Out and about

This week I'm playing again at St Stephen's, Richmond.  The main moments for the organ are the prelude and postlude, which will be:

Cantilena -- John Longhurst
Caprice Orientale (Op. 46) -- Edwin Lemare

Something you don't see every day

Out and about on Sundays

For the next eight weeks I'll be playing the organ for services at St Stephen's, Richmond, while the organist there is on holiday.  I've played this instrument publicly a couple of times before.

If you happen by, the main organ-only moments in the service are the prelude and postlude.  Here's what I've got planned for this week:

Larghetto in f# minor -- S.S. Wesley
Grand Choeur  -- A. Guilmant

Further thoughts on organ practice

Over the last few years I've had leisure to listen to other organists at work.  It's often been edifying, and I seldom come away with some sort of insight that helps me along my stumbling road when next I mount the organ bench.

I'd like to broach a topic that I am convinced few people consider.  It's the issue of where and how one listens while playing the organ.

For many organists, the primary challenge is to get fingers and feet in the right place at the right time.  So many people have basic technical problems that much of their performance energy is burnt up keeping the piece going that external issues, such as how the performance actually sounds, go by the board.

When I was preparing for a competition several years ago, my teacher rounded on me in frustration and exhorted me to listen to the room -- to put my ears on the back wall of the large cathedral where I was practicing -- and stop obsessing on console management.  He was right.  As soon as my concentration shifted out to the space, all the console management issues and technical problems resolved themselves.

I won yet another of my second prizes in that competition, and with my prize money I went out and bought a minidisk recorder.  This has proved to be one of my best investments over the long term, and has allowed me to focus on the details of performance goals while not loosing sight of the whole.  Another of my teachers announced herself as virtually redundant when she saw how I generated useful score markings resulting from a probing listening session of a practice tape.

I use three steps when listening to practice tapes.

First, I look for what happens when problems arise.  This step must be taken away from the instrument, preferably sitting at a table with the score and a pencil.  A mistake is usually prepared about a bar or two before it occurs, so careful listening can reveal the roots of the problem.  These problems are often technical rather than accidental.  These sorts of issues can then be isolated in practice and dealt with.

Secondly, listening to practice tapes allows me to assess registration schemes.  Sometimes it is necessary to make subtle changes to stops in order to keep the whole effect sounding consistent, for example, where regulation across the whole compass of a group of stops is variable, leading to a lack of cohesion in the bass while the treble blends effectively.  Sometimes combinations that sound good at the console just don't work in the building, and the recording device provides an audience-ear perspective.

Finally, articulation and phrasing.  In a large, resonant building more articulation may be needed in order project a clear legato line, or non-legato lines may need to be joined up to sound effective.  Equally, in a small room with no resonance there may need to be some compromise to achieve a good musical effect.  A practice tape will tell you all you need to know.

The last two steps can have implications for one's understanding of the structure of a piece.  Registration can be used to amplify phrasing, or to help delineate structural markers in a piece.  For example, much of the music by French symphonic organ composers uses registration directions to mark transitions between sections.  Equally, understanding the large-scale musical periods of a piece can inform detailed phrasing decisions by highlighting thematic material passed over in the process of note-learning.  These steps ought to be the tools by which one increases analytical awareness of musical structure.

There are a number of organists around the world who post their weekly postludes on parish or personal websites.  I think this is a useful exercise, as it can provide an overview of one's larger program, but often wonder if they are using these tapes to critique their own work.  For example, I can think of one Melbourne-based organist who tapes his weekly performance without seeming to give much thought to the fact that most of his postludes sound the same.  Every recording in the website archive uses the same sort of full organ, and I wonder if there are any softer registers in the instrument at all.  After listening to three or four pieces, I have to admit that the sound began to pall on my ear.  For my own taste, there's nothing more thrilling than a rapid passage played on 8' and 4' flutes, or something with a stateley swing using the foundation stops, or contrasting effects that play off reeds against flues.  I have no doubt his congregation appreciates him, but wonder if anyone wishes he'd play the occasional non-loud postlude.  Using this sound record would help him to vary the texture, thereby enriching the experience of his listeners.

Listening objectively to one's own playing is a vital step in the practice routine, and too few organists do it.  If you're wondering what do to improve your own performance, my advice is simple.  Buy a decent recording device, learn how to adjust it, and listen to the results.  Learn to be your own most demanding critic.

A taste of Herbert

 Herbert Howells is one of those composers you really need to spend time with.  He trained as an organist, and went on to study composition at the Royal College of Music with Charles Stanford.

My encounters with Howells go back to the early-1990s, when I first heard the Communion Service from his Collegium Regale setting.  This was written for Kings College, Cambridge, and published after WWII.  And, of course, I heard a good chunk of the Christmas pieces at various carols services.  I have always been struck by the expansiveness of Howells's treatment of texture, and the way everything is crafted to fit voices and instruments.

As a music undergraduate I had limited access to instruments with the full range of registration aids necessary to perform Howells's organ music.  This hasn't deterred me from learning a few pieces, and coaching up a regristrant!

In my final year recital I did have access to a large, properly-equipped instrument, so I included a small rarity as part of the programme.  Here is the second movement of Howells's Organ Sonata.

Carlo Curley

Shocking news arrived overnight.  Carlo Curley, one of the great organists of our time, has died.

Melbourne owes a special debt to Carlo; without his advocacy in the 1990s, the organ in the Melbourne Town Hall might now be a silent relic.  I remember his appearance on Hey, Hey, it's Saturday where he duly played the Bach d-minor toccata in a vampire cape (I don't remember whether he donned the fake fangs, but it wouldn't surprise me).

Here's a spot of Carlo in action.

Fun enough to share

Transfiguration

Doppelganger

Olympic suspicion

Too good not to share

 

I'll hold back on the long comment here -- I have to go and catch a bus -- but there are so many times I've sat in situations not a whole lot different to this one.

That said, I'd like to register one dissent from the underlying narrative here.  Being an inclusive church doesn't just mean calling a stop on sexism, homophobia, and racial prejudice.  It is currently the fashion to read inclusive as pro-gay (in reality, not-anti-gay), which is sort of nice, but misses the point.

Inclusive has to mean actively embracing those who see the world differently, be it through physical disability, mental or cognitive issues, depression.  And acting by making the community one that can meet people living these ways in a constructive manner.

Inclusive has to mean affirming the single and the married, and those who live in relationships that are stable but not formalized.

Inclusive has to involve moving away from the overtly didactic habits that have become all-pervasive in public liturgy since the Reformation.  We have at least five senses, but it is rare to find a church that acknowledges and honours more than one or two of them.  Inclusive therefore involves a style of worship that is open to a broader range of expressions: bells, smells, a balance of quiet with noisier, of static and dynamic motion, good music, and so on.

Inclusive has to mean facing up to ideological convergence in the political sphere, to start modelling the alternative, and not stop telling people why it matters.

Two favourite people

I'll admit to being a bit of an Elgar tragic.

Hardly a year goes by where I don't come up with another transcription from Elgar for some purpose.  He features fairly consistently in my go-anywhere repertoire.

One feature of my round of listening is the Dream of Gerontius.  If you want a really solid idea of what Elgar was about as a musician, I think this is one of the places where one has to start.  Sit me down with the Barbirolli recording of the Dream of Gerontius, and there's not much else to say.

Which makes me a bit of a Barbirolli tragic too, I suppose.  His musicality shines out of everything he did on record, and nothing he did with Elgar has ever been bettered to my ears.  Here's a taste.

Gore Vidal

News of Gore Vidal's death came this afternoon.

Around ten years ago, I went through a big Vidal phase.  The novels serious that stick with me are Messiah, Live from Golgotha, Julian, and Creation.  The latter is one I've read several times, although Live has been a Holy Week standby for a very long time -- just the right level of depravity to keep one sane in the midst of a lot of intense singing!

I read The City and the Pillar about the same time as the Palimpsest volume of Vidal's memoirs came out.  This was followed by Myra Breckinridge & Myron.  I was exploring Felice Picano, Edmund White, and Lawrence Kramer around the same time -- all very lengthy, rich, and rambling in their story-telling, to which Vidal made a happily acerbic and to-the-point foil.

While not wanting to deprecate Vidal, I think Armistead Maupin explored a more appealing style of epic story-telling through the six volumes of Tales of the City, where he developed a more life-affirming narrative.  By contrast, City and the Pillar belongs to the same kind of claustrophobic world as E.M. Forster's Maurice, where affirmation of the main character is very contingent and uncertain.  That said, without Vidal, there couldn't have been Maupin.