Although I don’t recall the actual circumstance, part of our family lore is that when I was three years old, sitting next to my mother at church (Presbyterian Church on the Green in Morristown, NJ), when the organ started to play, I leaned over to her and told her: “When I grow up, I’m going to be an organer!” As the family used to tell the story around the dinner table, it always got a chuckle, mostly, I assume, because of my made-up word, “organer.” But it demonstrates a basic truth that many professional musicians can attest to: When we first hear the instrument that we will spend our life with, it’s as if the instrument, itself, calls to us and confirms our path. Before the advent of psychological understanding, it would be impossible to assess this statement as a universal truth, although from the biographies of most of the great composers and performers, we know this to be a valid statement. Even though I had complete clarity, all my maturing years, that I would study the piano to gain proficiency, then “graduate” to the organ where my heart lies, it wasn’t until I read Pablo Casals’ autobiography, Joys and Sorrows, in which he describes how the sound of a traveling cellist made it instantly clear to him that he needed to play the cello, that it dawned on me I was in the same boat.
When you are young and called to a life in the musical arts, your concerns are not toward viability of the music profession, nor the future of church music (in my case), nor making a living. Instead you’re driven by three factors: a driving curiosity that leads you to explore every aspect of your beloved concentration, a self-discipline to work to achieve the ability to make all the music you hear in your head (hopefully driven by a cascading number of successes as we progress), and a mentor (or several) whose life is one that we can pattern our own by.
Some of those mentors (including my first one, Hedley Yost, who is still alive in his 90s) are living people that one works with mostly in the sharing of ideas. Some of those mentors are your teachers (most significantly for me, J. Clark, who was my first organ teacher) that you love and respect, giving yourself over to them, on a weekly basis, to be molded into an ever-better version of your musical self. Some of those mentors are famous composers whose life and work you’ve admired and studied in detail, then had the good fortune to work with them directly (in my case, Olivier Messiaen and Jean Langlais.) And the most ephemeral, but still vital, mentors of all, the historical figures with whom you spend countless thousands of hours trying to understand through their music, through their biographies, and through the metaphysical world of the spirit. Chief among the latter, for me, is Johann Sebastian Bach. I would even go so far as to say that my being a church musician has given me a profound resonance with the life that Bach lived, with the obstacles that he regularly dealt with, and with the joys that he surely experienced. More on that later.
I began playing the piano at age three, taught by my 11-year old sister, Jane (who also became a professional organist). The possibility of expressing the inner self through music seemed to have a direct link through my piano playing; so the drive to find as much music as I could through the strings of the piano kept me studying that instrument for twenty years. This was the 1960s, and the one of the world’s leading pianists of the day was Artur Rubinstein – who became my idol. I read his autobiographies, purchased every LP I could afford of his playing, and attended a recital he gave in Kennedy Center in the Spring of 1972. The Kennedy Center had just opened, and I was a brazen high school freshman who decided I would ignore all protocol and venture backstage to meet the artist following the program. I found myself in a circle of about six people, all of whom had Rubinstein in an active discussion of some sort. The moment I reached out my hand to shake his, he turned on his heels and said that he had to run and catch a plane for Chicago. I was heartbroken. So close; yet so far. But the experience had a profound influence on me. Little could I have guessed that I would spend much of my professional career onstage and backstage, that schmoozing with funders would become commonplace for me (something which Rubinstein was likely doing at the time), and most significantly, that proximity to tremendous musical stature was not intimidating to me. Indeed, I would thrive on it.
My parents made an agreement with me that they would pay for my first two years of organ lessons (after which I was to figure out how to pay for my own lessons, which I did) provided I didn’t begin organ study until I was entering high school, and would continue my piano study simultaneously. By this time I was also studying trumpet and voice, so my days were filled with music. Music was my shelter, my go-to when things were wrong or complicated or difficult. Music was my release. Even my spiritual world, at this time, was understood through the lens of music and music-making. By that, I mean that quite literally all of my pinnacle spiritual experiences, from infancy through graduate school, took place within the context of music. It wasn’t until now, aged 64, that it dawns on me how significant that was for the development of my self-understanding.
The first day that I had the keys to my home church (Lewinsville Presbyterian Church in McLean, VA), and had been given assigned practice time on the church’s Casavant pipe organ, was August 20, 1971. It just so happened to be the day before my sister’s wedding (in the same church); so I reluctantly gave over my first practice session to my first mentor, Hedley Yost, who was there to play for the wedding. Something about that constraint taught me about how precious practice time would become for me. All musicians develop their craft at home – except organists! Serious organists (not the ballroom variety) have to venture off to find a church that will allow them to practice, preferably for free. Then the practice time has to be negotiated. Then one must prove oneself responsible with the security of the church and the integrity of the organ as an instrument. Then, most significantly, I had to show up, proving myself trustworthy. Not having the ability to have a casual attitude about practicing, “whenever I felt like it,” created a rigor and a seriousness that has stuck with me as I have toured the globe giving concerts.
In the Fall of 1972, exactly fifty years ago, my mother told me that the Catholic Church our next door neighbors belonged to was needing an organist to play Saturday evening Mass. She encouraged me to apply. Thinking that this sort of thing would be way over my head, I only reluctantly agreed. I was hired on the spot and spent the next three years (which was the rest of my time in high school) serving St. Luke’s Catholic Church as their organist for Saturday Mass and Sunday late morning Mass. Sunday mornings involved a singing with my high school choir at the 9:00 service in my home church, then a dash over to St. Luke’s to play their 11:15 Mass. For most of my high school time, I was also in the band, singing in the Madrigals, accompanying friends who played other instruments (mostly clarinet players), singing in my church choir, actively involved in a church youth group, practicing several instruments a day, and taking A.P. classes at high school. This level of frenetic activity would become a microcosm of my professional life.
Working in the Church
In my fifty years of church employment, I’ve worked in small historic spaces (San Francisco’s Swedenborgian Church), gargantuan spaces (the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in NYC), prestigious places (Westminster Abbey), city and suburban Episcopal churches, and city and suburban Presbyterian churches. I entered this world with music degrees (Oberlin and Yale) and a seminary degree (also Yale). It was the acceptable and recommended way to do things in the 1970s and 80s. But there is little historic precedent for arming oneself with degrees and then entering the battleground of church politics. (Much more on that later.) Music, like all the arts, procreates itself through the apprenticeship model. Historically, organists trained under a mentor while shadowing them. Eventually they would become an assistant. This is the Organ Scholar system still in practice in England today; and it was this Organ Scholar paradigm that I was employed under at Westminster Abbey. The reasons that system has worked for many centuries, and the reason why I don’t believe an academic-only education prepares anyone for the life of a musician, much less a church musician, is because the arts are about communication and transformation. One has to experience how the arts can transform, firsthand, starting out by having a minor role in its execution, before serving as the mastermind for a concert or church service which aims to be a transformative occasion.
I am not anti-Academy! I absolutely loved my time at Oberlin Conservatory, Yale School of Music, and Yale Divinity School. The education was invaluable – something I draw upon every day. But it set up a bit of a trap for me, as it does for many of my colleagues who have worked for the Church.
Historically, musicians were second-class citizens. Long before the concept of the noble savage, the tortured genius musician, or any of the other 19th century stereotypes developed, musicians were craftsmen. Period. At least that’s what everyone believed. Their role was functionary: entertainment for the noble classes, entertainment and storyteller for the peasants. The Church had a millennium of plainsong, mostly existing in monastic communities, to aid its perpetuation of the faith and enhance prayer of the heart. Starting with the Reformation, from which we got the concept of hymnody (chorales), the organ became a useful tool to assist a congregation in singing together. Reports of the cacophony that resulted from village churches attempting to get a congregation to sing in unison, without the aid of an organ, are comical. In comes the organ and the organist into common worship. In the Renaissance and Tudor period, if you could find someone capable of playing the organ, he was certainly without theological training. He would have been among the lower classes. Nobility did not play the organ.
On the secular side of the equation, chamber musicians always performed on the “other side” of the rope so as not to be confused with, or mingle with, the noble classes. This was a common practice until Liszt who was, himself, of noble blood. The rope could not be put up for him. And so the policy quickly changed, and not long after musicians began to be referred to as geniuses.
In 17th and 18th century Germany, organists like Bach (who, although he was clearly a genius, was only referred to as a craftsman) were expected to have a high degree of theological training. Trying out for a major city post, like Thomaskirche in Leipzig, involved two full days of theological testing by the City Council. The Lutherans understood that a considerable amount of spiritual molding and development occurs through music. They wanted to make sure the right messages were being subtly taught by the Cantor.
But even though there has been development from craftsman to artist, from plebeian to influencer of spiritual development, from untouchable to idol, most professional musicians within the church and within society continue to be treated as second-class citizens. The church pays its musicians far lower than the clergy even though the training and the expense of the education (second only to medical training) would suggest the contrary. And in reading biographies of musicians, it wasn’t just Bach that had a very difficult time getting along with his church employers. The Renaissance composers were kept on a tight leash, Mozart and Haydn had infamous stories of their difficulties, Beethoven, Charles Ives, the list of church musicians that have been poorly treated within the church is almost the entire list of church musicians.
I didn’t know that when I walked into this profession. But I learned it quickly! My first day at a prominent post I had been given at age 26, the rector informed me that I was hired by him (not the church), that it was not my music program, but his, and that he would do with the music program as he saw fit. This, and several subsequent, attempts at power grab were intended to put me in my place, making sure I understood who is in charge.
Today we understand psychological development well enough to know that these power hungry employers are severely wounded and generally unaware that they leave a wake of devastation behind them. But this does not take away the pain they cause.
What it did, in my case, and for many others, was to push me to look beyond the church for employment as well as artistic satisfaction. Countless colleagues and musicians from as early as the 19th century have done the same. (Changing a career, or amending a career was not generally possible before the industrial revolution.)
Unfortunately, the Church turns out not to be a very kind, loving, or supportive employer. Autonomy and respect are often lacking. (Some colleagues don’t complain of this, but most do.) There seems to be a basic disconnect between the way musicians see the world and the way clergy see the world. For the latter, the main wavelength is that of verbal communication. For musicians, our world both includes and supersedes the verbal world, as it effects the emotions, the heart, the spirit, and the mystical world. Ideally, the two main church leaders (clergy and musician) would recognize the strength of the other and realize that the two can function in complementary fashion. But that has rarely happened in my fifty years of church work. Most clergy seem to experience me as their competition!
For me, working in the church involved more unhappy years than happy years. But that, in and of itself, created a disconnect for me. How could I, who always described my work within the Church as a “calling” from God, not be happy doing the very thing that I set out to do, with absolute clarity, from the age of three?
This is where the mentor relationships loop back in. There’s no way I would have continued to work in the Church if so many of my mentors hadn’t also talked about the difficulties that church work created for them. Even Bach! So, I did what every single one of my mentors did, divested my emotional energy from the Church.
Look at Bach: He was appointed in Leipzig at age 40 (1725). Leipzig was the center of the Pietist movement at the time. Bach knew how to tow the line to get a good job, but within three years, stopped composing church music. (The Mass in B Minor doesn’t count.) He focused on performing and perfecting the art of composition. Perhaps it was a midlife crisis for Bach, but he clearly expressed his disdain for his employer the only way that he could at the time.
The way forward for me, I learned when I was about 30, was to branch out. I chose to use my unique gift to make a unique mark. That gift is seeing cosmos within chaos, the sacred within the mundane.
And so the real journey of my life, the one outside the Church, began.
To be continued.