a lesson for those of us who call ourselves Anglo-Catholics. The Holy Father constantly speaks and writes about our personal encounter with Jesus, and sharing this Good News with everyone.

“To go to Galilee” means something beautiful, it means rediscovering our baptism as a living fountainhead, drawing new energy from the sources of our faith and our Christian experience. To return to Galilee means above all to return to that blazing light with which God’s grace touched me at the start of the journey. From that flame I can light a fire for today and every day, and bring heat and light to my brothers and sisters...

[It means a renewal of] the experience of a personal encounter with Jesus Christ who called me to follow him and to share in his mission. In this sense, returning to Galilee means treasuring in my heart the living memory of that call, when Jesus passed my way, gazed at me with mercy and asked me to follow him. To return there means reviving the memory of that moment when his eyes met mine, the moment when he made me realize that he loved me.

We Anglo-Catholics tend to emphasize the sacramental life of the Church at the expense of personal encounter with Christ, and at the expense of telling others about it. Francis reminds us that some of the greatest missionaries of all time were Roman Catholics -- one thinks of St. Francis Xavier, for example.

We must do better. And that begins with what Francis describes, remembering "the moment when his eyes met mine, the moment when he made me realize that he loved me."

Easter Week

He is not here: for he is risen, as he said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay. And go quickly, and tell his disciples that he is risen from the dead, and, behold, he goeth before you into Galilee; there shall ye see him. (St. Matthew 28:6-7)

By the time of the Peace at the Great Vigil of Easter, I was as giddy as a child. I was hugging people, giggling, walking on air.

I had poured all of myself into this week, as is my bounden duty. It began with the twenty-eight page service leaflet for the Three Days, the Paschal Triduum. Combining Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Great Vigil into one booklet was the idea of our new Rector, Rev'd L.: “It is a teaching tool; it shows people that these three services are a unity.” That it was, and it took a lot of work from the church staff to make it happen.

And there were the rehearsals. I wish that the Youth Choir could have been part of this, but they weren't; this was a task for the Adult Choir. I am humbled by the dedication they brought to the week – a very intense two hours of rehearsal last Wednesday, then services on three nights plus Sunday morning. There was so much to sing in these Three Days (counting Sunday) that we could not possibly rehearse all of it properly – seven anthems; twelve hymns, lots of service music (some of it new to choir and congregation); a set of plainsong Anthems for the Footwashing that were exquisite, and probably the best singing that the choir did all week; and most of all, twelve Psalms, nine of them during the Office of Lessons at the Vigil. And these choristers did it all with heart, with connection of “body, mind, spirit, voice” (Helen Kemp's phrase). Many of them sacrificed much to be at these services, night after night.

From the beginning on Thursday – a raucous shape-note rendition of “What wondrous love is this” as the processional, to the end of the service for the Sunday of the Resurrection – the Hallelujah Chorus (Handel) sung by the congregation, with continuo and trumpets and the rest of the brass quintet beefing up the tuttis – for in this, our beloved little Pilcher is clearly inadequate – it was a musical and liturgical feast. Or rather, a journey from the Table into the Darkness where the only food was vinegar and gall, and on into the Eighth Day, the New Creation when the Table is opened at last to all the world, to all creation.

The Pilcher did have its moment. For Easter Day, we have brass, but for the Great Vigil, the most important liturgy of the year, we do not – just the organ. Having played poorly on the Passacaglia at the last Evensong, I wanted to do well with this night's postlude, the Pièce d'Orgue (BWV 572). And it did go well. The Pilcher sounds very good on this sort of music, and I was glad to show it off, and glad (always!) to share in Bach's music. Soli Deo Gloria!

So now what?

In one way or another, all four Evangelists tell us: “he goeth before you into Galilee.”

Prevent us, O Lord, in all our doings with thy most gracious favor, and further us with thy continual help; that in all our works begun, continued, and ended in thee, we may glorify thy holy Name, and finally, by thy mercy, obtain everlasting life; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. [BCP p. 832]

The Rector's Sunday sermon spoke of leaving this place, this week's liturgies, and going into the world of “not yet,” where hatred and violence and iniquity still rule (or so it appears). And it is in that very world, right in the middle of it all, that we will see him, that Light that cannot be comprehended (in any sense of the word) by the darkness (cf. St. John 1:5, from the Gospel for Matins on Easter Day).

Or, as it is phrased most simply near the end of St. John's Gospel (21:22):

Follow thou me.

It is the same word that he extended to the Twelve and to many others during his earthly ministry; it is the invitation that he now extends to us all.

But my question remains: So now what? How does this take practical shape in our lives?

My uncle used to have a tattered paper cartoon on the wall of his office. It showed a little boy sitting on the toilet, with the caption: “The job's not over until the paperwork is done.” And that is where we must start the new life of the Resurrection – by doing the simple tasks that lie at hand, one at a time. It begins with cleaning up the loose ends from last week.

Sunday afternoon and evening I puttered around, putting things away. It took all of that time, and more. Tuesday morning, I put a CD on the stereo in the choir room and filed music. And another CD. And a third. One of the recordings (directed by Robert Shaw) included the Victoria “O vos omnes,” which we had sung on Good Friday. I had thought we sang it well, but my first reaction on hearing this recording was shame at how far short we fell of its example. But upon reflection, I realized that (1) Robert Shaw and his singers are not here. (2) We are. (3) If the praise of God is to be universal, that means that it must happen here, and we are the ones God has put here to see to it. (4) I am bound to prepare these people, these singers, few of whom could ever have the skills to make it into a choir directed by the likes of Robert Shaw, for the eternal Song in the heavenly places.

We will make mistakes, we will sing out of tune or with sloppy diction, we will sing with our (mostly) poor quavery thin old-person voices instead of the fine trained young professional voices that Shaw had to work with. And our song will be every bit as genuine as theirs, and specific to us and our place. (See also: this)


So we go on. The music is filed, the new music for the rest of the season through Trinity Sunday is in the folders, we have choral rehearsals today and this evening. And if we have ears to hear His song, He is there, just ahead of us.

pleasing my Teacher

I practiced hard this week, almost all of it on Bach. This morning's voluntaries were the two settings of Aus tiefer Not from the Clavierübung, and the prelude for this evening's Evensong was the Passacaglia.

I played it in the 1980's, but have not done it since. Several times I have scheduled it for a Lenten Evensong, but scrubbed it when I saw that there was not enough time to prepare it. This year, I was determined to do it, even though my intentions of working on it well in advance came to naught. I had a solid fingering from the previous times when the piece was scheduled, and began the First Workout last weekend. Could I get the thing ready in one week?

The answer is: sort of. I think that I gave a reasonably good presentation of it in terms of overall concept, but there were a lot of missed notes. And not a few in the Aus tiefer Not this morning -- the smaller setting (manuals-only) was played cleanly and I think very well; the large six-voice chorale fugue not so much.

I am okay with this. I want to please my Teacher, who was listening. He always is: "He knoweth my sitting down and my rising up; he discerneth my thoughts from afar" (cf Psalm 139:1-2). My Teacher knows how hard I worked this week, how many of my other duties I laid aside for these three pieces. No matter how well I might play, he has heard better - he heard JSB himself play these pieces, and I can never approach that standard.

I know that a teacher - this Teacher - does not want or expect perfection. What the teacher wants is progress. And the teacher knows that it will not be a straight-line journey; there will be setbacks, blind alleys that waste months, perhaps years, many failures. And he is okay with this. What the teacher wants above all is for the student to come to maturity as a musician and as a person, and the teacher is thrilled whenever there is a step along that path. Sometimes a performance with lots of rough edges (like the Passacaglia this evening) is more fruitful in this sense than a spotlessly clean playing of the piece, one that might make the student proud and complacent.

So, what have I learned? I had been feeling some pride in my practice methods, having had some success with them. This time, I pushed too far; no, I am not able to prepare a piece on the scale of the Passacaglia in one week, not even with the fingering in place. If I am to attempt something like this again, I must allow more preparation time. But on the positive side, I had a terrific day on the bench yesterday, seven hours of Bach. Yesterday, and this week's concentrated work, has perhaps made me a Better Organist.

For those who might wish to hear the piece, here is a performance by the late Helmut Walcha, one of the great German organists of the last century. I love his tempo, the registrations, the clarity of this playing.

Springs of Living Water

This morning’s Gospel at the Eucharist was about the Woman of Samaria, and He who is the Living Water. “The water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of living water springing up into everlasting life” (St. John 4:14). The form this takes in me is the Music that I play. For all musicians and artists and writers, this is how it is. There are many other life-giving forms it can take as well, such as parenting, acts of mercy and kindness, teaching, caring for the elderly, sick, or mentally deranged, careful administration, making things of value and beauty, but I cannot here speak of these directly.

Bach is a monumental example of this in the realm of Music; he worked all his life long, right up to his final day. Hundreds of cantatas, Passions, Brandenburg Concerti, music for solo violin, solo violoncello, the Well-Tempered Clavier, the Clavierübung with its Goldberg Variations, the B Minor Mass, the organ preludes and fugues, the Musical Offering and Art of Fugue, the hundreds of chorale preludes and harmonizations... there is no better way to describe this than to term it a “well of living water springing up into everlasting life.”

There is only one Bach. What about the rest of us? Well, there are springs and wells large and small. He is one of the largest and best, but there is ample room -- and need -- for the rest of us. Not least, his music and that of the other masters cannot now exist unless we play it, as I tried to do this morning with the B minor prelude and fugue (and yesterday, at a funeral, with several Bach chorale preludes and the St. Anne fugue and some of the Brahms chorales). As a performer, we strive to be like a spring, allowing the water that is not of our making to flow through us into the world. Some times it goes better than others, and as Paul Westermeyer wrote somewhere, when it goes well, it is always a Gift, not of our doing.

On our little hill country farm back in West Virginia, there is a spring. It is one of the most significant features of the place, in my opinion. Its water is hard with iron and sulfur (though perhaps healthy because of that; people once thought it so). It is just a little spring, but it has never run dry -- not in the one hundred years or so that my people were on that land, nor for all the years before, clear back to the Shawnee and others who used to camp there before the white men came.

And there was a little mountain spring that I loved. It was on the side of U.S. 19 near the state line between Tennessee and North Carolina -- sweet and good and beautiful, giving of itself freely to all. The builders of the old highway in the 1940’s recognized its value and made a pull-off area, and cleaned it up so that people could stop and fill their water jugs there and perhaps their radiators, for it was near the top of a long steep switchback climb to the ridgetop and the state line. The modern engineers who made the road into a four-lane in the 1990’s could not be bothered with such a quaint notion as a roadside pull-off for a spring; to them it was a nuisance to be piped away into a drainage ditch.

And there is Red Clay. In the uttermost southeast corner of Tennessee can be found so noble a spring that it became one of the chief Holy Places of the Cherokees, and remains so today. Nowadays, there is a little state park that protects the Blue Hole Spring and the council grounds around it, the last seat of government of the Cherokee Nation before they walked the Trail of Tears. The day my wife and I were there, several Indian families were there as well. From the license plates on their rusted out pickup trucks and beat-up old cars, they had come there all the way from Oklahoma to stand there in silence and Remember, and to let their children drink of that water and run and play in the little park. It is to such a spring that Bach might be compared. We too come to his music to Remember, to encounter the Holy, and to let our children drink of it.

A spring does not get to choose what sort of spring it is, nor the place where it is. But it is there in that place as a blessing upon all who pass by, and as a source of life. So it is with all of us, or so it could be, were we to drink from the Living Water ourselves and allow it to flow through us to others.

In other passages, Our Lord describes the concept in other ways: the branch which abides in the Vine and bears fruit, and is pruned by the Father to bear more abundantly; the good soil that brings forth thirty-fold, sixty-fold, and an hundred-fold (and the many ways that we can fail to bring forth any fruit), the steward who is told “Occupy till I return” and with the one pound he is given makes five, or ten. These likenesses remind us that the Music does not simply flow from us without discipline. We practice, and learn new skills, and listen, and study scores, and wrestle with the notes. One thinks of Beethoven in this, but one thinks also of Bach in the period when he was writing a new cantata every week -- writing it, teaching it to the choirboys, rehearsing it, performing it on Sunday. Or Haydn on his knees in prayer, not knowing where to take the idea with which he was struggling.

For a musician, this is the “pruning” that brings forth more fruit. Or the cleaning up of the spring so that it can be of more benefit to travellers. But the fruit, the living water, the increase of the harvest -- none of this is ours in any ultimate way. We strive only to become transparent, to “abide,” to let go.

Soli Deo gloria.

C clefs

The AGO professional examinations are often criticized because they test musical skills that seem old-fashioned and of little relevance to a modern working musician.

My voluntaries a couple of weeks ago included one of the most arcane of these skills: C clefs. I played Contrapunctus I from Bach’s Art of Fugue, and one of the Eighteen Chorales, Komm, heiliger Geist (BWV 652), in an edition that put the left hand part in alto clef.

Why did I do this? Both pieces are available in more modern editions that use only treble and bass clef. Partly, I used these versions to stay in practice with the clefs, a circular argument. But partly, it was because these versions were easier to play, and closer to the way that Bach wrote them.

The Contrapunctus was the clearest example. I started with the Kalmus miniature score of the Art of Fugue, using a copy machine to enlarge the pages so that my old eyes could read them more easily. The piece is laid out in four parts, open score (another arcane AGO examination skill): soprano clef, alto clef, tenor clef, bass clef. The parts cross so frequently that the editions which put the four parts in “closed” score (two staffs, treble and bass clef, like most keyboard music) are harder to read than the open score. The open score has the further advantage of clearly delineating the four contrapuntal voices, so that the organist will think linearly (in the four voices) and not vertically (from one vertical sonority to the next).

Even with open score, the piece could be recast into modern clefs: the two upper voices in treble clef, the tenor in transposing treble clef, the lowest voice remaining in bass clef. But the C clefs fit the tessiatura more closely, so that there are few leger lines. This was the principal advantage for the other piece that I played, the Komm, heiliger Geist: the two accompaniment voices in the left hand fall nicely into alto clef, but would require an awkward amount of leger lines in either bass or treble clef.


There is a deeper motive for learning the C clefs, a reason that is rarely mentioned: all of these seemingly arcane skills required for the examinations work together. No single skill in itself is of any great importance; all of them together make one a better musician.

For example, the C clefs are a gateway into transposition, and thereby into the reading of orchestral scores. Most obviously, the alto and tenor clefs are needed in order to read viola parts and some passages in violoncello and trombone parts. Tenor clef can be considered the equivalent of the B flat transposition (the instrumentalist sees written C, the third space in the treble clef, the sound produced is concert B flat. Or she sees what would be a written D in treble clef, the fourth line, and the sound produced is concert C. And with tenor clef, the fourth line is in fact C) – the B flat transposition is essential for most of the wind instruments. Alto clef is the equivalent of the D transposition. Soprano clef (C clef on the bottom line of the staff), never explicitly used in modern music and seemingly the least useful, is the E flat transposition, bread-and-butter for saxophones and thus for jazz charts.

Transposition (likewise tested in the AGO exams at all levels) is in turn an essential element of improvisation, as I described recently. Improvisation is, I think, the most liberating of musical skills, allowing the player to make her own music, customized to the occasion at hand. Besides this, it frees the organist from the printed page when accompanying congregational hymns, it improves one’s understanding of the “written” music composed by others, and it is a doorway into writing one’s own compositions.


A question remains: how does one learn to read the clefs? When I learned the clefs for the AGO exams, I did a lot of sight-reading at slow tempi. I now think that it would have been better to take one piece at a time and learn it thoroughly. This is how we all learned to read treble and bass clef: we played pieces that were written in these clefs, practicing them until they were ready for performance.

Thus, when I play the Komm, heiliger Geist, I solidify my facility with alto clef. For this reason, I play this and many other of the Bach chorales from the Dover edition entitled “Bach Organ Music,” which contains the Schübler Chorales, the Orgelbüchlein, the Third Part of the Clavierübung, the Eighteen Leipzig Chorales (and the Trio Sonatas, which use only treble and bass clef). There is a good bit of alto clef in these chorales, and occasional tenor clef -- an important example of the latter is the “Wachet auf” from the Schübler Chorales. The Kalmus editions of the Brahms and Buxtehude organ works are also useful for the clefs.

I recommend the book “Preparatory Exercises in Score Reading” by R. O. Morris and Howard Ferguson (Oxford University Press), for work in the clefs as well as the stated purpose of the book.

Learning to be a Musician involves a lifetime of effort. There may appear to be shortcuts, but there is no substitute for careful study, including the development of skills for which one cannot at first see any use.

"a poor man in vile raiment"

This morning, a scruffy old stranger wandered into the Eucharist during the first lesson. He noisily found a seat in the front row. After a few minutes, he came up to the Rector (during the second lesson), knelt before her and started talking loudly to her about something that was important to him. She got him to stand up and quiet down, and go sit back down.

Two of our young choristers and their families were sitting across the aisle from the man. It was obvious that the children were frightened, and they had no idea how they should react.

On the one hand, this fellow is a child of God. We are specifically enjoined by St. James to have no respect of persons:

My brethren, have not the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, with respect of persons. For if there come unto your assembly a man with a gold ring, in goodly apparel, and there come in also a poor man in vile raiment; and ye have respect to him that weareth the gay clothing, and say unto him, Sit thou here in a good place; and say to the poor, Stand thou there, or sit here under my footstool: Are ye not then partial in yourselves, and are become judges of evil thoughts? (2:1-4)

On the other hand, the children are right to be cautious around strangers. There are a lot of unstable and sometimes dangerous people roaming the streets of our community.


This is not an isolated event. For about a month now, we have had another homeless man (one of the long-time regulars in our city) come to our church during the early service, sit himself down in one of the two red easy chairs in the narthex (which serves as the entry point to the worship space and the location of coffee hour), fall asleep and snore loudly, and stay all morning through the three services, until he is run out when it is time to lock up (about 1 pm). He is gross and disgusting, especially with the snoring. He smells. And he too is a child of God.

For several weeks, we had panhandlers on the public sidewalk in front of the church. Parishioners had to “run the gauntlet” past them to get into the building. This has passed, for the present. But I expect it to recur, as our city decays – as our nation decays, continuing its path toward Third World status.

The first time I visited the City of Detroit was about thirty years ago. I remember walking by the First Presbyterian Church, a historic landmark on Woodward Avenue. The fine old building was in disrepair, with drunks asleep on the sidewalk and in the doorways, windows boarded up where they had been broken, graffiti spray-painted on the walls. The stench of death was in the air for that congregation, so it seemed to me. Indeed, the congregation is no more: as the Wikipedia link describes, the building is now the home of the Ecumenical Theological Seminary, after the Presbytery of Detroit leased them the building in 1996 and gave it to them in 2002.

How many people are going to stop coming to our parish because they don't want to deal with smelly old men taking the best chair in the narthex and snoring away the morning, unstable homeless people wandering into the service and making a commotion, and panhandlers outside on the sidewalk?

If I were the father of a young family, I would think twice about bringing them here. Almost any other church in town – the ones that have moved out to the nice residential areas – would be free of these issues. No one there but nice well-dressed clean People Like Us.

But by going to one of the Nice Churches, I would be denying my children some important lessons. I think they may have observed one such lesson this morning by watching their parents and the other adults. At the Peace, many people greeted the old man. One of the young fathers, with his two elementary-age children with him, invited the man to come sit beside him and he did. As the service continued, he was less agitated. I heard him trying to sing the songs, and he carried on a conversation (during the Eucharistic Prayer) with the man that had befriended him, chuckling and having a good time, it seemed.

He wandered out before the distribution of the Sacrament. But in some manner, I think and hope that he received spiritual benefit from Going to Church today.

And the children? They got a demonstration of the Body of Christ, which has no respect of persons. Which does not fear or shun or despise someone because he is Not Like Us. I do not think that they will find such a spirit anywhere else in American society, anywhere other than the Church and its sister congregations of other faiths (e.g., synagogues, mosques).

I do not know where we go from here. I know that we are not alone in facing such issues and I expect them to get worse. I know that, if we are to be faithful to the Gospel, we have to figure out how to stay here and minister to this community.

... and a followup

If you are one of the eight people who have already viewed the previous posting, this is for you:

I had second thoughts after I posted "Dust thou art..." I had written that the choir families do not attend the special non-Sunday services. Then I thought of some of our younger choristers and their families sitting in the Great Vigil service last year...

Watching a young family in the front row, it hit me how this service ought to work: their little girl was drifting off to sleep as one Story followed another, one Psalm after another. This is perhaps as it ought to be for a child, awakening later when all of a sudden it is Easter, all is alight, and the organ and congregation are roaring away as loud as they can go. If the child comes back the next year, and the next, these stories will eventually be woven into her soul. She will know in her bones that this is a night like no other.

There were others at that service too, some of the teenagers and their families.

I thought of our Christian Formation director, who has repeatedly lobbied for an earlier service time. And who, for several years, had a choir supper between rehearsal and liturgy to entice families to stay.

And I thought of one parent (not a choir parent) who was there at the service. She always brings her infant child to church, and the little girl may well have been there and I didn't see her.

I realized that I had been awfully hard on these parents. They are amazing people, the most amazing group of choir parents I have encountered, and they are bringing their children up as Christians in a world that is unremittingly hostile to the faith.

I went back just now, over lunch, and revised the previous to try and reflect some of this. Raising children in this time and place is hard, and I have no answers.