Words....words...words

Cleveland columnist Dick Feagler passed away a few weeks ago. I grew up in the Cleveland area and enjoyed reading his columns. Feagler had a gift for painting in words a picture of the town he loved back in the "good old days" that could leave you nostalgic for a place you had never known, which is a hallmark of true artists.

Under Feagler's spell you could feel a warmth for people you hadn't met, come to understand what was in the minds of all the people around their dinner tables nodding their heads in agreement with his 'unsolicited opinions' and generally feel like people were decent, or at least tried to be, and that life was good, out there in the parts you'd never seen. The down side to all of this romanticizing was that Feagler himself later said that while he could make sense of the world of the past, he didn't understand the one he was living in now. Too much change. He had succumbed to one of the most popular myths of humanity, that things are always getting worse, and that the things you knew growing up were always the best. It's the life you were living while young, and that confidence of youth apparently is what makes up for pollution and the imminent threat of thermonuclear war in making the landscape of the past seem so much better than what we have now. I can remember going to bed wondering whether I'd wake up in the morning or if we'd all be incinerated and yet it still seems like a simpler time largely because I didn't have to pay my own bills.

Some of Feagler's columns were collected in books late in his career. I have them. The prefaces are interesting. In one of them he writes about how he got started. These origin stories usually involve a lot of happenstance, and this is no exception. A reporter who often let go of his opinions in print, he was given a column to dispense them regularly on page two. It was, he wrote, not a glamorous bit of real estate, being the part folks usually "skipped on their brisk journey from page one to the interior of the paper." Just to the left of Feagler's own preface is an introduction by his editors which is more laudatory. They frame page two as "the place given to the star." I'll bet most readers are much more inclined to this version of events, even though they may both be right--the cache of page two probably went up as their columnist's reputation slowly rose.

If there is any false modesty in Feagler's remarks it is probably a defense mechanism. Uncritical praise can be just as dangerous to a creator as ignorant criticism. In the strange contract a writer has with the public it is safe to display this armor of modesty without fear of damaging your reputation because nobody is going to buy it for a second no matter how true it is. But in Feagler's world he'd probably gotten used to plugging away without thinking of Pulitzers because that was how you deal with the constant stream of irate readers who don't share your opinion, editors who think of you as a fungible commodity that helps sell papers, and constant deadlines.

It was those deadlines that got to him first. "Armed with one firm opinion a month," he says, "we [columnists] grind out three columns a week." Given leave to write about anything, he soon realized he had nothing to write about. And then he wrote about it anyway. "And that, dear reader, is why you are holding this book. I forced myself to write columns whether I had anything to write about or not."

Inspiration is a strange thing. It tends to visit those most often who keep working whether they've gotten her visions or not. It tends to reward those who learn to master their medium with hammer and chisel in the mines of constancy so that by way of the magic rhythm of words and sentences, something is worth reading even when its substance is at best gossamer. It teaches you to write about the weather so that someone will want to read it.

And then, when inspiration strikes, you have something to say, and you know how to say it. Otherwise, if you wait for the muse before you've prepared her welcome on a steady current of words, she may not come at all.

---
don't forget to check out the articles and recordings this week on the website proper, pianonoise.com.

Bach, the not quite god

There is never a shortage of worshipful persons gathered around significant figures of the past, unreservedly declaring everything they have done without blemish and a clear summit in the progress of the human race.  In the case of Bach writers have gone particularly overboard, which is hard to do, it seems to me, considering what an incredibly accomplished composer he was.

Nevertheless, if you are a composer, it is helpful to know that even Bach didn’t always arrive at perfection the first time out, and that he often changed his mind, reworking music he wrote, even correcting mistakes. This statement of mine is in direct contrast to that of Phillip Spitta, his first major biographer, who was constantly declaring Bach’s unerring, unswerving, sure mastery from the start: That and Spitta's rampant nationalism make me want to gag sometimes. 

Which, again, isn’t to gainsay any of Bach’s massive achievement. It’s just that, the man himself apparently valued hard work above all else, saying that “anyone who works as hard as I did would get the same result.”

Ok, that might be a bit of a miscalculation in the other direction, but it still underscores something I’ve been noticing for a long time. Persons who are particularly accomplished in some area tend to stress the hard work required to get there. Persons who are not accomplished in something tend to talk in terms of talent and “just having it” and other magic. There might be a lesson in that.

The reason I was reminded of Bach’s work ethic is that there is a short chorale prelude, which just happens to be based on the same hymn tune. It is the shortest of what are commonly called the “great 18” or “Leipzig Chorale Preludes,” but as it happens, it was once even shorter. In fact, the first half of the Leipzig version exists in a shorter version in Bach’s “Little Organ Book.”  It is a setting of a single verse of the hymn and it takes only about 45 seconds to play. Apparently, Bach later decided to add on to it, setting a second verse.  Bach decided to move the hymn melody from the soprano to the bass, and change the surrounding texture. Essentially, it was another standard method of setting a chorale tune, which Bach then tacked on to the first portion with a bit of connective material, and a new piece was born, and a quite effective one, too.

At that point, actually, Bach had what has become known as the Weimar version of the chorale, because that was where he was working at the time, and only later revised it, even fixing a couple of places where the counterpoint (gasp!) was faulty. (I kid you not: the great Bach actually wrote parallel fifths in the first--or rather the second--version!) It wasn’t until a third reworking of the original chorale that he arrived at the Leipzig version that most organists play.

I’ll leave you with a recording of the second of these multiple versions, the one from Weimar, since I’ve taken a vow to learn all of the early versions before embarking on the later ones to study what Bach changed. 

Bach: Come, Creator, Holy Spirit    Bwv 667a

This is far from the only example of Bach doing something like this, and it is a reminder to composers who have come up with an idea for a piece that seems too short or too ineffective, that it often takes a second look, maybe even months later, to realize the potential in that initial idea (not to mention an accomplished technique). Despite all the nonsense you read about great composers envisioning their music whole and perfect right from the beginning, or knowing exactly what they want and how to get it, because any amount of floundering in the dark, even for a moment, would somehow make them less great, don’t buy it. And don’t try composing that way yourself. It stunts your growth. It is the result that matters in the end anyway. If you are so worried that people are going to find out you had to work hard to get it, burn your sketches or something! (worked for Mozart)

As a teacher of mine, who clearly revered these musical immortals, once said, “they weren’t gods.”

But I think they did OK anyway. You?

Bored in Church?

We had barely gotten back from San Francisco (the hard way) when I discovered some correspondence sitting in my email inbox. Our pastor is preaching a sermon series on "The Witness of the Prairie Poets" which refers to poems by some of Illinois' most revered poets. And interesting idea, and this week turns out to be quite an event.

One of the poems, "General William Booth Goes to Heaven" is supposed to be accompanied by a bass drum, flute, tambourine and banjos. No one seriously thought we'd get a bass drum in our sanctuary on short notice--I like the idea of it, though. Probably Charles Ives would have liked the idea, too. He set the poem to music, as a solo song for male voice and piano. A member of our choir made some attempts to get a well respected voice professor at our university to sing it, but he's out of town for the next couple of Sundays.

Instead, two gentlemen are reciting the poem, and the choir is helping out with some portions by singing the refrain to "Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?" I decided to track down Ives' piece and interpolate bits of it during the recitation, which will occur during the sermon. I'm also playing the "Dead March" from "Saul" by Handel, which was played at the actual funeral of William Booth, who, if you are wondering, founded the Salvation Army.

Besides that poem, we have another, "Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight," also by Vachel Lindsay, our poet for the week, and it has given rise to the anthem, a stirring rendition of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," which was borrowed by another of our choir members on short notice from our community choir. We are also singing "God of the Ages" and "There is a Fountain Filled with Blood"--two more unusual selections for this congregation. Not that we don't cover a lot of ground anyway: there is a good bit of variety in our repertoire, and one Sunday might very well not be much like another at our church. This one will be particularly festive, and particularly 19th century American.

In addition to all that, a woman from our congregation, now in her nineties, who has been playing the piano for our church since she joined it practically at the church's inception over fifty years ago, is joining me for three piano/organ duets. Fortunately, we chose a fanfarish rendition of a hymn to open the service, even before we knew the contents of the rest. Things worked out fairly well in that regard.

I predict I will be very tired when all this is over (twice).

There is an alternative to that, which is not to work any harder than necessary; not to track down (difficult) pieces at the university library at the last minute, or to protest fatigue from travel harrangues, and just keep things as simple as possible. But that would be dull.

We are the choices we make. One choice I tend to make over and over is not to take the simplest way out. Frankly, one reason for that is I hate being bored, and, whatever you can say about giving all your energy to something is that it is seldom boring. There is something about Sunday mornings at Faith that usually isn't. Sometimes it is in overcoming an emergency where someone got sick and we've got to cover, or the amount of last minute coordination that is virtually always necessary for a multitude of reasons. Or trying to employ multiple and opposite skills: sightreading, improvising, and playing concert quality music on the organ are just three of them. One involves meticulous planning; the other two involve no planning at all, but can be further subdivided into one requiring the eye and the other the ear. Or it may be that each week is somehow different than all other weeks. THIS is the day the Lord has made. Sure, he made yesterday, too, but that isn't the point now, is it?

Anyhow, this week is decidedly a group effort, even more than most weeks. We have a lot of folks who have stepped up to employ their talents, tossing around emails all week to plan the best way to do that. If I'd been doing all the planning I probably wouldn't have thought of half of it.

It's certainly going to fun.

Hold my tongue--fun? in church?

Forget I said that.

Make it, piously joyful instead. That'll make it past the censors!

Anyway, it adds up to the same thing.