Second Mode

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In his book The Technique of My Musical Language, Olivier Messiaen identifies seven modes of limited transposition. Within the chromatic system of twelve sounds, Messiaen has identified groups of pitches which after a certain number of transpositions are no longer transposable. These modes may be used both melodically and harmonically and give the impression of several tonalities without polytonality. The first of these modes is the whole tone scale. The second mode is probably the best known of the modes Messiaen identifies as it is also known as the octatonic scale.

Mode 2 is transposable three times. It is constructed by alternating half and whole steps. The three transpositions are:
Mode2
It is the symmetry of these modes that limits the number of times they may be transposed. Even by beginning the scale with a whole step, the same limited set of transpositions is generated. The example below uses the same transposition number scheme as the one above so that you may easily see the relation:
Mode2Whole
In his book Breaking Free, Jeffrey Brillhart offers an entire chapter on the Second Mode with several characteristic harmonic progressions and many suggested ways to use the mode.

Bernard Bartelink

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BartelinkBWebsite:
http://www.bernardbartelink.nl/

Bernard Bartelink (1929-2014) studied organ with Albert de Klerk at the Dutch Institute for Catholic Church Music in Utrecht. He continued his studies at the Amsterdam Conservatory with Anthon van der Horst, earning a Prix d’Excellence in 1954. Winner of the Haarlem Improvisation Competition in 1961, he also served on the jury for the competition four times between 1969 and 1996. He held the position of organist at St. Bavo from 1971 until 1999. He was professor of organ and improvisation at the Amsterdam Conservatory until 1989.

Audio:
Entry in the 11th Haarlem Improvisation Competition
Entry in the 12th Haarlem Improvisation Competition

Are you killing time or following a form?

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No one likes to wait, and silence can be deadly.
When that unexpected silence arrives in a church service, who is asked to fill the void?
Why, it’s the organist, of course!
This might mean extending a piece for a few more measures, or it might mean creating a new piece just long enough to fill the gap (even when you don’t know how long that gap might be).

Aimless Wandering

At the most basic level, any organist should be able to fill time. Creating an additional repeat in a written piece of music or even starting again at the beginning and bringing the piece to a successful cadence when the time is up are the simplest ways to start. While I recommend aimless wandering as a way to explore new modes or when searching for your own harmonic language, when the organist just meanders meaninglessly around the keys to fill time, it becomes killing time and I think silence might actually be a better option.

Following a form

The much better option is to actually follow some sort of form in the extension that you need to create, or if you expect to have the time for an entire piece, then you definitely need to have a form in mind. I find one of the easiest and most flexible forms is AABA or song form. There are many hymn tunes that follow this form (HYMN TO JOY and NETTLETON to name only two), and unless your B section is radically different, there’s a good chance that you can end your piece at the end of any section without too much concern.

Simple Structure

If you are in need of an extension, the easiest material to use for the A section is a phrase or idea from the piece you just played. If you need to start from scratch, here is a simple harmonic scheme that you can follow:
AABASimple

You could plan out more elaborate structures according to your ability level, and of course, this can be adapted for any key or time signature. One easy way to stretch this form would be to double the phrase length to eight measures. For example:
AABADouble
At a moderate tempo, either of these examples could provide you with 1-2 minutes of music. I prepared a PDF that you can download here to print both of these on one page to take to the console and practice. Feel free to create your own patterns to practice the form.

Longer Songs

Once you are comfortable creating a 16 or 32 measure song form, you can then practice stringing them together to create a larger ABA or even AABA form. If you choose to follow a larger AABA form, be sure to differentiate your two A sections by changing the accompaniment pattern or the register of the melody or perhaps even both. By doing something slightly different, you help to keep the listener involved with the piece. By using the same material again, you will be making your job as an improviser easier, so it becomes a win-win situation for everyone!

Silence can torture, but so can rambling aimlessly. If you have a gap to fill, make sure you are following a form rather than just killing time.

May all your songs be filled with beautiful melodies,

Glenn

 
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Newsletter Issue 25 – 2014 10 21
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Herbert Buffington

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HerbertBuffingtonHerbert Buffington won Second Prize in the American Guild of Organists National Competition in Organ Improvisation at the 2010 National Convention in Washington, D.C. He earned degrees from Duke University and the Peabody Conservatory of Music at The Johns Hopkins University. He also studied at the Vienna International Music Center and the Hochshule für Musik in Vienna, Austria. His organ teachers have included Fenner Douglass, Robert Parkins, Peter Planyavsky and Donald Sutherland. His improvisation teachers have included Bruce Neswick, David Dahl, and Gerre Hancock. He presently serves as organist at Peachtree Christian Church in Atlanta, Georgia.


Recording:

Joy to the World-Christmas Improvisations

Lasst uns erfreuen

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LasstUnsErfreuen
The melody for LASST UNS ERFREUEN is named for the Easter text “Lasst uns erfreuen herzlich sehr” in the Jesuit hymnal Ausserlesene Catlwlische Geistliche Kirchengesänge where it was first published in Cologne in 1623. The setting by Ralph Vaughan Williams first published in The English Hymnal in 1906 has become the most popular version of the tune paired with the text “Ye watchers and ye holy ones” by Athelstan Riley. Other texts often paired with the melody include “All Creatures of our God and King” and “From All That Dwell Below the Skies.”

See a list of other chorale and hymn themes here.

Videos:
DRJFK1986 – Improvisation ‘Lasst uns erfreuen herzlich sehr’
Healey Willan – Hymn and Improvisation – St Mary Magdalene, Toronto

Shifting Gears

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Yesterday, I had the opportunity to play part of a Sunday Matinee concert at the Cathedral Church of St. Luke in Orlando, Florida. I opened the program with one of my own compositions which I had written as a gift for the music director at the Cathedral. For the rest of my portion of the program, I was to improvise on hymn tunes suggested by the audience. While several people offered compliments to me after the concert was over, I actually discovered something that I’d like to offer as a practice tip for this week.

Random Selection

If you ever accept theme suggestions from the audience, you have to be prepared for just about anything. By requesting that people submit something from the hymnal for the drawing, we made an attempt to limit the realm of thematic material I would be working with. When I showed up to practice, I would open the hymnal randomly and improvise on whatever tune was in front of me, so I thought I had covered this random selection process well in my preparation. By asking for the person’s favorite hymn, I also suspected that many of the suggestions would be familiar tunes that I had practiced before. (Now that I have the complete set of index cards with the audience submissions, I have a few tunes to add to the list of hymn and chorale themes at organimprovisation.com.)

Caught off Gaurd

Having improvised on a submitted theme at the end of numerous other concerts in addition to improvising multiple pieces for church services every week, I thought Sunday’s task of filling 15-16 minutes with improvisations on potentially four different themes would be easy. After all, that’s really only 4 minutes each. A simple ABA form or even an ornamented chorale variation could take that long, and I’ve done those every week for years. What I failed to realize was the time compression that was required for the concert. Rather than knowing the hymns for the week several days in advance and having other elements of the service to provide time for reflection in between improvisations, I now basically had to choose an order of the themes, and improvise the equivalent of the prelude, offertory, communion, and closing voluntaries all strung together. No breaks.

Shift

My challenge became not how fast can I play, but how fast can I mentally change gears? Whether you break out the metronome and ratchet up the speed gradually or look for efficiencies while playing slowly, physical technique for speed seems a lot easier to tackle than mental agility. While I’m still contemplating how I could have better prepared for yesterday’s mental challenges, here are a few ideas that I plan to practice before doing this again:

  1. Practice improvising while watching the clock. Choose not only a theme and form, but also a duration and make sure the improvisation runs for the allotted time.
  2. Open the hymnal at random, count to ten, then start! Practice giving yourself the least amount of time possible between discovering the theme and starting to play.
  3. Use a random number generator (like http://www.random.org/) to generate a list of page numbers from the hymnal. Improvise on each of the tunes in the order given on the list.
  4. Practice in “performance mode.” No stopping. No redos. Play straight through from start to finish.
  5. Set a timer to beep every two minutes (or an even shorter interval). Every time it beeps, change theme, change key, and/or change form. Practice this doing dramatic shifts as well as doing more subtle shifts.

One of the practice ideas I heard in a masterclass with Tom Trenney was to make a deck of cards with forms or improvisation techniques written on them and then to draw randomly from the deck to see what you would improvise. I think you could also have a deck of themes and even a deck of keys/modes. The weakness I discovered at yesterday’s concert was not with any of the cards that were in the deck, but in my ability to flip from one card to the next quickly.

The Fix

The remedy I see at the moment is to use a timer to force me to change ideas quickly. We are all used to practicing with a metronome for technical speed, so why shouldn’t we use something to measure our mental speed? How else can we train ourselves to think faster? I’d love to hear any ideas you might have.

Hoping all your improvisations shift gears smoothly!

Glenn

PS. In case you’re wondering, the four hymns that were selected by the audience were Holy, Holy, Holy (NICAEA), Be Thou My vision (SLANE), Rock of Ages, and All Creatures of Our God an King (LASST UNS ERFREUEN). What would you have done with these themes?

 
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Newsletter Issue 24 – 2014 10 13
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Whole Tone Scale

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WholeToneScale
The whole tone scale is a scale of six notes where each tone is separated from the next by the distance of a whole step. Olivier Messiaen called the whole tone scale his first mode of limited transposition because there are only two possible transpositions of the scale. Because each note is equidistant from the next, there is no leading tone that would help establish a tonic note. Instead, the scale creates a more fuzzy, dreamlike environment, in part because it was used often by impressionistic composers like Claude Debussy.

Judas Maccabeus

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JudasMaccabeus
Originally written by George F. Handel in 1747, this melody was later added to the oratorio Judas Maccabaeus with the lyrics “See, the Conqu’ring hero comes.” In 1884, Edmond L. Bundry wrote new words in French “A Toi la gloire.” This hymn was first translated from French into English by Richard B. Hoyle in 1923, becoming “Thine be the glory.” Other texts for this melody include a wedding hymn in the Netherlands (“Praised Be the Father” and an Advent hymn in Germany (“Tochter Zion, freue dich”).

See a list of other hymn and chorale themes here.

Video:
Naji Hakim – Improvisation A Toi la gloire – Trinité, Paris

Patrick A. Scott

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PatrickScottYouTube Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/pascott123/videos

Dr. Patrick A. Scott was recently appointed as the new Assistant Organist-Choirmaster at the Cathedral of St. Philip in Atlanta, Georgia. He is a graduate of Birmingham-Southern College and the University of Texas — where he studied with the late Dr. Gerre Hancock and Gerre’s wife, Dr. Judith Hancock. At the 2014 AGO convention in Boston, he won first place in the National Competition in Organ Improvisation.


Videos:
Stations of the Cross:
Station I: (What Wondrous Love)
Station III: Jesus Falls the First Time
Station V: Simon of Cyrene Helps Jesus Carry the Cross
Station VII: Jesus Falls the Second Time
Station XI: Jesus is Nailed to the Cross and Station XII: Jesus Dies on the Cross

How Fast Can You Play?

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Over the years, I’ve been fortunate to study with many different improvisation teachers. The encounters have been in short masterclass lessons, intensive workshop immersions, and regular weekly lessons. Only once, however, has a teacher ever made an attempt to asses my improvisation skill level.

I met Franck Vaudray when I was in Lyon to audition at the conservatory (CNSM). I was in town on Sunday morning, so made a visit to St. François de Sales. I sat in a pew for mass and went up to the organ afterwards, expecting to find Louis Robilliard and planning to ask what pieces he had played. Instead, that’s when I met my next improvisation teacher.

Franck Vaudray

As I arrived at the organ while he was still playing the sortie, I instantly discovered that I was hearing an improvisation. No score by César Franck was on the music rack. (I had dismissed Charles-Marie Widor as an option once the canon appeared.) After we exchanged introductions, I learned that he also had improvised the lovely baroque trio sonata movement at the offertory. These improvisations were both so polished that they could have been written pieces, so when he offered to take me as a student, I was more than happy to begin commuting to Lyon for lessons whenever I could.

The Evaluation

When I came back to St. Fraçois de Sales a few weeks later for my first lesson with Franck, he started by placing a piece of paper on the music rack with something like the following written on it:
FranckAtonal
(I had the original paper for many years, but it seems to have gotten lost in my last move.)

My instructions were to play single notes as fast as I could with my hands in an atonal style and then add in the theme in long notes with the pedals. While the instructions may seem simple, it can be very easy to fall into tonal patterns if you are not careful with the hands. Likewise, this duo may not seem very impressive, but with all the foundations and swell reeds coupled together, it could be the start of a very nice toccata!

Increasing Difficulty

So ends the easy part. Every step thereafter basically served to make the task more difficult. It’s hard for me to remember the exact sequence of steps, but here’s a few basic ideas of what I went through:

  1. Increase to trio texture. Both hands play independent atonal lines of fast notes. No rests allowed. Pedal plays them in long notes.
  2. Duo: Right hand and pedal alone, but this time, play the theme in retrograde (C, E, F#, Eb…)
  3. Duo (left hand and pedal) with the theme played from the outside in (G, C, Ab, E, F, F#…)
  4. Duo (both hands and pedal) with the theme from the inside out (A, Bb, Eb, D, F#, F…)
  5. Duo with the theme inverted (octave transposition permitted so as to not run out of notes) so it becomes: G, F#, A, C, E, F…

Is your brain tired yet? Now, it’s time to do it all over again, but this time observe the numbers as the duration of the notes of the theme. Starting again with the basic theme, this means that you would play five notes with the hands for the G in the pedal, followed by ten for Ab, seven for F, six for D, and so forth through the entire theme. I’m guessing this will slow you down a little, because it certainly decreased my speed! Be sure you go through all the retrograde, in-out, out-in, and inversion steps following the numbers as well.

Texture Inversion

For the final task, I could disregard the numbers (Yeah!) and was told to start again with long notes in the pedal and fast notes in the hands. Instead of ending after playing once through the theme, however, I was to continue playing more notes of shorter and shorter duration with the feet while the hands were to play longer and longer notes until eventually I managed to reverse the texture and could play the theme in long notes (in octaves) with the hands while the feet played the quick atonal notes. Here was the final speed test: how fast could my feet move?

To Be Continued

So that you can try this easily yourself, I created a pdf with the theme and instructions above that you can download here and print to take with you to the console. How fast can you play? Is it easy to play atonal lines with your hands? How about with your feet?

These exercises turned out to be only the first part of my first lesson with Franck Vaudray. We continued on for at least an hour more through challenges involving dictation, motives, transposition, canons and harmonization. (If I can find the sheet he gave me as homework, I’ll share more of these in a future newsletter.) I walked out of St. Fraçois de Sales mentally exhausted. When was the last time you tested your improvisational limits?

Hoping your improvisations set new speed records!
Glenn

 
Recent additions to organimprovisation.com:

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Mode:

 
Newsletter Issue 23 – 2014 10 06
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