Podcast Episode: The Artistry of a Church Organist
In the latest episode of our Sounds of Faith podcast, Chapel Organist Chad Fothergill plays examples of his approach to service music during a discussion of the artistry of a church organist. In just one recent worship service, Fothergill opened the service with a late-seventeenth-century French composition, accompanied the choir in a chant he composed, swapped melodic phrases with a colleague playing a second organ, and then closed the service by playing seven minutes of improvised music. That is a taste of the versatility Fothergill brings to his role, which includes arranging hymns, selecting compositions, accompanying the choir, guiding the congregation through the liturgy, and more.
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Chapel Organist Chad Fothergill and Organ Scholar Dr. David Lim trade off musical phrases during the introduction of a hymn in a worship service.
TRANSCRIPT
[intro music plays]
James Todd: Welcome to Sounds of Faith, a podcast exploring traditions of faith, sacred music, and spoken word here at Duke University Chapel. During a recent Duke Chapel Sunday morning service, Chapel organist Chad Fothergill opened the service with a late 17th-century French composition. During the end of the service, Fothergill and Chapel organ scholar David Lim introduced the final hymn with a dynamic alternation of musical phrases between the two organs at either end of Duke Chapel. Finally, Fothergill closed out the service with an extended improvisation on a hymn tune written for the liturgical theme of the service.
I'm James Todd, communications director here at Duke Chapel, and I am here with Duke Chapel organist Chad Fothergill to learn something about the artistry of his role, which includes arranging hymns, selecting compositions, accompanying the choir, improvising music, guiding the congregation through the liturgy, and much more. Hello, Chad, and welcome to Sounds of Faith.
Chad Fothergill: Good to be here, thanks.
James: So, we've been listening to clips from the Sunday service, September 14th, not too long ago, which was Holy Cross Day. So, before you even step into the chapel, I'm wondering about the work that you and your music colleagues have put in to prepare the music for the day. What does that process look like?
Chad: Sure. Usually, it starts in the late summer, when the director of music, Dr. Zeb Highben, has basically given us a roadmap for the semester. As we get closer to each week, the organ scholar and I, Dr. David Lim, will figure out who might play preludes and postludes on certain days. As we get closer to each week, we're looking at who needs to be where, when, at what instrument, and that starts to guide our actual choices of what repertoire we might play, what instrument we'll use to accompany, and other things like that.
James: So this specific service on September 14th is Holy Cross Day. Can you talk through this prelude piece, which, interestingly, you play on the Flentrop organ at the back, and then later you magically appear up front, so we'll talk about how you move around. How did you choose this prelude piece, "Pangea Lingua Gloriosi?"
Chad: On festival days in the chapel, we do a gradual hymn, so we sing a few stanzas before and after the Gospel reading, and we process the Gospel out into the middle aisle, and it's read there in the midst of the assembly. This being a feast day for the church, we opted to do that rather than have a response hymn after the sermon. The particular text that was chosen for this day, "Sing My Tongue," is a very old text from, I think, the 5th or 6th century by Fortunatus. For a very long time, it was associated with this particular plainsong melody called "Pangea Lingua," and so I thought this would be a nice, fitting historical connection, at least in my mind.
James: So, this is subtle.
Chad: It's very subtle, yes.
James: But thoughtful also.
Chad: Yeah, it was also just a practical opportunity to learn another movement of this particular set that I had not learned yet. I think I'd learned the first movement a long time ago, hadn't really worked on the second movement, so it was just an opportunity to do something practical as well.
James: That's great. Again, in preparing, the hymns have been selected, but for example, the psalm, you made the arrangement for the chant.
[Woman sings]
Woman: Give ear, O my people, to my teaching. Incline your ear to the words of my mouth.
James: So that's your chant tone. How do you write music? Are you doing that well in advance, or when does that happen?
Chad: The lectionary for Holy Cross Day prescribes these certain verses from Psalm 78, which the first line is, “Give ear, O my people, to my teaching. Incline your ear to the words of my mouth.” Later in the psalm, a few verses later: “But even as he killed them, they beseeched him. They turned and sought God. They flattered him with their mouths, and with their tongues, lied to him.” So, there's some serious behavioral issues, or very hefty topics here and images, in this particular psalm. As we're looking at tones, we maybe don't want to have a nice, sort of sweet, “Even as he killed them, they beseeched him.” That just felt a little...
James: It's [inaudible], it doesn't match.
Chad: Yeah. So, what we did is we chose a tone, something a little bit more declamatory, and then the second half of the phrase, it doesn't really finish its idea.
James: So, we're left hanging there.
Chad: Yeah, a little bit. And finally, at the very end, the soloist, or the last verse, in this case chanted by the soloist, kind of turns all that around: “But he, being merciful, would forgive their wrongdoing.” All of a sudden, I believe we brought it way back down, but with a different tonality. "He, being merciful, would forgive their wrongdoing and not destroy.” At the very end, rather than ending open, we ended back where we started, and I think we trailed out and brought all of that very dramatic text and ideas to a quieter close.
James: Since the text comes to a resolution, the music comes to a resolution.
Chad: Yeah. I'm also watching in the camera. I've got a camera in front of me that could show the conductor or the full chapel. In this case, I was watching to make sure the soloist had enough time to get from where she was in the choir all the way over to the lectern, providing that little silent film accompaniment for the liturgical action that's unfolding.
James: Let's jump to that: you're playing, at times, complex and sophisticated pieces, but you're also kind of stitching the service together, helping to guide the congregation that now it's time to sing, or the preacher needs a little time to get back to his seat. So, can you talk about some of those musical signals that are guiding, covering, leading the ministers and congregation?
Chad: Sure. This goes back to a lot of early functions of the organ. We have these mosaic images from ancient Roman times showing this little organ in the midst of gladiator games, and so the organ was a signaling instrument. You have associations of the instrument with battles, so you have a lot of Spanish organ repertoire in the Renaissance and early Baroque called "tiento de batalla," or battle piece. You've got fast passages of the enemies scattering, and you'll have sounds of trumpets and drums and things like that. So, the organ has always had this pictorial and illustrative quality to its repertoire and what it does in a service, and we can continue that in today's traditions as well. For instance, as I think through a Sunday service, if the first hymn is very familiar, and I know that there are 95 people in the choir, plus ministers, plus communion ministers, and there's going to be a procession of so many people, but there are only four stanzas of the hymn, let's say it is "Lift High the Cross," which we sang that day, but if it had been at the beginning, maybe I would have started with fanfare ideas, and done little echoes and things like that, actually signaling these little fanfares of the hymn.
James: You're kind of teasing the tune.
Chad: Yeah, and just not settling quite into the tempo of the hymn yet, but just getting the ball rolling a little bit, and giving myself 30 to 45 seconds for the procession to get a little bit closer, so that when the singing does begin, the choir is in the midst of the assembly. There’s a practical objective of having these voices that support congregational song within the congregation by the time the singing gets underway. With such a large space, I don't want to begin too early when the choir's way back there, or else we'll have a little bit of phasing.
James: When there's a moment in the service, say, unplanned, that it's like, "Oh, we've got a gap here," do you have a go-to, I don't know, set of chords or something, or tune that you just hop on and play?
Chad: Sometimes yes, sometimes no. For instance, when the former Archbishop of Canterbury was here preaching, there was a problem at the parking garage or a traffic jam, and so just a few minutes before the service, I think Dr. Highben came in and was relaying a message from the ministry staff, just saying, "We won't start until about 11:05 or 11:07, so you're on." I should say that organists also study improvisation; we practice it so that we're prepared and ready to do things.
James: So just to set the scene, there's, say, 500 people there already, and you get the message, like, "Go ahead, just start playing something before 500 people."
Chad: Yeah, well, if there's a hymn coming up that I know, for instance, let's say it was "Lift High the Cross," I might just establish the tonal space. So that's a hymn that happens to be in C major, so maybe as the improvisation starts, I'll just lay down a C to say, this is our little sphere in which this will happen, and maybe take little ideas of the phrase and kind of play with that, and then for contrast, maybe go to minor and do things like that.
James: So you're holding a chord there and then playing some on the scale of that?
Chad: Holding a chord, doing figurations based on the tune. What's hard about, for instance, a day like that, is you don't know exactly how long to be, and so one thing organists want to be attentive to is not only the techniques that allow you to just have free inventiveness. So, for instance, in that, the melody ascends first by a fourth and then comes down a step, so one thing you could do in the middle, if you've done that for too long and it's like, "Okay, we need a new idea," you can invert it, and so you find a new idea that way. You can also play around with changing those intervals.
James: That's where your music theory classes really come in [crosstalk].
Chad: Yeah, and then thinking more broadly about form. So, if we start here in C major and we do all that for a while, maybe all of a sudden we drop down to A-flat major or something like that, find our way here, and then find our way back home, so thinking about that road map as well.
James: Now, since we're talking about improvisation, this September 14th service, we keep talking about it, ended with a planned improvisation on a hymn tune, "Hoc Signum Crucis." It's just, to me, remarkable. I get to peek with the video and see the hands and feet flying everywhere, and realizing none of this is actually written down anywhere. So, can you talk about when you know you're going to improvise, how do you approach it? Do you practice ahead of time? Do you have some ideas? I want to listen to that and then have you talk about it. So let's first listen to improvisation on "Hoc Signum Crucis," performed by Chapel Organist Chad Fothergill.
[Hoc Signum Crucis plays]
James: So, Chad, we're listening to the untrained ear. It sounds like a very elegant, scripted piece of music that is completely planned and directional, but you're improvising, so how can you do that?
Chad: Through a lot of listening to other people do it, and just a lot of study. I have worked out a little bit what my roadmap is, but what's going to happen in the moment, I'm usually not exactly sure of. So, just a little bit more context for this day: a lot of the choral music and hymns for this day were really in this 19th-century style. So we sang music by Sir John Stainer, so the English 19th century, there was an early 20th-century, late, just kind of Victorian 19th-century sounding hymns. The idea for the prelude to be French Baroque or French classical, so just a different color, and the same thing with the postlude, just something a little bit different from what else we've heard in the service. So that was one idea for improvising. Now, I certainly could have played another piece. I knew that we would be ending with "Lift High the Cross," firmly in C major, and there are a lot of lovely C major pieces to play.
James: So what would that ending sound like?
Chad: Let's see. That would have finished, and then launched into something. There's a wonderful piece by Dietrich Buxtehude that just outlines C major in the feet first.
James: So that's a snippet from another piece.
Chad: Yeah, so that would have been fun to play, but I had worked a lot on this Grigny piece, and so time was also of the essence. What do I have time to prepare?
James: So you'd spend a lot of time practicing the prelude, so then the postlude, you say, "Hey, I'm going to improvise, so I'm not practicing so much."
Chad: And this particular plainsong melody, this is also a very old feast of the church that goes back several centuries, and so sometimes on those days I like to look for older melodies, like from the plainsong tradition, which is a long stay. Even Grigny's piece is based on plainsong as well, so it seemed like a good bookend to do plainsong and plainsong around all of this 19th- and 20th-century repertoire. And this particular melody, there's these online databases that have collected all these versions of melodies, and one that I found for this particular text actually started with that same interval as "Lift High the Cross." So part of me wondered if the composer of that tune maybe knew this. It was sort of an interesting, again, very subtle connection, but to me, after we sing "Lift High the Cross," I thought we can start the postlude that way as well. It keeps us in the key that we were just in, and in this particular case it allowed the Flentrop organ, it has a distinct French accent, or part of it does. So we had these French classical sounds at the beginning, and then in the postlude I tried to use even more of the French-sounding stops, and just a little bit more modern French, sort of a toccata style.
James: Awesome.
Chad: That's where all that came from.
James: So, as we start to wrap up here, I want to touch on your teaching. So, obviously, you do a lot of performing, or service playing, even concertizing, but you teach at a church music camp for high school students and have for a long time. How do these high school students respond that they've got Spotify accounts, and they're having music thrown at them all the time. It's poppy, and catchy, and hip-hop, and then you come in with, like, "Hey, this is a repertoire from the last 500 years." How do they respond?
Chad: The fact that they get to make it together, that they're not just listening individually with their AirPods in or anything like that, they're making music together. We also try to find pieces that might relate to what they're studying in choir, band, or orchestra. So if they're playing in the concert band, one of the Holst military suites, or if they're in the orchestra and playing "Planets," we'll try to find a few hymns that use that famous "Jupiter" tune. A lot of the students, those who aren't familiar with the organ, they're fascinated by this thing. "Why are there so many keyboards stacked on each other? Why are these buttons? What are you doing with your feet?" So there's a lot of exposure to the instrument. And then, for students who already do play organ, we had about 30 organ students this past summer. Some of them are interested in pursuing performance careers, so we are trying to show them the depth and breadth of repertoire, but there are some who attend Lutheran Summer Music simply because they are the only person in their congregation who plays, and they want to come and learn about how to do better, or their congregation has sponsored them to come learn about hymn playing, and how to set expectations for the assembly about when to breathe, how to foster trust in your leadership, and all of that.
James: This is wonderful, and so I want to wrap up here. I will say a message that I had a sense of, but has been reinforced, is that the organ music and services is both beautiful and moving just on its face, and there's about five or six layers down to almost everything you're playing for people that know and pay attention and listen, and so, we're never done listening.
Chad: Right, and neither is the organist, hopefully. I think my own personal philosophy about this is that the organ, as you said, there are many layers. It's a wonderful multi-layered dip, or lasagna, I guess, or something.
James: Fair.
Chad: You're trying to be didactic, you're trying to be clear, trying to be supportive, and yet at times you are making connections or trying to give some inspiration. One of my favourite parts of the service, and also most terrifying, is right after the sermon. So if the preacher's sermon, let's say was very bold, declamatory, there's a clear sense that this is the ending, full stop, exclamation point...
James: Amen.
Chad: ...[inaudible] boom, response hymn. There's an energy in the room that comes from something like that, where maybe I'd worked out a fancier introduction or something more subtle, and in the moment, I have to say, "Actually, that's not needed," and leave those plans aside and maybe use them again the next time.
James: Wonderful. That is a great philosophy. To finish, I want to end with what I really did notice on the September 14th service, which is when you and Dr. David Lim, our organ scholar, which surprised everybody by, in that final hymn, "Lift High the Cross," it's a familiar one, it's fitting for the day, but you all were at organs at opposite ends of the chapel, the Aeolian and the Flentrop, and not only handed off like by stanza, but in the introduction you're handing off on just phrases or a few bars. So I want to listen to that and then have you talk us through. So let's listen to the introduction to "Lift High the Cross" from the September 14th service here at Duke Chapel with Dr. David Lim and Chapel Organist Chad Fothergill alternating.
[Lift High the Cross plays]
James: So Chad, these organs are, I don't know, 200 feet apart at least. You're kind of tossing the musical football back and forth. How did you do it?
Chad: Well, I don't remember where the idea came from. David began, he arrived in mid-August, and I believe we were talking one day about how we use the organs in services, and I mentioned that at Christmas and Easter, sometimes we'll trade stanzas back and forth. There'll be an organist at either end for a single hymn; one will play a few stanzas, then it'll go to the other organ. And so we just said, "Well, let's try it." What I think I did is I went and sketched out kind of a rough sketch with maybe some melody and chords where the Aeolian started and the Flentrop responded, so that echoes from before. I had written out a sketch, and we tried it earlier that week. One thing I had done was one organ would be holding a chord, and the other one would start. But we noticed we couldn't hear the other organ as soon as we started playing, so we realised that those little tiny overlaps of just a few eighth notes were really difficult. So that's when we decided, "Well, we need to revisit this plan," and so what we did is sketched out serving the melody back and forth to each other. We had a little sketch written out where we knew what the person was going to play melodically, and it showed where we would end harmonically. I knew that he'd end on that chord and I'd pick up there, or he'd end here and I'd pick up here. So we had that all sketched out, and then I think we practised it again that morning. We thought, "Okay, we'll try it."
James: Well, Chad Fothergill, thank you so much for sharing your insights into the artistry of an organist.
Chad: Yeah, sure thing. Thanks for having me.
James: Chad Fothergill is the Duke Chapel organist and serves as the primary organist for Duke Divinity School. I'm James Todd, and this has been Sounds of Faith.
[outro music plays]
[END]