Serving two Masters

I was a little off yesterday. Can you tell?

[listen]

I hope not. Despite feeling a little peckish and having fingers that weren't quite as articulate as I would have liked, I like to think that they were trained enough to get down to business, suck it up, and do what needed to be done when it counted. Ten fingers, go! (and you feet, too).

By the way, that little piece was the first of a collection known to organists as the "8 Little Preludes and Fugues" and was once thought to have been written by J. S. Bach. Actually, depending on who you talk to it still is thought to be by Bach. But I'll get into that issue in next week.

I made this recording as a sort of  "break" from learning a contemporary trumpet sonata. It's called "The Mysteries Remain" and is 28 pages of largely non-tonal writing, which requires me to essentially familiarize myself with all sorts of unusual clusters of notes, angular melodic cells, and so on. In a few days the piece will start to come around, and hopefully sound like music, but early this week it was making my head hurt so after a few days of kicking it around for four hours a day, and working on nothing else, I thought I'd take a break and do something simple and tonal.

It's my fault, really, for waiting too long to get started on a piece that I have to play in concert in exactly a month, busy schedule that I've had notwithstanding, and cramming the whole thing into my head in a few days had a predictable effect. But like I said, that should pay off by next week when I start rehearsing with the trumpet player. In the meanwhile I'm feeling rather worn out, mind and body. But then, I still managed to get the job done, and also to make a nice recording of another piece I had barely practiced. On a break. For stress relief. Not so bad, really.

I'm not trying to brag, especially if you are a person for whom learning a piece like the Prelude and Fugue in C and playing it for a recording is a major achievement. Sure, I learned and recorded it in about a day, but to start with, I've logged at least 10,000 hours of practice over my lifetime and spent over twelve years at music school just learning how to perform. And I still spend a large part of my day practicing. Besides a general reservoir of skill built up over years of patient labor, the reason I can even do things like that are that I've been dealing in large quantities of music on short deadlines for quite some time. I've acquired skills relating to preparing music well an in a hurry, and I've also learned to plan far ahead whenever possible, so that, in this case, the things I'm playing in church this month are already learned (they were easy) so I can focus all week on something I'm playing for a concert instead.

That doesn't mean there aren't conflicts. I've got three concerts coming up this remaining calendar year, with three programs of varying lengths, and, of course, about a dozen Sunday services to prepare for over that same stretch. That's a lot of music.

"Jesus said, "no one can serve two masters. Either he will hate one and love the other, or love the one and despise the other."

Then there is the old question about how much one musically "gives" to the church. Since I spent pretty much the whole week working on concert repertoire (my other "break" was to learn another piece to play on one of the other concerts, tonal, and easier on the mind, if not the fingers) that issue is on my mind today. My experience has been that quite often musicians spend most of their time preparing for concerts and other secular events, and then throwing stuff together on Sunday morning. It is a major reason that, as I suggested two weeks ago, most people don't expect a lot of quality out of their church music.

My experience may be anecdotal, but I can think of several historical examples as well. There is J. S. Bach, of course, who wrote a great deal of glorious, and difficult, instrumental (and choral) music for the church, at least half of his output, and clearly spent a lot of time at it. But there is his contemporary, Georg Telemann, who, as prolific as he was, dashed off a few short pieces for the organ and that's about it (instrumentally). They are charming, and well written, but it is pretty clear he wasn't really all that into church music. He'd decided, I suspect, that the way to advance a career and make a name was in the theater and the concert hall.

Other folks, like Mozart, who paid lip service to the organ but never wrote anything at all for it, or Gabriel Faure, who spent his entire like as a church organist and didn't write anything for his instrument, remind us of the bargain that often is struck. Sure, I work in a church, but that's not really where I put in my time. It's just a job.

That isn't my style. Sure, this entire month I'm playing easy literature, celebrating the 300th birthday of an obscure Bach student while simultaneously clearing time from my schedule to do other things, but I am planning to play well, putting in enough time and planning ahead. There is a big difference between simple done poorly and simple done well. I've heard enough organists clearly sight reading on Sunday morning, stumbling over passages and missing notes, organists with advanced degrees and plenty of experience who play much better than that on their organ recitals and in concerts, to know that.

The professional solution to all this is, ironically, to sound just as good when you haven't had much practice as you do when you are on full strength. Be consistent. Obviously practice time means something, but if you can really bring your A game under any circumstances you and everyone else are better off. And this is exactly what service in a church requires anyhow. There is never enough time to prepare everything. And next week is right around the corner. I think I once counted some 40 musical items I play in four church services every weekend. Some I have to sight read or play on only one short rehearsal. It's ironic that you have to prepare to learn how to not be able to prepare, but that's the long and short of it. Being able to handle more than you can handle and still managing to sound like you can handle it.

Which reminds me of something else Jesus said. Remember the parable with the three servants, two of whom invest their master's money when he goes away and a third who does not? The first two double their money and receive a commendation from the master when he returns, and...guess what. More work! "You have been faithful in a few things," he says, "now I'll put you in charge of more."

Is that really a happy ending? Talk about overload! But anybody who serves musically in a church knows how that works, don't they?

Which is why you have to be able to sight read like crazy. To play your own part with no discernible errors in it so that you can spend all your time focusing on the people you are playing with. To be able to help them with a well chosen note or two when they need it. To communicate quickly and effectively how you are going to start/stop/play the piece and also not to worry if they skip a beat because you can catch them and keep the music going without a hitch. And you will catch them, right? Adding a beat or two to a score at random is a must for a church musician. That, along with learning how to go on with no warning, no planning, no warm up time, and barely any concentration on your own thing because you have to concentrate on their thing--the complete opposite of all the things I would suggest contribute to quality--that is just what you have to do. Week after week. It's quite a challenge. If you want it to be, of course. If you accept the challenge, and try to figure out how to actually make all that impossible stuff work out well. You get 52 tries a year, if not more.

How do you learn all this?  Just by doing it, week after week, with your ear to the ground, and making notes to yourself how to get better every day. And reading this blog, of course.  :)

Because, on a tight schedule like ours, there is really no time for learning, there is only time for doing it well. And yet, simultaneously, there is all the time in the world.

Glamour Job

Being a church organist is not often thought of as a job for highly talented musicians. That's often a perception of musicians themselves as well as the public at large.

I once received a compliment from a visitor to our church who said that the music that morning was very fine. She went on to say that you don't often encounter churches with good music programs.

I've often gotten the impression that when I tell people I'm a church organist they form an opinion of my musical skills that isn't particularly flattering.

And why not? I happen to have a Doctorate in music in performance on the piano, and can be, and occasionally am, a concert pianist. Over the last several years I've tried to bring my organ playing up to match that. But although there are some extremely fine concert artists at some of the larger churches it is somewhat unusual to find one there. After all, there are thousands upon thousands of churches in America, most of them small or medium sized. And the jobs don't pay very well. How many really good musicians are there to go around and how many of them will want to have a job that pays so little and where the chief arguments are often over whether or not the organist should be listened to respectfully or talked over when he or she plays and whether or not it is actually sinful to pay them anything at all? And if you have to prepare at least three pieces each week and you know nobody is paying attention to them anyhow, you might not give them your best attention. Supposing you are a concert musician and you have a concert on Thursday. Which pursuit is likely to get the most attention?

Regardless of the church size and the salary size, churches are usually not looking for musical excellence in their musicians--it may even scare them. What they are looking for are people who will play the hymns and the anthems and the service music without complaint, who are easy to get along with and have positive attitudes, who work well with amateurs, are consistent and show up on time and basically get the job done with as little drama as possible. Some folks are afraid that a particularly good musician must necessarily have an attitude that will make it hard to deal with them. Not without some real life examples to back up that fear, regrettably.

There's a particularly funny (and painful) sketch Garrison Keillor did several years ago about a little church that strove for musical excellence "and it nearly killed us." They advertise for a music director and manage to hire folks like Stravinksy, Phillip Glass, and Aaron Copland, pretty much a who's who of the 20th century in music (I particularly remember a minimalist introduction to "Onward, Christian Soldiers" in which the pianist never manages to get to the second line). Each time the composer doesn't stay around long for some reason and the church ends up returning to their in-congregation back-up volunteer, Mrs. Palmquist.  Keillor sums her up after every one of her comebacks: "She was a good woman."

That is really an indictment on both the musician and the congregation, although Mr. Keillor paints his set-in-their ways, stubbornly average congregations in such humorously sympathetic ways that it is hard to fault them. And, after all, I may have all [musical] excellence and all [musical] knowledge, but if I have not love....

Still, excellence is something that can be achieved, and should be attempted in church. Part of this will depend on our definitions of excellence. And part of this will hinge on whether or not these pursuits are friends or enemies of what your congregation thinks they want. It is a curious dynamic, and I'll explore it in some of the coming blogs.

A Musical Mountain (part two)

On Mondays and Fridays I'm blogging a six-part series on one tremendous piece of music. This is part two. You can catch part one here.

On Friday we started to explore Cesar Franck's epic Choral no. 3 in A minor. I introduced you to the tragic, lyrical tune that is at the heart of this amazing piece. Today, we'll delve into the other strand of this Choral's thematic heritage:

Listen

It is actually the very first thing you will hear when the piece begins, and, like the tune from Friday, you will also hear it return in many guises. But I'd also like to comment on the theme's paternity. It reminds me of something:

Listen

That is the opening of a Prelude in A Minor by J. S. Bach. I've only played the opening of it because it's been a few years since the last time I played it and I don't have a recording. Besides, we don't want to get distracted. (Although, if you want to listen to it later, its catalog number is Bwv 543. James Kibbie has recorded the entire Bach catalog and put it online which is a good place to look for it.)

Now then, that opening salvo is followed immediately by this sonic buildup, which also reminds me of a little Bach:

Listen

That's from the famous Toccata and Fugue in D minor, again right near the opening. I bring this up because I want you to be aware of how frequently composers speak from within their traditions; conscious of the great contributions of the past, Franck seems to be almost quoting from it, though he will soon use the material in a new way.

Now that we've been introduced to the dramatis personae it is time to see how they interact to bring us this musical narrative. But first we need to take a little detour into one major episode that we haven't covered yet but will absorb our attention for nearly five minutes in the piece's middle. That's on Friday.

go to part three

A Musical Mountain (part one)

Last time I said we'd do a little mountain climbing. The peak I've got in mind is Cesar Franck's Choral no. 3 in A minor. It's one of the cornerstones of the organ literature and I'm playing it this year for Lent.

Often these musical riches go by in one sudden rush for the listener. While the performer has spent weeks, months, years, thinking about the music he or she is playing, the rest of us get one listen. And if you've never heard the piece before, that's a lot to absorb. So for the next six blogs, Monday and Friday (on Wednesdays I'm going to write about something else) I'm going to take you into the world of this incredible piece of music.

We'll start with a tune. Franck is considered by many to be the most important composer of organ music since Bach, which is interesting in that he only wrote a dozen pieces for the instrument. But what epics many of them are! The three Chorals (the French spelling of Chorale leaves off the E for some reason) are the last pieces he wrote. Unlike other pieces with the same title, these Chorals aren't based on pre-existing hymn (or Chorale) tunes. Franck wrote the tunes himself. I'll play what is perhaps the most important tune in this 3rd Choral without any supporting harmonies:

Listen

It is a haunting, beautiful melody. You will hear it several times over the course of the near 15-minute long piece.   Because I'm going to be playing the piece in church as part of the passion I'm inviting us to use our homiletic imaginations. I've decided to call this tune the tune of 'sacrifice' or 'suffering'or perhaps 'sacrificial love.' You'll understand why in subsequent installments. For now, it is enough to get the tune in our heads.

Now for those of us sensitive to harmony Mr. Franck has an exquisite way of presenting this tune. I'll play it for you now with the supports underneath:

Listen

This is how we'll hear it the first time it is presented in the piece, about 45 seconds or so in.

Now as I mentioned a few posts ago in an observation about sonatas (the sonata principle) pieces like this usually have a musical foil, an opposite theme, running in a different direction. Just like in a good story, the antagonism between the two conflicting ideas often sets up drama and propels the story forward. Next time we'll meet the other side of this Choral's dual personality.

on to part two