Improvisation Blog: October 2009 - May, 2010

Service postlude 18th April, 2010 Recorded at First Presbyterian Church in Orange NJ.

Improvisation on G.F. Handel’s tune Judas Maccabeus, most commonly associated with the text, ‘Thine is the Glory’. There is an audacity to the Christian’s spiritual reality of the Resurrection: The firm belief that the God-Man Jesus Christ defeated the final enemy, that is death. The words of this hymn, “No more we doubt Thee, Glorious Prince of Life! Life is nought without Thee!” is not a statement that can be made with demure timidity or lackluster lack of enthusiasm. To say those words and mean them; trust them; truly embrace them, one must be wiling to enter a place of ecstatic spiritual joy.

This piece, performed as the postlude at First Presbyterian Church in Orange on Easter Sunday, 2010 is an attempt to convey such a triumphant soul-state. A parishioner once said to me, ‘I just don’t like Easter as much as I like Christmas… Christmas is so joyous, so sentimental. Easter always strikes me as kind of morbid.’ I suppose in a way the thought makes sense – There are elements of the Nativity story that are very easy to relate to in very human ways: A young girl and an unexpected pregnancy; a kindly fiancé willing to unconditionally accept the questionable birth; the seemingly bucolic vision of a child born in the midst of friendly barnyard animals. Easter on the other hand forces one to confront the mystery of an open, empty grave – both Jesus Christ’s and our own. By definition the celebration of the Resurrection points us away from the comfortable realities of life defined solely by birth and death. In this improvisation, based on Palestrina’s tune Victory, generally wedded to the text, ‘The Strife is O’er’ I attempt to portray the joyous but unfathomable wonderment of the believer’s life, suddenly unshackled from its mortal boundaries.