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I spent a lot of time at the organ yesterday. Not only was I rehearsing stuff for this Sunday and next Sunday, I began learning the organ accompaniments to a couple of bigger anthems coming up.
While doing so, I discovered that the arrangement of “Happy and Blest are they” from Mendelssohn’s St. Paul op. 36 is a pretty lousy one. I decided to do my own arrangement of this movement from the large chorus and orchestra setting. I’m reducing it to organ and cello and essentially leaving the chorus parts the same. We will sing it in English.
The arrangement I was working from was what they call a vocal score. That means the vocal parts are correct but the accompaniment is playable on organ or piano. The notes are squinched into two staves. The arrangements are often not that keyboard friendly asking the player to work through intricate reductions of voice leading.
So this is what the first version looks like:
And this is what my version will look like:
I was taught that when I play and conduct a piece I should carefully prepare what I was going to do and plan out when to play the accompaniment as written and when to reduce it and allow a hand to come up and direct.
This is a matter of learning this approach to a score pretty thoroughly. Hence my work yesterday.
The other piece was by Bach. It’s the first movement of Cantata 139, “Wohl dem, der sich auf seinen Gott.”
This arrangement was slightly more user friendly. But after studying the Mendelssohn vocal score I am tempted to look at the full Bach score and see if it can be arranged more clearly. This one I want to sing in German.
All of these scores are well out of copyright and available free online.
I have been embracing the notion that what I do as a church musician is practice my art.
Encompassed in this art is the leading of congregational song. John Ferguson, the very fine organist and conductor that I admire and aspire to emulate, urged American Guild of Organists types to always remember that despite their fancy degrees and abilities on the organ, their first job as a church musician is to lead the song in church.
This reflects the late 20th century understandings of many liturgical churches. Participation of the assembly or congregation was very important to these reforms.
But in addition to this, I’m realizing how much satisfaction I am getting out of my preludes and postludes. I’m also enjoying revisiting the scholarly considerations of hymnody.
I have maintained a scholarly interest in musicology, music history and theory for most of my adult life. This is one reason I am so tickled to have good online access to academic journals and resources.
This week alone I have connected with two interesting online articles. One I mentioned in yesterday’s post (Leon Botstein’s “Recording and Reality: The Musical Subject” Musical Quarterly Spring 2012). I put up a discussion starter regarding this article on LinkedIn’s Classical Musician group. So far no has responded.
But I also am reading David Yearsley’s article, “Death Everyday: The Anna Magdalena Bach Book of 1725 and the Art of Dying” in Eighteenth Century Music/vol 2/Issue 02/ September 2005, pp 231 – 249. Again this is only available via my college’s online subscription, this time to Cambridge journals.
I found Yearsley when someone posted one of his books on Facebook organists. I interlibrary-loaned a couple of them.
Then I went on Yearsley’s Cornell Faculty page and found a citation to this article. Looked it up and downloaded the pdf to read.
On the Cornell journal page there was a button to send articles to your Kindle. I fussed about with this last night and this morning. I think it only works with real Kindles and not Kindle for PC (which is what I use).
Speaking of the art of church music, I once again have chosen organ music for this weekend which is requiring copious preparation.
Prelude: Andante from Third Sonata for Organ by Francis Jackson (b.1917)
Postlude: Fanfare by Tony Hewitt-Jones (1926-1989)
This are a couple of Anglican dudes. I have long admired Jackson’s work.
Couldn’t find a YouTube of his piece to share.It is however on Spotify. Not sure if that link will work. Tried to embed it, but it kept disappearing. It’s a recording by Francis Jackson himself who apparently is still alive.
Tony Hewitt-Jones on the left,
I found recording of the Hewitt-Jones piece on YouTube. It was well played but on an electronic organ and pretty much sounded like shit. So I didn’t embed the video.
Thinking of my work as an art has a calming affect on me.
This was a link shared by a family member. The author, Mike Lofgren served 16 years on the Republican staff of the House and Senate Budget Committees. He has just published The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted.
The article linked seems to be a conservative analysis that is a bit more dispassionate than the noise in the Republican right now.