I have a variety of methods for finding pieces of music to play in church. Despite having an advanced degree in piano performance and a good knowledge of the piano literature, I didn't know these pieces until I came across them on a discussion page on the internet a couple of years ago. I played the second in July for a sermon on dealing with adversity. (If you know the piece it makes sense!)

The idea here is to show a modern composer dealing with an ancient musical text. Like modern bible readers, who have to come to terms with something that comes from a very different time and place, something invested with authority, but whose contents may in some instances seem alien and irrelevant, musical expression too has changed a great deal since the tenth century, when Gregorian chant began being preserved. (Gregory himself dates from the eighth century.) 

musical buzzwords: chromaticism--using all the possible notes (pitches) on a keyboard instrument instead of only those notes belonging to a major or minor scale. [Listen for the difference here (a major scale followed by a chromatic scale.]

This week's selection seems like a good opportunity for some ear training. (Bach wrote his 'little organ book' for the training of organists. Not that the pieces are particularly simple, but simple is relative in Bach's case. They are short, anyway.) As to what to listen for, that can be accomplished clicking on the blue words in the program notes above.

The difficultly comes in when Bach layers all of these things on top of each other, and the listener has to sort it all out 'on the fly.' This is one reason I provide such guided tours in the form of notes in the church bulletin, which I am able to amplify here. Someone from my congregation let me know again this morning (August 29) that this approach is appreciated. I'm glad. I realize that to many music is a foreign language, and like Paul, I would rather be able to communicate with my congregation rather than just mystifying them with musical sounds.

Did Bach similarly try to communicate with his congregation? We don't know that he wrote any program notes, or gave any lectures. Such a format may not have been available to him (I've been in situations where such attempts to get the congregation inside the music was not encouraged). A phrase in a book I read last week sticks with me. Bach's congregation, the writer asserts, may have thought that this setting of what would have been for them a familiar hymn was little more than "artistic high-handedness." In other words, they might have thought that Bach was just showing off, that he was being Mr. Artistic Fancypants, for no good reason. I've come across a lot of writing that discourages or forbids any artistic approaches in worship precisely because it is all interpreted that way.

And yet, it looks as though Bach was doing his best to not only be faithful to the text of the hymn, but to make it relatively clear what he was doing and why he was doing it--if you have the imagination to make the connections.

For one thing, there is that falling motive. It is not a particularly pleasant musical drop off, and he keeps doing it, again and again for the entire run of the piece. And the slithery inner voice (sorry; we're talking about the snake and the garden of Eden this week, and the word slithery won't get out of my mind) which probably sounds to most listeners, Bach's and ours, a little uncomfortably uncontrollable. Where is that voice going, anyhow? And where is the stable center? Chromaticism, (which actually means 'colorful') basically divides the scale into more notes than belong to any one key. It makes it easy to get from one key to the other, but, like modern transportation, which allows us to get across the world easily, it can also cause musical jet-lag. We can't tell where we are so easily anymore. D major? G minor? A new center every measure? Which way is up? Historically, music kept getting more and more chromatic in the century and a half after Bach until some people were writing music that had no center at all. Although chromaticism has resulted in some really fine music, it is still under a certain cloud of mistrust to the average ear. No accident that both the Phantom of the Opera and Jaws have themes that are entirely chromatic! It is often heard as threatening, sinister.

The barrier comes when we put all that together and realize that Bach's piece makes us uncomfortable, and then realize that it is supposed to make us uncomfortable. If we think all music should be nice, then we won't get the point. Sin, however, is not a pleasant thing. So Bach wrote some unpleasant music about it.

What Bach was doing is usually referred to as text painting--taking ideas in the text and making musical gestures that correspond to them. Writers on music have been debating whether that is really a good idea for a long time. It can, after all, be a little obvious, come across as gimmicky, and often it will lead to some less than great music. If, every time there is something in the text that can be made into a particular musical line (going up, going down, running notes to represent a musical waterfall or climbing notes to represent a staircase) it can lead to a series of disconnected musical episodes. Still, I think this can be a legitimate way to write music, and something to listen for in some of it. Just don't expect all music to operate that way.

For those of you scoring at home, this is my third week playing Bach. I try not to do that too often. There are some organists, I suppose, who play Bach practically every week, and, since Bach worked at churches for most of his life, and because his composing purpose was through, he wrote something to cover every Sunday of the church calendar, and every hymn that his congregations sang. So you really could play Bach every week!

There are many topics that Bach did not cover, however. His church, like many of ours, put most of the emphasis on the gospels, often to the exclusion of all of the other parts of the bible. Since our church is working its way through the 'Old Testament' (for the first time in our pastor's 30 year career, incidentally!) this is a little more evident. Yet here I am playing a 'Jesus' piece on a Sunday in which the Hebrew people are crying out in bondage in Egypt. It's not something I normally like to do.

Since our pastor made the strong here-and-now connection between this once and ancient event and the ongoing need for deliverance from bondage in our own lives, this actually turned out to be a good choice.

I have to admit, part of me thinks of minimalism as a bit of a gimmick. For starters, it is really, really simple. Much of our theological notions work that way, too, and that can get us into trouble when our lives don't quite go the way we were so sure God intended (it can also be very unpleasant for some of the people around us when we reject those people out of hand based on our own simplistic notions of goodness and badness). Arvo Part and a few others, known as the "Holy Minimalists," who once composed some very complex and difficult music, each had a time in their lives when they had a personal and/or artistic crises, after which, seeking the serenity of simple sounds, they began writing music as if they had retreated into a musical abbey.

It happens, though, that I find this piece to be very beautiful. It's been on the radio in Champaign a couple of times recently, and I found myself staying in the car to listen/meditate to the rest. And despite the fact that this music plays into the kind of atmospheric shut-off-your-mind-and-soak-in-the-pretty-sounds ethos that I find pretty limiting, and despite some of the more extreme statements by some of these composers, who are not simply content to reject everything outside of their newfound simplicity, but must declare it theologically suspect for anyone who does not do the same (e.g., John Taverner once said, "I think evil and complexity are closely aligned")--despite all of that, music does have the ability to calm us in an often harsh world. We may overuse and abuse this notion when it comes to religious music, but it does seem to me to be a legitimate expression. So, for anyone who wishes to quiet themselves for 10 minutes on Sunday morning and listen, or pray to, or escape from life's demands, via this soothing music, here it is!

A reading from the book of Mozart: it is nice to be able to share some Mozart with my congregation. I don't do it that often (I once memorized all the Mozart piano sonatas so I have a lot under my fingers). Like Salieri in the largely fictional movie "Amadeus," I have a problem. How do you get Mozart's music to 'fit' liturgically? He did write specifically religious music, but not for keyboard. The answer in this case depends on a rather creative connection between the material in the sermon/scripture reading and the music itself. This is one of several methods for choosing music in a service--the one thing I don't do is play Mozart just because I feel like it, or simply because it is good music. It imposes a discipline on me which acts in tension with the desire to share the bulk of the keyboard literature (which is almost always written for purposes other than church services) and makes for an interesting ministry.

This week was a study in domestication. The week's theme, "The Power of the Holy Spirit" was derived from our reading this week of the first half of Acts, in which the spirit arrives like tongues of fire and a strong wind at Pentecost, causing a rash of glossolalia (speaking in tongues), causes the deaths of a man and his wife for lying about his giving to the church, allows Peter to heal a man at the city gates, and Paul to resurrect a man who fell of a window during one of his sermons. Wild stuff. Wild opening voluntary.

It is not easy to introduce such themes into church. The hymns, for one thing, were two versions of 'All hail the Power of Jesus' Name" and "I sing the Mighty Power of God." The word power in the titles suggests our choir director was doing her best to match the theme, but you'll notice that the Spirit isn't mentioned anywhere. I don't think we have any hymns about the power of the Spirit. Western Christianity doesn't really seem to know what to do with the spirit, I think.

Jesus' power is much more friendly, it seems. And it wasn't Jesus' power we were singing about, per se, but the power of Jesus' name, which got me thinking about the power of a name. In Judaism, people don't say God's name out of fear and awe. In our modern Christian protestant tradition, some of our hymns sound like entries for a contest to see how many times they can cram the name Jesus into one line of a hymn. One of them goes, "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, sweetest name I know." Sweetest name I know? Not the same thing, is it? It is more of a soothing, calming mantra. Say Jesus over and over and over. Not, the name is so powerful you might want to keep it at a distance. There is 'something about that name,' but it is very comforting and familiar.

And so, not so surprisingly, our call to worship was filled with gentle shepherd imagery, as was our prayer of confession, and even the sermon focused on Jesus (and his spirit) and how the Holy Spirit can use us ordinary folks even today. What I'm getting at is this week's organ offering really seemed to stick out. I guess, under the circumstances, that shouldn't be much of a surprise.

What was a bit of a surprise was that some people actually clapped(!) at the 10:30 service. Maybe they noticed the nervous apologia in this week's bulletin (reproduced in the box above) and decided to show their support for my risk-taking (thanks, guys!). I still recall that the former organist told me when I arrived here five years ago that a substitute organist a few years back had played something by Messiaen, and "they are still talking about it!" so I was treading carefully (at least rhetorically!) One can't assume that at a mid-sized Methodist church in the Midwest they are going to welcome the music of the adventurous French cathedral organist Olivier Messaien; every musician I have mentioned this or similar 'transgressions' to has seemed shocked that I would even try such a thing!

The folks at the more staid 8:00 service might be talking about it this week, but I decided long ago that the point of being a church musician wasn't to be popular. If people don't like what I play for them most of the time then there is probably a disconnect between myself and the people of the church (aka body of Christ) and that suggests a problem. But if my first thought when a topic like this one comes up in the calendar is to be practical and not 'preach' anything from the organ that folks might not like then I'm not being a very effective minister of music or anything else. Risk taking is necessary.

Still, I was joking when I told my wife this week that I was going to get fired after the opening voluntary. I've been around here long enough to know that I can go outside the box and play some pretty bold things some of the time and not get called on the carpet for it; it is even appreciated by some (we have a pretty diverse congregation; some of them are musically educated as well, and in a university town many of them have advanced degrees in other areas which often means that while they may know little about music they don't mind being stretched a little; my bulletin commentaries have been quite welcome since they don't mind learning something about the music, and it helps to know what I was thinking when I decided to play a piece). This makes for a pretty great environment, even if there are times when things don't seem to hang together too well, like this week. We'll try again in seven days. Anyhow, next week's offering will be a lot tamer, so it is more likely to go with the flow.

At the 10:30 service one of our choir members read a poem by Susan Cherwien called "Wind and Fire" which had the same kind of edge to it. Thank God for that! And the person who selected the poem.

One of my students got a go at the organ this week. One of the things church is really bad at is a farm system--we don't train people to do things, we just expect them to do it. Most of what I know about how to do my job was accomplished in spite of, rather than with practical help from, people in churches (my technical ability came from the conservatory; my creative ability was largely self-directed). I hope to reverse that trend a little. The only way to do it, of course, is to provide instruction as well as opportunities to learn on the job. So my student played about half the musical elements in the service this week, one hymn, one doxology, and the prelude and offertory at right. Both of these pieces are well below her level of musical ability so she could learn them quickly and be able to worry about some of the other things that make for good church service musicianship, and that also make things far more of a challenge sometimes than playing concerts or recitals.

michael@pianonoise.com