One Traveler

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My Monday-morning coffee-time thoughts are centering on hymn tempi. Looking through many renditions of the Welsh classic HYFRYDOL, I have found that most of them simply go too fast. When they don’t—when the tempo is actually musical, breathable, and religious—there is sure to be a snarky response along the lines of “pick it up, grandma!” Well, hurrah for grandmas if they remind us that hymns are for singing and for worship…and not for the discharge of pent-up emotions in the organist.

I can’t forget a hymn festival in which I sang, at Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago, back in the ’90′s. John Ferguson played the organ, and we concluded with HYFRYDOL at simply the slowest tempo I’ve ever heard before or since. So convincing was John, so strong his sense of music and leadership, that I feel I surely was levitating by the final verse. There’s no doubt I was in tears.

Trying it out at my own church the next morning, I was promptly conducted, flagged, wig-wagged, and eye-rolled-at by the cognoscenti of the choir loft. Since then, I have settled for a strategy of gradual de-escalation. HYFRYDOL is not meant to be sung at a fast clip…of that I am convinced.

We have come through some of the hardest decades in the history of Christendom. One of the greatest challenges has been in the area of music. Here, the anxiety and addiction to distraction so typical of the modern age have intruded with point-blank demands to “pick up the pace.” Yet there is the wisdom of two millennia to consider as well. This wisdom bids us slow down the tempo, de-emphasize the rhythm, spiritualize the music: to invite what Pope Benedict calls “the sober intoxication of the Holy Spirit.”

For “sober intoxication” one could substitute other antitheses: voluptuous chastity, calm intensity, gentle rage. Dylan Thomas said “there was calm to be done in His safe unrest.” Amen! That breathes an apostolic spirit.

It is hard indeed—sometimes impossible, and sometimes dangerous to a career—to buck the trend and witness to an evangelical spirit in one’s hymn playing. Oftentimes, one is in conflict with clergy as well as with random YouTube commentators. Yet if the organist can make his case with grace, candor, and persistence, and demonstrate a pastoral and teacherly spirit at all times, change is possible. The modern world feels that it just about has the Church where it wants it. May organists one day be remembered as those who helped prove it wrong.