Sunday afternoon musings

Good, solid hymnody today: "O worship the King!" (Hanover), "From God Christ's deity came forth" (Salem Harbor), "When I survey the wondrous cross" (Rockingham), "O Love of God, how strong and true" (Dunedin), and "Spread, O spread, thou mighty word" (Gott sei Dank). There were several a capella stanzas, partly because the choir and congregation do those well and partly because any stanza on which I'm not playing is a stanza on which I'm not honking out a wrong note on the 16' Schnözzenfløven.

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Actually, my playing was fine, though there was one scary bit. I had shoved the Fraction Anthem up a whole step so it would be more comfortable for the cantor, and even as I put the transposer on, I thought, "Don't forget to turn this back off before the hymn." And then, as is my middle-aged way, I played the Fraction Anthem and gave no more thought to the transposer . . .

until the Communion Hymn (455) started, and as soon as I hit the first note, I knew it was still on. As I'm playing through the first line of the hymn, I look ahead and confirm what I had suspected -- namely, that the hymn is already high enough in its proper key and we really can't afford to sing it higher still -- so after the first line I break, twiddle the transposer back to home base, and then noodle a bit in the new key in a way that I hope will confuse people just enough so that they don't know what just happened but not so much that they don't know when to start singing the hymn.

I'm pretty sure there's nothing like this on the AGO Service-Playing Test.

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Speaking of which, have I mentioned that I have a long-standing desire to prepare for and take the AGO Service-Playing Test? There is no conceivable benefit to doing so, except that it would be very cool. (And somebody would finally have to teach me about registration, which I don't remotely understand.) Naturally, I now work at a university that doesn't even have an organ, let alone an organ professor, so I guess that won't be happening any time soon.

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Granted, if I were a parish musician and saw that the new Rector had an AGO Certificate, even at that level, I would figure I was in for a world of interference . . .