Music for Sunday 4 July 2010

Readings for the week are linked here.

The mass setting will be Michael Dudman's Parish Eucharist [Together in Song, 756]

Hymns are as follows:

Introit: In the cross of Christ I glory [349]
Gradual: We have a gospel to proclaim [245]
Offertory: Ye servants of God [215]
Communion: Draw near and take the body of our Lord [498]

Organ Australia

The June edition of Organ Australia arrived in my letter box yesterday.  The journal has undergone a major revamp of design, including an increase in colour pages -- a vast improvement on all fronts from the rather dated and daggy style of the last 15 years.  The journal looks very slick, and definitely a cut or three above the Sydney Organ Journal.

Articles include an extensive report on the Organ Historical Trust of Australia annual conference -- really an organ crawl with interesting conversations.  The reviews section, as ever, is worth the effort, and my article has been promoted to the features section.

Only one more day to go with the AYC winter intensive, then three days of intensive recital preparation lie ahead for Duo Seraphim on Sunday.  Oh, and in the middle of it all, I'm trying to generate an abstract for a conference paper.  What's that saying about how it never rains?

Teaching Rhythm 2

Below the jump you'll find a second group activity plan for rhythm.  This builds on the one I posted here last week.  Hymn numbers refer to Together in Song.

Duo Seraphim

2.15pm, Sunday 4 July 2010

St Cuthbert's Presbyterian Church

10 Wilson Street, Brighton 

(click HERE for a map)

Kieran Crichton (Organ)

Matthew Schultz (Trumpet) 

Programme

Sinfonia in D – G. Torelli

Concerto in a minor [BWV 593] – A. Vivaldi, transcribed J.S. Bach

Canzona a 5 – G. Frescobaldi

Toccata

Ricercar

Bergamasca – Frescobaldi

Sonata detta la Verliche

Sonata detta dell’Arcinboldo – G. Fantini

Balletto—Corrente—Passacagli – Frescobaldi

Sonata detta del Stuffa

Sonata detta la Renuccini – Fantini

Toccata and Fugue in F Major [BWV 540] – J.S. Bach

Canzonetta super Beatus Vir – C. Monteverdi

Programme notes below the jump.

Better to laugh than to cry?

Open rehearsal

This is the last week of term II.

I recall a similar moment at the end of term I, realizing I'd survived ten weeks of a very steep learning curve with the Australian Youth Choir.  Every Thursday, I chug over to Essendon to spend three hours teaching around 60 young people the basics of music, and to prepare repertoire for their concerts.  For the last couple of weeks I've had to be the one-man show, since my accompanist went on tour to QLD on Fame.  He'll be back in time for the resumption of rehearsals in a couple of weeks, but I've never been more exhausted than last week, bouncing from music desk to whiteboard to piano and repeat all possible permutations of the sequence ad infinitum.

Now, the last week of term means only one thing in the AYC: open rehearsals.  The parents get to sit in on the last half hour of the rehearsal, and at the end one makes affable small talk with them.  It's probably the most emotionally draining rehearsal of the whole term, because so many of the parents have these incredibly intense responses to seeing their children sing.  I suspect it emanates from that comment I encounter so frequently -- "I always wanted to sing/play the [insert instrument of choice here], but never had the chance to learn..." -- the parent sees their child's developing ability through their sense of inability.

So, by the time you read this, I'll be getting parents to stand up and wave their arms about, and to learn one of the simple teaching songs the children have been working on.  They didn't think I was serious when I did this last term, but it'll be interesting to see if any of the parents who held back join in this time round (assuming they weren't scared off!!).  Asking them to sing can be a bit like a grungy magician holding up a blood-stained saw in the middle of an open air show and asking for a volunteer from the audience...

Then next week there's the craziness of the winter intensive: three days of non-stop 9am-3.30pm work on repertoire for two concerts and a CD.  After that, the remains of a couple of weeks' break.

Scarlet day

I got a letter in the post today, repeating the information in an email I received the other day.

My graduation will be on Saturday 21 August, at 3.30pm.

A little bit of trivia for you.  My chief supervisor was Warren Bebbington, who is a Pro-Vice Chancellor at the University of Melbourne.  At my graduation he will be the Acting Vice Chancellor, which means he is the person to whom I will be doffing my hat and making the prescribed obeisance.  Given that he was the Ormond Professor when I was a mere undergraduate in the now-amalgamated Faculty of Music, there's a nice closing of the circle in that.

Rare thing

So Julia Gillard won the spill.  For the first time, a woman holds the Prime Ministerial office in Australia (and it's taken us a long time!).

Let's see if things improve, although I would say that history is against this.

The tendency with Labor governments in Australia electing women as leader is that it's a sign that they're on their last legs.  Joan Kirner was put on the bonfire of the Victorian Labor government before Jeff Kennett won the 1991 election.  Carmen Lawrence did better on her elevation to the premiership in Western Australia in 1990, but was beaten at the 1993 election.  Right now, Anna Bligh and Kristina Keneally both lead highly unpopular Labor governments in Queensland and New South Wales respectively.

Let's hope Julia Gillard's elevation is the one that confounds this tendency.

Why C.V. Stanford was a brilliant teacher

A lengthy extract from Charles Villiers Stanford, Musical Composition (London: Macmillan, 1911), 78-9:

The variety within the limits of an apparently shackled formula is so great, that it takes not months but years to turn form from a master into a servant.  If the composer investigates the knots of the ropes which bind him, he will eventually find how to loosen them.
Too many students are afraid, from a natural desire to be original, to copy the examples which the great composers provide; but if they wish to get at the root of the methods in which their predecessors successfully worked, they must make up their minds to do so.  Here, again, the parallel of the art of painting comes in, where students can get the best possible tuition from masters greater than any living by copying their pictures, and so getting at the root of their methods.  A musician has one great advantage over a painter in this branch of study; for he can take a movement by a great composer for a model, but confine his imitation to copying the shape and the trend of the modulations while using his own themes and rhythmical figures to carry out the design.  The painter merely copies out another man's complete work.  The composer writes his own work on the lines of his predecessor's model.  Except to a heaven-born genius, such as Schubert, this system of studying form is the only possible one for the all-important control of shape and proportion.  It might even, without blasphemy, be said that Schubert would have been less given to diffuseness if he had trained himself systematically, which we know that he did not; for his "heavenly lengths," as Schumann termed them, are only carried off by the wealth of invention which they contain.  Beethoven often writes at as great a length as he (witness the Sonata in B flat, Op. 106), but his subjects, episodes, and developments all increase in proportion to each other and in proportion to the length of the scheme; and just as a man of perfect proportions will not look like a giant, even if he is six feet six, so another of six fee two, whose legs are too long for his body, will give the impression of abnormal height.  It is an almost cruel task to write a movement, bar by bar, modulation by modulation, figure by figure, exactly the same in all respects, save theme, as a work by another composer; but it is the only way to get at the root of the matter, and it must be faced.

I found my copy of this book a few years ago.  As it turned out, the discovery was serendipitous: the front flyleaf shows that the first owner of the copy was Franklin Peterson, on whom I did my Ph.D. thesis:

You can also see what an outrageously good deal the book was!

Indulge me

The Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, is going to a spill in caucus today.  Good.  If he wins, there can be no more speculation about his stability as leader of the Labor Party until after the election (whenever it is).  If he loses, I'm not even going to open a newspaper for the next fortnight.  As it is, I'm not really paying close attention to anything before the international news coverage.

Indulge me for a moment.  In Australia it is compulsory to be on the electoral role once you reach the age of 18, and thus enrolled, to attend a polling place on election day.  What happens in the privacy of the booth is between you, the table, your pencil and the ballot slip.  I started my voting life as an instinctive Labor voter (there were some Liberal-supporting crazies in my family), but my sense of priorities have shifted in time.  That's natural, but the political convergence of the ALPs is what finally cured me of voting for either of them.  Such is my abhorrence of the easy bigotry, intellectual laziness, wanton class and generational warfare and sheer bloody-minded, persistent moral turpitude of both parties that I make sure my preferences travel a very long way indeed before my vote ends up with either of them.  I even vote below the line for the Senate.  O that more people would take advantage of the rigour of the Australian ballot system and do likewise.

There's plenty of journalism about the fortunes of the Rudd leadership, but that won't deal with the biggest problem I have with Rudd Labor.

None of those supposedly educated people can string a simple, grammatically straightforward, sentence together.  Not without lapsing into acronyms, doublespeak, changing the topic or any of an infinite number of "go directly to jail..." types of verbal duck-shoving.  Mr Rudd himself has never appeared before the public with fewer than 1,000 words (including unpacked acronyms) at any time.  OK, it's nice that he's trying to avoid being sound-bitten, but in all that wall of verbiage he never really says anything at all.  For someone apparently so preoccupied with decency (pace David Marr), it strikes me as terribly indecent.

I have never seen Mr Rudd in the absence of television cameras or microphones of various sorts.  He may well be an articulate and witty conversationalist in Mandarin or English.  If that is so, then it's a pity he lapses into being such a noxious bore in public.  It's clearly contagious, as it has affected his challenger, Julia Gillard.

Just a quick example will suffice, because it is past my bedtime.  Julia Gillard was interviewed on the 7.30 Report a couple of weeks ago about the problems in rolling out the Building the Education Revolution policy.  The problem is summed up by observing that Catholic and independent schools have been able to put up buildings that meet their needs, on schedule and at a cheaper rate than comparable public schools.  Now, the policy is about building facilities for schools.  Fix this in your mind.  Go and browse the transcript of the story I'm talking about here.  Within seconds of the opening of the interview between Kerry O'Brien and Julia Gillard that followed the story, this dropped out:

Kerry, what I would say is this, building the Education Revolution is a huge economic stimulus project and today's national accounts prove that it is supporting jobs.

Why is everything in Australian politics about jobs, even when it's meant to be about improving facilities in public schools?  Jobs equals the here-and-now, schools represent future prosperity.  Let's leave the senseless waste of public money on independent schools aside for a moment; public schools must accept any student within their catchment area.  They should be the powerhouses of the nation.  In the perpetual present of the political echo chamber, it's jobs that matter because there's statistics to parse and votes to extrapolate, so we end up talking about jobs when we should be talking about schools.  Go and read the rest of that exasperating interview here.

All manner of iniquity begins with language.  In many ways the present government have never really grown away from the contest with Mr Wiggly himself.  So much of their rhetoric could be played next to that of certain ministers in the former Howard government, and you'd be stuck for weeks trying to tell the difference.  I could go for the Orwell gun, but that's hackneyed, and in any event, G.K. Chesterton put it better:

From all that terror teaches,
from lies of tongue and pen,
from all the easy speeches
that comfort cruel men,
from sale and profanation
of honor, and the sword,
from sleep and from damnation,
deliver us, good Lord!

(Find the rest of it here.)

Music for Sunday 27 June 2010

This week will be the first time in about four years I have been in Melbourne for St Peter's day.  Among the perks of doing a PhD is that one can get funding to go overseas for research trips and conferences. You can combine these trips with any amount of cathedral crawling.  My most memorable St Peter's day was 2007, when I sang at Old St Paul's in Edinburgh.  Their processional route includes a short stretch of the Royal Mile, two closes and the back of a busy hotel.  I was associated with St Peter's, Eastern Hill, in various ways for a few years back in the 1990s, and on-and-off in the last decade.

So, for the first time in a few years I am back at the grindstone for an observance of St Peter's day.  The readings for the week are linked here.

The mass setting will be the  Christ Church Mass of Philip Mathias [Together in Song, 757].

Hymns for the week are:

Introit: Thou art the Christ [tune, TIS 118]
For the Psalm: Taste and see the goodness of the Lord [22]
Gradual: God of grace and God of glory [611, tune 520
Offertory: Ye watchers and ye holy ones [150]
Communion: Glorious things of you are spoken [446, tune 772]

The choir will be singing the proper Communion antiphon for the day, using Francis Burgess's edition of the Plainchant Gradual, which was a contrafactum of the old Roman Gradual.  Thus, you get the authentic Gregorian melody with English text underlay:

The chant is being extended by the inclusion of verses from Psalm 80, so that it covers the action of the general communion.

Something heartbreaking

I ran across this image on the Classical Iconoclast blog just now.  It stopped me in my tracks.

What do you see here?  People making music?  Certainly that.  Does the room evoke a middle-class home, or something more sinister?

Look a bit more closely.  Can you see something that might give a clue as to where this image is set?  There are only two people whom we see front-on, the little girl and the older man to the left of picture.  They have yellow stars on their outer clothing.

The scene is a dormitory at Terezin Theresienstadt, one of the concentration camps of the Third Reich.  The artist was Helga Weissova-Hoskova, who was an inmate of the camp who survived the war.

When I think of music in the difficult circumstances of the 1930s and 40s, I often end up thinking about the public dilemmas of Wilhelm Furtwangler.  If I think about music in concentration camps during the same period at all, it's generally the Quatour pour la fin du temps, Messian's transcendentally epic journey out of a shared musical syntax.  I suppose the sheer fact of the concentration camps stops one from contemplating that people didn't merely die there, they also lived -- many of them highly cultured people who were well-equipped to make music.  As Dondou Tchil comments,

The music of Thereseinstadt speaks for everyone, because it shows how people can be creative in the most adverse situations, and that art has value, against all odds. That's why its significance resonates for all humanity.

Because camp conditions were strained, no huge Wagnerian orchestral extravagance. Instead, focus on chamber music, song, things that ordinary people can do. Ilse Weber's poems and songs are loved because they are so simple and down to earth. They weren't meant to be fancy High Art but they  are moving because of their context. Terezin-Lied came from Emmerich Kálmán hit operetta Countess Maritza. Everyone knew the tune, so changing the words gave it another level of meaning. Trained voices not needed, everyone could sing along together.

The article from which I've extracted this little nugget is a thought-provoking write up of a concert at Wigmore Hall.  I highly recommend giving it a read, so do pay a visit to the Iconoclast.

On the Opinions of Footballers

You are in the media because you run fast, kick a ball a long way, and conform to a certain stereotype.

It could be argued that you are only valuable to the extent that you are an ornament to a patch of grass.

Actually, being a football player is a lot like being a woman.  Perhaps that's why so many footballers have been coming up with weirdly topical emotional outbursts lately.

Teaching Rhythm

Below the jump you'll find the outline of a small group activity focusing on rhythm.

I am a strong believer in breaking down the elements of music for new choristers.  For me, rhythm is the horizontal aspect of music notation -- it is something that we read across the page, much like the way you are presently scanning this blog entry.  Pitch is the vertical aspect, and there will be a plan for a small group activity looking at that shortly.

You'll also get a flavor of my teaching style from this.  I ask a lot of questions: the reason for this is that people will retain only 20% of anything I tell them, but close on 100% if they tell me.

The first step

After that very reflective post of last night, something a little lighter.

Sunday was the first week of the new youth choir at All Saints, Preston.  I arrived at 9am to discover that four of the nine children had been dropped off already -- fortunately, the sacristan was already at the church to let them in!  After an incredibly frenetic morning, I came home and went to bed for a couple of hours.

Things went fairly smoothly.  A key element of the way this program has been put together is the allocation of mentors from the congregation to take care of the new choristers during their first few weeks.  This provides a way of spreading the pastoral load by giving the older members of the congregation a direct way of contributing to the work of welcoming the young people into the 10am service.  The mentors did a very good job of guiding their charges through the service, and I think the young people felt that they were well cared-for.

But my, how the week flies.  Today is the beginning of week two of rehearsals.

Absolutely renewable energy

This made me laugh:

LONDON—In what is being called a game-changer for the embattled oil company, BP announced today that it has developed a new technology to convert lies into energy.

Go and read the rest.  It would be wonderful if it wasn't satire...

In the mail

I received my academic transcript in the post a few days ago.  It got lost in a pile on my desk, and resurfaced today.  It has now been put in the filing cabinet, so I'll know where it is until the next time I move house.

When I received the envelope, I didn't really pay much attention to it.  It was only when I was putting the document away that I noticed that the transcript states that I now have the Ph.D., but is addressed to Mister.  The title doesn't become official until I graduate in August, although that hasn't stopped a few people addressing me as Doctor since the thesis result was finalized.

This little happenstance rather neatly sums up where things have been for a while.  The last twelve months or so have been a bit of a blurry in-between sort of time for me.  I submitted my thesis on the last day of August last year, and spent the subsequent three months in a vale of tears.  It was like coming to a shuddering halt, and the recoil was quite vile.  I recently joked that one spends the first six months after submitting a thesis getting through the emotional baggage that has been accumulating for the previous three years, and then the following six months are the time in which you finally get around to sorting yourself out.  In the meantime, you live each day as it comes, do as the University asks you, and just generally get on with things.  When people ask what I'm doing now, my answer is "panicking!"  The worst fight I've had in the last six months was with someone who thought I should be in a job, any job.  After four-and-a-half years of living in libraries, and with the computer attached at the hip, no longer having to do these things can be a bit like learning how to breath again.

The thesis is almost a memory now.  My graduation will be about a week short of twelve months since the original submission.  I've got a couple of writing projects on the boil, but most of my week is taken up with teaching children how to sing and read music, preparing repertoire for upcoming recitals, or heading off to play for a funeral (Deo gratias for Le Pine!).  This is all provisional, while I tackle some of the broader questions that surround me at the moment.  For various reasons, I didn't want to head straight into full-time work, although there have been some interesting opportunities.  I also soft-pedaled jumping in and making research funding applications, but that was mostly due to my thesis results not being final before the February funding round.  That, and I find the paperwork mind-numbingly tedious.  I find I can sell a research proposal more effectively in person.

Life at the moment is a bit like watching a duck glide across a pond: one doesn't see all the pumping that's going on under the surface.

Where is it?

The June edition of Organ Australia is running late.  Most exasperating, as I have an article in the coming edition that had to be written in a hurry to meet the deadline.

Perhaps this one will be the Winter Edition.

Decentralization

If you are a regular reader of political journalism in Australia, it would be clear that the race to the 2010 Victorian state election has been on for about, oh, the last four years or so.  Weekly, fortnightly and monthly opinion polls track the progress of the political party that currently holds government.

I've always felt that opinion polling would be better if it were put to other uses in non-election years, as it has clearly poisoned the process of formulating and implementing policy.  Imagine if Henry Bolte had heeded public opinion when he started building the housing commission towers in the 1960s: Melbourne would still be a provincial backwater, afraid of doing anything bold.  Suburbs such as Fitzroy, South Melbourne, South Yarra, North Melbourne, Kensington, Footscray and so on would have retained nineteenth-century housing stock that would now be worth a considerable fortune, but that would have come at the price of iniquitous social conditions for those who could not afford to live close to the city.  The policy fortunes of Melbourne as a major urban centre were long held hostage by farmers, and Bolte (himself a farmer!) was the first to face up to the fact that Melbourne needed to be treated as a city, not just the capital.

So it is interesting to read about plans to decentralize state public service offices out of Melbourne.  There are also plans to improve infrastructure in regional cities, such as Geelong, the Latrobe Valley, Bendigo and Ballarat.  Media coverage has responded to this as a combination of good policy delivered at a time when it looks like a massive attack of pork-barreling.  The next opinion poll will probably deliver a result along the lines of "too much, too late" from country voters, and something panicky from urban people.  The Age had a good feature report on the regional centres policy today, but it hasn't appeared on their website yet.

I grew up in country Victoria before my family moved to Melbourne in 1992.  A lot of the complexities of my life are bound up in having had my early years in a small country town where little happened: one had to travel to Benella, Shepparton or Melbourne to visit an art gallery, attend a concert, or participate in enrichment activities.  I spent a lot of my childhood in cars and buses, certainly more hours than I really cared to spend at the time.  This is the lens through which I look at the policy announcements of this week.

One of the big differences that has always struck me when traveling interstate is the density of cultural life in the regional cities of New South Wales and Queensland.  I have always been impressed with the conservatorium system that operates in NSW, where there are several very excellent schools of music dotted throughout the state, some of which extend to offering degree-level studies.  By contrast, anyone seeking higher education in music must move to Melbourne if they are to pursue it in Victoria.  Leaving aside the general feeling of torpor that prevails in all levels of music education in Victoria, it would be encouraging if any of the universities with regional campuses would consider starting up music departments along the lines of what I've seen in NSW.  So my first observation is that this policy should be counted as successful if the higher density of population brings wider opportunities for cultural life, particularly in music.

One of the pleasures of travelling in the UK is that one doesn't have to go to London to catch a train from one side of the country to the other (to get from Bendigo to Shepparton, you would likely have to take a passenger service into Southern Cross Station to make the onward connection).  If you are not driving, you can choose to travel by train or by coach; services are generally punctual, and where delays occur, information is offered promptly and without any of the corporate double-speak that one hears here.  The present government's major contribution to regional rail transport has been a mixed bag, changing fully-duplicated train lines back to single-track, so far failing to come up with a better solution to how to move regional services smoothly through the metropolitan network, and generally giving the impression of not being much interested in public transport through a lack of investment in rolling stock to keep up with patronage growth.  Victoria was the first Australian colony to build a mainline service (to Mildura, no less).  Yes, you can catch a bus to just about anywhere in the regions, but it's the lack of a rail option that provides the clincher for a lot of travelers -- on a train, one is free to get up and walk about in a way that is not practical on a bus.

It has always struck me as the height of silliness that those cities that once boasted tram networks that serviced their whole urban areas -- Geelong, Ballarat and Bendigo -- no longer have good coverage.  Geelong's tram network was entirely dissolved, apparently at the behest of the Ford company.  Bendigo maintains a tourist service, while Ballarat has been exploring the possibility of ressurecting their tram network.  These three centres are big cities.  It would be great to see them develop a level of public transport comparable to Melbourne's tram network.  Such things used to be a sign of civic pride and prosperity: why should it be any different now?

So I think the other area where I would count the latest policy to be successful would be if it improves transport links, particularly by developing options for passengers to take the train or a bus.  For internal transport within large regional centres, tramways would be a desirable development.

In a nutshell, I think decentralization of population growth is a good thing.  Opinion polling will probably give a mixed view, but good policy has never been achieved by asking questions about the status quo.  This is a good policy -- even if it looks like a naked grab for votes by an aging government now led by Victoria's answer to Gordon Brown -- but only as long as the advantages of population growth in regional cities is matched by genuine investment in cultural and transport infrastructure.

Music for Sunday 20 June 2010

As I write, the first rehearsals of the new children's and youth choir at All Saints have just taken place.  Stay tuned for more news about the progress of this exciting project!  Over the coming weeks there will be a number of choristers graduating out of the WHITE level of the training program, so I expect to have the first round of fully-admitted choristers putting on robes in a few weeks. 

The advent of a new ensemble means a bit of change to the existing choir's pattern.  Weekly rehearsals have been held at St George's, Reservoir, since I arrived, but because the children are to be based at All Saints, all rehearsals are being consolidated there for the time being.  People have been very gracious about a change that would have generated considerable perplexity only a few months ago.

In the meantime, things carry on much as usual, except that Sunday morning rehearsals will be at 0915 rather than 0930.

The readings for the week are linked here.

The psalm is set to be sung antiphonally, using Anglican Chant.

The mass setting will be Philip Mathias's Christ Church Mass (Together in Song, 757)

Hymns for the week are:

Introit: King of Glory, King of Peace [201]
Gradual: 'Take up your cross,' the Saviour said [583]
Offertory: All hail the power of Jesus' name [224 i]
Communion: Amazing grace (how sweet the sound) [129]

Organ music at All Saints will be:

Prelude: Fugue [BWV 540] -- J.S. Bach
Postlude: Toccata [BWV 540] -- J.S. Bach

Another beginning

Today saw the first rehearsal of the new children and youth choir at All Saints, Preston.  This is the beginning of realizing a project I've been cooking since mid-December.  Because the parish has a strong Sudanese community, with many children  and young people, this looked to be a ready-made opportunity that was simply waiting to be courted.  In the long-run, it may see some developments in the ways in which the various congregations in the parish interact.

The young people will rehearse twice a week until the September school holidays.  This is a high commitment, but the benefits will flow very soon; the parents are highly supportive, and in this situation that can be half the battle.

There were nine young people at the first rehearsal.  This is the hardest one of all -- establishing some of the basic disciplines.  To any other choir directors out there who are wondering how to teach good rehearsal behaviour, I can only suggest asking the following question at regular intervals in the first two or three practices:

When I am saying something to you, who else should be speaking?

It's going to take about four weeks to get the discipline together, but once it's there things will really take off.

The other thing I'd say to anyone looking to set up a youth choir in a church is this: make sure you get your congregation's office bearers involved.  You'll shake more potential choristers out of the system with greater efficiency if there is more than one set of hands putting up posters, following up phonecalls and generally spruiking for business.  Only do it as a one-man show if you're determined to make a martyr of yourself.  So here's a quick tug of the cap to the parishioners who were present today to help out with setting up and tidying away, and helping to supervise.

I hope to get a picture or two to put up here soon.  Perhaps once the first group of young folk have received their robes.

Upcoming recital -- "Duo Seraphim"

I'm playing a recital featuring music for trumpet and organ in a couple of weeks.  Here are the details:

2.15pm, Sunday 4 July 2010

Some of the most spectacular works in the early music repertoire were written for the exciting combination of organ and trumpet.  Kieran Crichton (organ) and Matthew Schultz (trumpet) will present compositions by Torelli, Frescobaldi and Monteverdi.  Solo organ items will include Bach's Toccata and Fugue in F [BWV 540] and Vivaldi's Concerto in a minor, transcribed by Bach.

Location: St Cuthbert's Presbyterian Church, 10 Wilson Street, Brighton.

A Minor Redesign

Blogger has put up a new set of templates, so I thought I'd have a quick look to see what's about.

If you have trouble reading any of the page elements here, post a comment here and I'll try to fix it.  Equally, if you like the new look, let me know!

Music for Sunday 13 June 2010

Green is back for a while.  I love the opening line from the office hymn for Pentecost, which reminds us that Eastertide is past and the year is now in full swing.  Now that green is back, it certainly feels like the year is striding along.


The readings for this week are linked here.

The psalm setting is here.

The mass setting will be Michael Dudman's Parish Eucharist (Together in Song, 756).

Hymns for the week are as follows:

Introit: Eternal Ruler of the ceaseless round [tune: 521]
Gradual: Drop, drop slow tears [tune: 466]
Offertory: There's a wideness in God's mercy [136]
Communion: What a friend we have in Jesus [590]

Organ music at All Saints will be:

Prelude: Toccata -- Girolamo Frescobaldi
Postlude: Bergamasca -- G. Frescobaldi

The Ideal Hymnbook

I spend a lot of time thinking about hymn books.

My earliest memories of hymnody come from growing up around the Uniting Church in Australia, which used the Australian Hymn Book.  I seem to recall that certain members of the Violet Town congregation were rather daring in openly possessing copies with the Catholic Supplement.

I spent much of my youth around places that used the New English Hymnal, and in a lot of ways this remains the benchmark of what a good hymnbook should be about for me.  The strengths of this book are the immense wealth of seasonal material, such as office hymns, and the liturgical section at the back.  It was supplemented a few years ago when the New English Praise was published.  I am constantly drawn back to these books by the outstanding quality of the editing of words and music.  It takes a brave editor to leave a poet's pronouns un-bowdlerized these days.


In my more ecumenical disguises, I have dealt with various Presbyterian hymn books, such as Church Hymnary and Rejoice!  As organist at a church that used the latter, with its seemingly boundless supply of praise choruses, I almost lost the will to live just about every week.  Similarly, the Catholic Worship Book and Gather have caused me a combination of wonderment, dismay and frustration, the latter especially at the appalling standards of layout in the full music editions.  Only a singer would think well of putting the last system of a hymn tune over a page turn.

The question that keeps percolating in my mind is: what would be the ingredients of a good hymnbook?

It's no small question, so I'll give my answer in another posting.

Stanley organ voluntaries

Here is another piece I wrote for the March edition of Organ Australia, focusing on one volume of the voluntaries of John Stanley.  One of the frequent requests among organists is a steady source of suggestions for service music for the modestly capable, along with pointers to how to source scores without laying out too much money.

Upcoming recital -- “A Little Bit of This, a Little Bit of That...”

Above, you'll see the stove upon which I'll be doing some cooking on Sunday afternoon:

3pm, Sunday 6 June 2010

St Gabriel's Catholic Church

1Viola Street, Reservoir

The program will be as follows:

 

Hallelujah Chorus from Messiah – George F. Handel, tr. Théodore Dubois

An Air composed for Holsworthy Church Bells – Samuel Sebastian Wesley

Prelude and “St Anne” Fugue in E-flat [BWV 552] – Johann Sebastian Bach
Canon (Op. 56, No. 1)
Sketch in C Major (Op. 58, No. 2) – Robert Schumann
Variations on a Theme of Robert Schumann – Edmund T. Chipp
Fantasia Chromatica, Study for Double Pedal -- Otto Olsson
Toccata from Symphony No. 5 in f minor (Op. 42, No. 1) -- Charles-Marie Widor

I've even come up with a sample of one of the quieter pieces in the program.

Click here to listen to the middle section of Variations on a Theme of Robert Schumann by Edmund T. Chipp.  The first variation (with the clarinet) has a couple of missing neighbour notes at the beginning; a note was duly made in the tuning book for the attention of the organ builder.  Hopefully it will be fixed on Sunday!

Music for Sunday 6 June 2010

This week the parish is keeping Corpus Christi.  It's a great feast: if you have the New English Hymnal you can knock yourself out with a wonderful selection of hymns by St Thomas Aquinas in those wonderful translations by J.M. Neal, or you can wallow in the wonder of Sweet sacrament, divine.

I don't know if All Saints has a monstrance, so it's not clear yet whether there will be any procession to mark this wonderful feast.  I remember the first time I participated in the Corpus Christi mass, when I was a canopy bearer for the procession at St Peter's, Eastern Hill.

The readings are linked here.
The psalm setting for the week is here.

The mass setting for the week is Philip Mathias's Christ Church Mass (TIS 757)

Hymns for the week are:

Introit: This is the truth we hold [469]
Gradual: Jesu, thou joy of loving hearts [tune: 332]
Offertory: Robe yourself, my soul, in gladness [503]
Communion: Here we adore you, hidden Saviour, Lord [500]

The choir will be singing the proper communion chant for the feast, taken from the American Gradual.

Organ music at All Saints will be:

Prelude: Fantasia Chromatica -- Otto Olsson
Postlude: Hallelujah Chorus -- G.F. Handel (tr. T. Dubois)

How to structure a competition for new compositions

When I was on the Council of the Society of Organists in 2006-07, preparations were under way for marking the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the Society in 1938.  One of the initiatives proposed for the celebrations was a competition for a new organ piece by a local composer.

This was a very good initiative, and a forward-looking one that marked a commitment to the organ as part of the present-day furniture of musical life.  I was excited by it, but the proposed structure for the competition was deeply disappointing.  The original plan was to offer one very large cash prize, and a second prize of a substantially smaller sum, along with the guarantee of a performance of the winning pieces during the anniversary year.

Now, there's nothing wrong with cash and performances -- after all, these are the lifeblood of a healthy musical culture -- but I had deep concerns about the likelihood of the competition coming up with a choice between three or four pieces, which would never see the light of day after the premiere performance if publication did not follow. I refer to this as the Big Bang Effect .

Another aspect of the original regulations that worried me was the use of undefined jargon.  I took on the categories for "liturgical" and "free" pieces, but made sure the definitions were clear enough to be useful to a composer who would be blissfully ignorant of the ways these terms signify to organists.  The biggest fight in getting my version of the competition rules was over the use of the term "liturgical" -- particularly the extent to which it should be required to make use of existing material, such as hymn tunes and suchlike.  I think this requirement was an imperative, otherwise we would have ended up with two categories asking for the same thing.  You'll see how this was resolved below the jump.

Below the jump you will find the final version of the regulations I proposed, and which were accepted for the competition.

The worth of a pudding is in the tasting, as the saying goes.  The competition garnered nearly 30 entries, and the book was published nearly 12 months ago.  It's still available for sale, and the order form can be found here.