Ink score, detail, page 1, photocopy

I received in the mail this past Friday an envelope containing a compact disc, labeled with a note, pencil on yellow post-it . The note read “Organ piece based on a theme of Stokowski.” The CD was sent by a New York businessman and church member named William Hermann. He’d emailed me some months ago about his intention to have my 1984 work, “Fanfare and Fugue on a Theme of Stokowski,” both played and recorded. He wanted to know if I wanted a copy of the recording when it was made. I, of course, emailed back, ‘sure!’

I’ve never met Bill. I gather that he is something of a music lover and that he’s especially fond of an instrument that Fats Waller used to call ‘the God box.’ He was, in 1985 or so, the recipient of a gift from a woman named Cynthia Schwab of Joplin, Missouri. In 1982, Cynthia had been to Kansas City and heard a work of mine for pipe organ that had been part of a performance by the Westport Ballet. I was the titular music director of the company, but was in reality the resident composer and accompanist. The performance took place at a beautiful church downtown. (This, by the way, was the very church where once Vergil Tomson held forth on the God box.) 

The organist at Grace and Holy Trinity Episcopal, John Schaefer, thus found himself straddling several layers of our musical culture. As organist, he played services. Now, he was trying out the death-defying role as an accompanist of live dance. He guided me in the preparation of that first piece by saying, “don’t write a lot of parallel thirds!” I didn’t. I wrote a set of variations that showed off my counterpoint. The tune was, “Let Us Break Bread Together On Our Knees.” It ended with a rollicking fugue. It was in glorious A Flat major, and it sounded great in rehearsal on the new Gabriel Kney tracker. (A tracker organ is built in the antique way of providing a mechanical linkage to the arpeture that lets air into the pipe. The organist therefore has much more control over the articulation, but also more responsibility.) The Kney instrument featured a rank of pipes mounted in a box on the wall opposite the console and main installation called the “Fanfare.” These pipes sounded, as the name implies, like the long trumpets of the mediaeval court. It was too late to use the Fanfare in ‘Break Bread,’ but the sound stayed in my mind.

In the performance, Schaefer missed a registration change (damned toe studs) and made kind of a mess of the big ending of the piece. Instead of the full organ, I went out with a sort of wheezy calliope. (They blame the architect if the roof leaks!) This is a side story, truly, but it may have had something to do with his continued interest in the piece and my work. At the performance, he felt so bad that he reprised the fugue as the audience filed out. He’d locked himself in the organ loft, and that was that. He also later made me a fine recording of the work that is, by virtue of my tape editing, quite accurate. I have no direct knowledge of how Cynhtia came to hear the work. Clearly, she knew Schaefer and got my contact information from him. She wanted to commission a piece for her brother’s birthday, an organ piece that would be played in a service at some big church in New York, New York. She wanted me to make a set of variations on his favorite piece, a choral work by none other than Leopold Stokowski.

Well, Stokowski had begun his career as an organist with a church gig. It has been speculated that he composed his setting of “Benedicite Omnia Opera Dominum” (All ye works of the Lord) to get out from under the onerous perpetual rendition of another popular piece, the ‘Benedicite’ of George William Warren, a favorite of Choirboys. The Stokowski setting would prove to be his most enduring sacred composition. I either was given a copy of the score or located one. I had no recording. I remember playing it at the keyboard and finding it uninspiring. I recall the story of how Bach found the Aria that eventually inspired his Goldbergs harmonically bland. Beethoven of course made great use of the little Diabelli tune (which we only remember because of Beethoven’s variations), referring to it as a ‘cobbler’s patch.’ Luckily, I had to provide only a roughly ten minute work, not a set of 30 odd brilliant variations. With Beethoven in mind, however, particularly the story about how he tore a sheet off the manuscript of some soon to be humiliated rival, plastered it upside down on the piano and proceeded to hammer it inside and out to a glorious new shape, I set about fulfilling the commission. I did not state Stokowski’s theme. I took a few fragments of its rhythmic motif and worked these up into a “Fanfare and Fugue.” I specified the fanfare rank in its box be used, if available. In those days, I made a pencil score and then copied to ink. I remember it being hot in Kansas City the Summer of 1984. I remember working at the score, trying out its passages on my Zuckerman harpsichord. I didn’t own a piano. (This may have had much to do with my impression of the Stokowski. Romantic choral music doesn’t really work on the harpsichord. In those days, only ten years along from my first real piece – The “Piano Suite” in A -, I still needed to make a score sound on an instrument to hear it. I had yet to learn how to sound it in my head. I remember recording the piece on my four track, playing the parts on a synthesizer (Prophet 600), and thus building up a performance. A hippie Wiccan visitor to my apartment hearing this bit of tape remarked, ‘It sounds like doom on tax day.” Thus began the mostly negative critical response to this work at the time.

Pipe organs are big (huge) installations that sometimes occupy entire houses of worship, with ranks of pipes on multiple walls, pipes in big rooms, all served by mechanical equipment that rivals the buildings’ HVAC system. Poor musicians don’t have these in their garrets. My good friend and intimidator, Mr. Dan Moore, now of Bridgton, Maine, had been my guide to the art of the God box. I met the man as he worked on his degree at Boston Conservatory, and you will find him caricatured, Dean Moriarty style in the webinovel. I turned pages for him at his organ recitals. I watched as he registered, practiced, and performed. I learned all I ever learned about organ registration from my perch as page turner. As a keyboardist, I can sort of play the pipe organ, but I have no pedal technique. I did, however, see how it’s done. My “Fanfare and Fugue” is full of registration suggestions, at least insofar as the important information about what pitch the pipes should sound at and what manual the hands should be on. A part on the pedal board can sing above the instrument as the melody. All the composer has to do is make a note of this intention in the score. If the composer goes too far, he will want to duck the incoming organ shoes. I went quite far in this piece. It is not very easy to play. I could play the passages, as I’ve noted, but lacking an organ, I was unable to fully asses the aggregate difficulty level.

I worked quickly; that, I recall. It was late Summer when I began looking at the Stokowski. By November 6th (according to the pencil score, I was done with the “Fugue.” In the pencil, this still has Stokowski’s title. The Fanfare was finished on December 26th. At length, the fair ink copy was made, xeroxed, and the original sent off to Cynthia. I no longer remember what she paid me, but it might have been on the order of $250 – $300. I sent a copy to Dan Moore. I always hoped that he might take up one of my works and compare me favorably to his hero, Bach. I recall one visit to Bridgton where Dan suffered with my improv on his local God box. Standing next to me at the console, he tapped the Bach score on the rack. “That’s why I don’t compose,” he says. Fine, I always think. Back in the day, between 1970 and the mid ’90s, I had enough gumption in me to not care so much about the dubious possibility that the great music has already been written. The great music was not my music. I felt a need to contribute. Dan’s specific critique of the ‘Fanfare:’ he called it “fanfare and gobbledygook.” Very funny.

During a recording session at Trinity Episcopal, to record “Break Bread,” Schaefer called down from the organ loft as I set up my microphones, “let me sernade you!” He played the ‘Fanfare’ for me, reading at sight. I noticed two things. The piece, despite its textural disintegrity, had the potential to work. The fanfare rank sounded great. But Schaefer, a fine organist, and a good reader, stumbled, played slowly, and doubled back over difficulties, especially in the fugue. This was, obviously, not a sight readable piece. For the composer, here’s the problem… If one writes a new piece and expects players to take it up, it either needs to be easy and good, or, if it’s difficult, it needs to be worth the effort. Otherwise, you’ve got something that will never be heard. The nineteenth century model was difficult, but great. Chopin fits this bill. Liszt just barely makes it, and Alkan is a fail. The 18th century Mozart had the impression that what he was making was easy AND great. False. Mozart is difficult in its transparency. Beck? How have YOU done? 

Then came the 1986 trip to New York to hear the piece actually played. I was in DC again by then, so I flew up and got together with KC expats in Brooklyn. We went over to the Church of the Heavenly Rest. I sat amid my friends, working at hiding my panic response. The organist, Charles Dodsley Walker, started out ok, but when he got into the fugue, his insufficient preparation led him into the headwinds of the passagework. I became unbearably restless down in the sanctuary. My friends around me were also figgety. (‘Fanfare and Gobbledygook. Tax day massacre.’) Clam after clam misrepresented my intentions. I became worried that there might be a total train wreck. “Let’s get out,” I horse whispered. Out into the New York Sunday morning we went. “Condolences,” one of my friends said.

As it turned out, that was the last time I wrote a piece in the traditional way. In ’88, I got a computer, which I hooked up to my MIDI instrument, the Prophet. I created scores directly from playing, a very different, and much more natural way to work. I only used the pencil sketch when what I was trying to do was too hard to work out in real time. My real time playing (and thinking) was getting better. Certain features of the Conservatory training now fell by the wayside. I no longer used an underlying Fibonacci proportion scheme, as Hugo Norden had tried to persuade us that old B-B-B-Bach (he stuttered) had done. I lost my penmanship through disuse.

There was a PS back in the late 80s. I got a letter from Schaefer saying that he thought I had two fine works for organ, and that I should shop them around for publication. I prepared a computer  score of the stronger piece (sans gobbledygook) “Break Bread.” I sent it off to Schirmer’s. I got a rejection letter that made me laugh. The form letter said that I should not take a rejection by the firm to indicate a lack of talent. (The anti-suicide clause.) During this period, I must’ve taken a stab at some slight revisions to ‘Fanfare.’ I did not remove any gobbledygook, but I cleaned up some cadences and lengthened some pedal points to further ratchet up the tension in the harmony. I wrote these amendments on separate sheets in pencil. I also printed out the ‘Fanfare,’ without the ‘Fugue’ in an inkjet version. Then, getting busy, and having been rejected, I forgot about organ music. Surely, I would have shown this score to the organist at my parents’ church. Surely, they would have smiled wanly and said, ‘no thanks, too much work.’ I forgot all about the piece except for the aggregation of anecdotes about it, which I have now set down. As in “To The Lighthouse,” time passes. 28 years go by. Another Summer’s swelter envelops…

That brings me back to where I started at the top of the page. We went off to Rockford (see Conservative Cats) on Saturday. It was Sunday (yesterday), before, after writing away the morning, needing a break, I opened the CD and sat down in the living room with Del to give it a listen. 

Fabulous! The organ at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine is commanded this time by Bruce Neswick. In this recording, Bruce nails it. Also, the acoustics and instrument in this space are literally magnificent. The piece works as intended. The places where the texture dissolves are filled with the expected resonance of a huge  big city cathedral. The fanfare sounds as expected: brassy and somewhat remote. The passagework in the fugue is muddied by the acoustics, but the shape is there, and quite effective. The sonorities pile up into big mounds of dissonance, and the resolutions are pretty much orgasmic. In short, for the first time, like, ever, I was blown away by my own piece. The playing is clean, incisive, and worthy of a composer’s highest praise. 

Del’s jaw was dropped for the entire duration. The cat, trying to win the battle to stay in the room with the human, was having a rough go. We played it at the full cathedral volume. (Or maybe a bit more.) 

I had to go find the score in the archive in the basement. Drag that huge box of scores and fragments off the rickety metal shelf, and look through the stack. It was not all that hard to find. As the last score I ever made in pen and ink, it was near the top of the pile. I ran with the score back upstairs, and as I opened the package, the pages with the revisions fell out. Two sheets of music paper with clean pencil in my once decent pen hand, marked with the measure numbers where these newer passages go. I played the CD again, following along. Now I notice a place in the fugue where instead of following my pitch indication, Mr. Neswick does something else. Do I really care?

If Mr. Neswick and I could sit down together at the console of a God box, we could make this a really great piece, and give it a truly great performance. Bruce Neswick has, after all, really done the work here. Either that, or he’s one hell of a reader! In any event, the registrations show thought, and the pacing really brings the piece to vivid life. Of course, as noted, the acoustics in this space and the huge instrument really make a difference. That said, I don’t think the fugue really needs all that resonance. The way to make the harmonies speak fully would be to not pump so much low frequency into the bass voice. This is really only true from time to time: sometimes the 32 foot diapason really rocks the house and gives the sonority its necessary grit. Neswick doesn’t stint on the reed, either, which totally makes me smile. Dan used to have a poster of a quintet of Bazookas, and somehow we’d speak of piling up the dirt on the sonority. That’s what happens in this ‘Fugue.’ Damn the torpedoes! I notice in my email from Bill Hermann that Bruce Neswick is taking up a post as Professor of Organ at Indiana University. I understand that sort of transition. I’ve emailed him for permission to post this performance and to open a dialogue. At the very least, I hope he gets my approval and thanks. 

As a composer, this experience rather rocks me back on my heels a bit. I think the key to the lesson, apart from its strange business aspect, is that a work can be one thing in the imagination, when that imagining is founded in experience, and another thing on paper. The composer imagines what the sonority will be. I know the sounds made by favorite orchestras on records and the sounds of local orchestras in halls wherever I’ve happened to hear them. With the pipe organ, I had some experience with these beasts over the years of my youth. I had the sound in my head. The sound I had was not particularly the sound of the organ at Saint John the Divine. I had in mind a smaller house. I did imagine the reverberation time of any moderate church sanctuary. The score, on paper, looks out at you with its penmanship, but it is dry. It looks empty and simple, or ornate and full of repetitive gestures. Unless you can really hear harmony in your mind when you look at the notes on the page, (and this will depend on how complex the harmony is and where your skill level rests), all you, the potential performer can do is reckon the difficulty of getting the fingers (and feet) to do this stuff. The ‘worth it’ factor is harder to gauge. The organist, I can assure you, has the worst seat in the house. The console in a large church is of necessity outside the sounding chamber. You have to play on faith, and then check out the recording. Things might be better in a small venue with an electronic instrument, but that is not what I had in my imagination. 

What I had in mind, in the case of “Fanfare and Fugue,” is what’s on this CD. I was persuaded off my certainty by the sort of clever, slightly snarky, casual criticism that comes from its specific, necessarily narrow point of view. I can’t say that I stopped making work: far from it! (I made plenty of pieces after this one, and I started using tools where the sound I could record was the sound I had in mind.) The traditional pen and ink composer (and they must still live out there: in fact I know of a few) have it tough. Either they write chamber music, or they never get the feedback they need to tackle the large ensemble and huge instruments. In this case, I finally got some real, empirical feedback. But, of course, unless somebody like Neswick (who may also hate this piece, for all I know) lights a fire under my ass, I’m pretty much done with pipe organs. My few organ pieces are out there, floating around, accreting notes and performances as they wander from organ to organ. I rather like the idea that I’ve yet to publish opus 1. In the science fiction, when collapse has blown all the labels off the jar of civilization, the future of musicology will be left to decipher what random work stuck to the wall. The mass of digital work will be mostly gone. My xerox copies have as good a chance as any of at least anecdotal survival, and I begin to think that’s ok.