Fifty Years on the Bench: Cathedrals & A Royal Peculiar (part 3)

Cathedrals & a Royal Peculiar

I’ve always thrived on pressure. Perhaps it’s the residual effects of having worked as a triage secretary in a hospital Emergency Room while in college, or perhaps it’s just my particular constitution. But in the music world, one’s ability, or inability, to remain calm and flexible under extremely stressful situations marks the trajectory of a career.

When I first moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, cathedral organist John Fenstermaker said to me, “There are two types of organists, cathedral organists and parish church organists; and they are completely separate ‘animals’.” I immediately knew what he was talking about, based on my own experience and knowledge of colleagues, but it would be decades of mismatch (the proverbial round peg in a square hole) before I understood the ramifications of that in my own life.

London

On February 14, 1982, I took the train down to NYC from New Haven to attend a workshop being led by Simon Preston, the great organist and choir trainer. Simon and I had spent most of a week together at Christ Church, Oxford in December 1979. At the time, I was taking a year off between college and graduate school to be in Europe, studying men and boys choirs in England and organ in northern Germany. Shortly after starting my graduate programs at Yale (I got two degrees there, one in Music and the other in Religion), Simon had taken the post of Organist and Master of the Choristers at Westminster Abbey; and in January 1982, I phoned him up at the Abbey to see if we could meet together over lunch while he was in NYC. It was at that lunch that he offered me the post of Organ Scholar at Westminster Abbey, to begin right after I graduated in Spring 1983. (In hindsight, there must have been something about my meeting with Simon that can only be called “destiny.” I later figured out that that date was 25 years, to the day, after I had been conceived. Bizarre!)

Westminster Abbey functions like a cathedral church, but is termed a “royal peculiar.” Royal peculiars are exempt from the jurisdiction of the local diocese, and only subject to the direct jurisdiction of the monarch. As such, Westminster Abbey (or simply “The Abbey”) is the location of numerous state occasions every year, and the result was that life at the Abbey was infused with a goldfish bowl phenomenon. I quickly discovered that Simon’s perfectionism was a perfect match for the demands of the Abbey’s persona.

My role at the Abbey was to play at evensongs four to five times each week, assist at Sunday morning services (usually playing prelude music and turning pages for the Sub-Organist, Christopher Herrick), attend rehearsals with the boys every day, lead many of the rehearsals with the probationer boys (younger boys still learning to be Abbey choristers), occasionally accompany the full choir (once or twice each week) and even less occasionally conduct the full choir. The custom is to throw the Organ Scholar into the full gamut of responsibilities immediately, to see if they will sink or swim. “Stress” was not a word that was bantered around in those days, but the inference was clear: The profession of church music, at its very highest level, is a very high pressure responsibility, and not suited to everybody. Fortunately for me, I thrived on this.

One extremely stressful moment stands out in particular. The Poet Laureate, Sir John Betjamin, had died, and his memorial service was to be at the Abbey. Both Simon and the Sub-Organist were out of town on concert tours, so I was expected to play for it. The Assistant Organist, Geoffrey Morgan, conducted the choir. The Queen’s delegate was in attendance, Prince Charles read the lessons, Laurence Olivier preached the sermon, and it was live broadcast on BBC with the announcer sitting just on the other side of the organ console. Although I was quaking in my boots, I figured if I could handle that, I could handle just about anything.

There were many things I took away from those days at the Abbey. The demand for personal perfection in my own music-making was one of them. The expectation that musicians I would work with, whether choral singers or instrumentalists, would consistently give 100% toward the goal of beauty was another. But this second was tempered by a firm personal commitment to avoid the then-common practice in British cathedrals – psychological abuse of the boy choristers. I witnessed, nearly every day, at least one boy leaving rehearsal in tears for having been insulted by the director. This practice wouldn’t last one day in today’s world, but in the 1980s and before, it was commonplace.

Simon Preston, himself, became my chief inspiration, and to a certain extent, I modeled my career after his. His approach to making music, his freedom in conducting, his technical virtuosity as a player, his animating personality in group settings, and his love of recording all became aspects of a musical career that I would aspire to. We developed not only a professional relationship, merging into a colleague relationship, but also a warm friendship that was very important to me. I remember a very significant moment for me, assisting him in a recording of the Liszt Ad nos, for Deutsche Gramophone. I remarked how nerve-wracking the recording process must be. He responded with something that changed my life: “Oh no! The microphone is your friend!”

Simon Preston inadvertently became the bookends to my professional career as a church musician: I served as his Organ Scholar starting in 1983, and then attended his funeral service, also at the Abbey, shortly after my final firing in 2023. Forty years! (In Biblical terms, the number 40 generally symbolizes a period of testing, or one generation. Very a propos.)

The skill of being an organist & choir director has historically been learned through the apprenticeship model (e.g. Organ Scholars). In the United States, we’ve mostly removed that progression, valuing, instead, the halls of Academia – which, frankly, don’t prepare organists and choir directors for work in churches and cathedrals. Yes, Academia trains musicians in the needed proficiency for their craft, but proficiency is only about 25% of the work. The rest is a combination of psychological and sociological skill (always learned in situ) and administration.

New York

The Abbey both prepared me and didn’t prepare me for life at St. John the Divine in New York. My personal level of musical rigor held me in good stead, but my relationship with the choristers was completely different! Where the Abbey choristers behaved under fear of severe punishment, the NYC choristers (boys and girls together) made me prove to them that I was on their side. Once they were clear that I wasn’t merely using them to boost my own ego, they gave 125% of their efforts to our mutual endeavors. That was a beautiful lesson for me to learn.

My years as Associate Director of Music at St. John the Divine stretched me. Musically I became adept at being able to switch between playing continuo for a Bach Passion, and playing back-up with the Paul Winter jazz Consort. I discovered how choristers thrive on making music with the same degree of beauty and perfection as do professional adult musicians. Administratively, I took on all the planning of choral music for the year (under the approval of my boss), and learned a great deal about the wealth of musical possibilities that exist in church music. I began a lifelong passion for commissioning and performing new music – starting with a commission I gave to Jean Langlais to write a piece for me focusing on the Cathedral’s famous State Trumpet. And I began my recording career, something for which I’ve discovered I have a tremendous love and passion.

Minneapolis

My second cathedral stint started off as a match made in heaven. St. Mark’s Cathedral underwent a two-year search for a new Music Director, looking at 135 applicants. I seemed to be exactly what they were looking for (but sadly, I was not what they wanted). When I started working there, my immediate task was to build a relationship between the choir (80 singers) and the church members. My predecessor, and the dean’s predecessor, hated each other. The result of their mutual disdain was that the choir developed its own persona, completely separate from the rest of the cathedral community. The relatively new dean who hired me, as well as all the other cathedral canons, were eager to change this paradigm; so they hired someone (me) with both musical and theological training.

At first it looked like it was working. The clergy and I got along like peas in a pod. The dean, and his wife and family, had become very close friends with me. The choir stopped objecting to my request that they process through the congregation.

But then something snapped. I didn’t realize that there was a committee in place to try and oust the dean well before I arrived on the scene. I became their target practice.

Because I was changing the self-identity of the choir, not everyone was happy with me. By mid-winter, I was receiving an average of six pieces of hate mail every day. Most of it was anonymous. All of it was targeted at my psychological destruction. And so I would read these letters about how I was destroying the greatness of their tradition, letters saying that they “rejoiced in my inevitable demise,” and on and on. The few that had a return address and signature, I would swallow my pride and write a charitable letter back to, thanking them for their honesty and lamenting the fact that they felt hurt.

Never confuse the ability to handle pressure with the ability to handle abuse. I naively did conflate those two forms of stress, thinking that I was secure enough to handle the viciousness of the attacks. I was wrong.

Like all artists, I’m a sensitive person. Things effect me deeply, and I’m easily hurt. That sensitivity is the very thing that artistry requires in order to shed compassion on a hurting world, to empathize with all people, and to communicate through our respective mediums. It’s often thought that musicians that rise to the top of their profession are inured to criticisms, attack, and psychological warfare. But in reality, probably the opposite is true: The greater one’s ability to communicate as a serious artist, the greater the sensitivity to the outside world, both negatively and positively.

And so, after nearly a year in Minneapolis, I left and returned home to San Francisco. But something broke in my heart because of that painful experience. I decided to leave church music entirely.

To be continued.

Fifty Years on the Bench, Cathedrals & A Royal Peculiar (part 3)

Cathedrals & a Royal Peculiar

I’ve always thrived on pressure. Perhaps it’s the residual effects of having worked as a triage secretary in a hospital Emergency Room while in college, or perhaps it’s just my particular constitution. But in the music world, one’s ability, or inability, to remain calm and flexible under extremely stressful situations marks the trajectory of a career. 

When I first moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, cathedral organist John Fenstermaker said to me, “There are two types of organists, cathedral organists and parish church organists; and they are completely separate ‘animals’.” I immediately knew what he was talking about, based on my own experience and knowledge of colleagues, but it would be decades of mismatch (the proverbial round peg in a square hole) before I understood the ramifications of that in my own life.

London

On February 14, 1982, I took the train down to NYC from New Haven to attend a workshop being led by Simon Preston, the great organist and choir trainer. Simon and I had spent most of a week together at Christ Church, Oxford in December 1979. At the time, I was taking a year off between college and graduate school to be in Europe, studying men and boys choirs in England and organ in northern Germany. Shortly after starting my graduate programs at Yale (I got two degrees there, one in Music and the other in Religion), Simon had taken the post of Organist and Master of the Choristers at Westminster Abbey; and in January 1982, I phoned him up at the Abbey to see if we could meet together over lunch while he was in NYC. It was at that lunch that he offered me the post of Organ Scholar at Westminster Abbey, to begin right after I graduated in Spring 1983. (In hindsight, there must have been something about my meeting with Simon that can only be called “destiny.” I later figured out that that date was 25 years, to the day, after I had been conceived. Bizarre!)

Westminster Abbey functions like a cathedral church, but is termed a “royal peculiar.” Royal peculiars are exempt from the jurisdiction of the local diocese, and only subject to the direct jurisdiction of the monarch. As such, Westminster Abbey (or simply “The Abbey”) is the location of numerous state occasions every year, and the result was that life at the Abbey was infused with a goldfish bowl phenomenon. I quickly discovered that Simon’s perfectionism was a perfect match for the demands of the Abbey’s persona. 

My role at the Abbey was to play at evensongs four to five times each week, assist at Sunday morning services (usually playing prelude music and turning pages for the Sub-Organist, Christopher Herrick), attend rehearsals with the boys every day, lead many of the rehearsals with the probationer boys (younger boys still learning to be Abbey choristers), occasionally accompany the full choir (once or twice each week) and even less occasionally conduct the full choir. The custom is to throw the Organ Scholar into the full gamut of responsibilities immediately, to see if they will sink or swim. “Stress” was not a word that was bantered around in those days, but the inference was clear: The profession of church music, at its very highest level, is a very high pressure responsibility, and not suited to everybody. Fortunately for me, I thrived on this.

One extremely stressful moment stands out in particular. The Poet Laureate, Sir John Betjamin, had died, and his memorial service was to be at the Abbey. Both Simon and the Sub-Organist were out of town on concert tours, so I was expected to play for it. The Assistant Organist, Geoffrey Morgan, conducted the choir. The Queen’s delegate was in attendance, Prince Charles read the lessons, Laurence Olivier preached the sermon, and it was live broadcast on BBC with the announcer sitting just on the other side of the organ console. Although I was quaking in my boots, I figured if I could handle that, I could handle just about anything.

There were many things I took away from those days at the Abbey. The demand for personal perfection in my own music-making was one of them. The expectation that musicians I would work with, whether choral singers or instrumentalists, would consistently give 100% toward the goal of beauty was another. But this second was tempered by a firm personal commitment to avoid the then-common practice in British cathedrals – psychological abuse of the boy choristers. I witnessed, nearly every day, at least one boy leaving rehearsal in tears for having been insulted by the director. This practice wouldn’t last one day in today’s world, but in the 1980s and before, it was commonplace.

Simon Preston, himself, became my chief inspiration, and to a certain extent, I modeled my career after his. His approach to making music, his freedom in conducting, his technical virtuosity as a player, his animating personality in group settings, and his love of recording all became aspects of a musical career that I would aspire to. We developed not only a professional relationship, merging into a colleague relationship, but also a warm friendship that was very important to me. I remember a very significant moment for me, assisting him in a recording of the Liszt Ad nos, for Deutsche Gramophone. I remarked how nerve-wracking the recording process must be. He responded with something that changed my life: “Oh no! The microphone is your friend!” 

Simon Preston inadvertently became the bookends to my professional career as a church musician: I served as his Organ Scholar starting in 1983, and then attended his funeral service, also at the Abbey, shortly after my final firing in 2023. Forty years! (In Biblical terms, the number 40 generally symbolizes a period of testing, or one generation. Very a propos.)

The skill of being an organist & choir director has historically been learned through the apprenticeship model (e.g. Organ Scholars). In the United States, we’ve mostly removed that progression, valuing, instead, the halls of Academia – which, frankly, don’t prepare organists and choir directors for work in churches and cathedrals. Yes, Academia trains musicians in the needed proficiency for their craft, but proficiency is only about 25% of the work. The rest is a combination of psychological and sociological skill (always learned in situ) and administration.

New York

The Abbey both prepared me and didn’t prepare me for life at St. John the Divine in New York. My personal level of musical rigor held me in good stead, but my relationship with the choristers was completely different! Where the Abbey choristers behaved under fear of severe punishment, the NYC choristers (boys and girls together) made me prove to them that I was on their side. Once they were clear that I wasn’t merely using them to boost my own ego, they gave 125% of their efforts to our mutual endeavors. That was a beautiful lesson for me to learn.

My years as Associate Director of Music at St. John the Divine stretched me. Musically I became adept at being able to switch between playing continuo for a Bach Passion, and playing back-up with the Paul Winter jazz Consort. I discovered how choristers thrive on making music with the same degree of beauty and perfection as do professional adult musicians. Administratively, I took on all the planning of choral music for the year (under the approval of my boss), and learned a great deal about the wealth of musical possibilities that exist in church music. I began a lifelong passion for commissioning and performing new music – starting with a commission I gave to Jean Langlais to write a piece for me focusing on the Cathedral’s famous State Trumpet. And I began my recording career, something for which I’ve discovered I have a tremendous love and passion.

Minneapolis

My second cathedral stint started off as a match made in heaven. St. Mark’s Cathedral underwent a two-year search for a new Music Director, looking at 135 applicants. I seemed to be exactly what they were looking for (but sadly, I was not what they wanted). When I started working there, my immediate task was to build a relationship between the choir (80 singers) and the church members. My predecessor, and the dean’s predecessor, hated each other. The result of their mutual disdain was that the choir developed its own persona, completely separate from the rest of the cathedral community. The relatively new dean who hired me, as well as all the other cathedral canons, were eager to change this paradigm; so they hired someone (me) with both musical and theological training.

At first it looked like it was working. The clergy and I got along like peas in a pod. The dean, and his wife and family, had become very close friends with me. The choir stopped objecting to my request that they process through the congregation.

But then something snapped. I didn’t realize that there was a committee in place to try and oust the dean well before I arrived on the scene. I became their target practice. 

Because I was changing the self-identity of the choir, not everyone was happy with me. By mid-winter, I was receiving an average of six pieces of hate mail every day. Most of it was anonymous. All of it was targeted at my psychological destruction. And so I would read these letters about how I was destroying the greatness of their tradition, letters saying that they “rejoiced in my inevitable demise,” and on and on. The few that had a return address and signature, I would swallow my pride and write a charitable letter back to, thanking them for their honesty and lamenting the fact that they felt hurt.

Never confuse the ability to handle pressure with the ability to handle abuse. I naively did conflate those two forms of stress, thinking that I was secure enough to handle the viciousness of the attacks. I was wrong.

Like all artists, I’m a sensitive person. Things effect me deeply, and I’m easily hurt. That sensitivity is the very thing that artistry requires in order to shed compassion on a hurting world, to empathize with all people, and to communicate through our respective mediums. It’s often thought that musicians that rise to the top of their profession are inured to criticisms, attack, and psychological warfare. But in reality, probably the opposite is true: The greater one’s ability to communicate as a serious artist, the greater the sensitivity to the outside world, both negatively and positively.

And so, after nearly a year in Minneapolis, I left and returned home to San Francisco. But something broke in my heart because of that painful experience. I decided to leave church music entirely.

To be continued.