I realized yesterday that it is this Saturday that I have a wedding. My boss is not the priest for this wedding but she still handled all the musical choices. This is definitely not a churchy type wedding. I am playing three pop songs instrumentally on the piano. This is good time for me. I didn’t really want to learn these three far in advance so I would have to keep them in my fingers.
Yesterday I made a playlist of them on Spotify and listened to them a bit while treadmilling.
The three tunes this couple has chosen are:
Come Away with Me by Norah Jones
A Thousand Years by Christina Perri
A Beautiful Day by U2
I requested that the couple purchase the music and get it to me. They of course bought Vocal/piano versions. If I were to play just the piano part they would wonder where the melody is. The last one is the only one I’ll have to practice to adapt it to piano solo. The other two are pretty simple. It never fails to amaze me how people define their relationship to church musically. At least these people don’t seem to be part of our regular worshiping community. I would hope that the way we sing and pray might influence someone’s preferences when choosing stuff to get married by. But what do I know?
A box of used organ music I purchased from my old teacher Craig Cramer arrived recently. Yesterday I sat at the bench and went through a lot of it. Most of it was by living or recently deceased composers. Some of this was vaguely interesting, some pretty boring. At this stage of my life, craft doesn’t hold my attention by itself. There are slew of church music composers who write well crafted stuff that puts me to sleep.
I also ordered a bunch of different editions of Buxtehude and Sweelinck from Craig. These ranged from Dover and Kalmus editions of the former to a beautiful old Barenreiter edition of the latter.
It was these not the contemporary stuff that grabbed me yesterday. I played through some bicinium of Sweelinck and the Ciacona in C minor (BuxWV 159), Ciacona in E minor (BuxWV 160), Passacaglia in D minor (BuxWV 161) and several Preludiums of Buxtehude. This is such fine music and a joy to play even on my old Moller.
The secretary at church purchased the update for the church software so I now I have registration number. This should allow me to do my work today. Onward and upward for the old guy.
