Monster piano players and guitar players and golf pros and Chinese acrobats begin training for their careers just a few years after their exit from the womb.
Tiger Woods, the superstar of professional golf, was just barely out of his toddler days when his dad put a golf club in his hands.
The Chinese acrobats and contortionists one sees in the Cirque du Soleil productions are in the first years of grade school when their conditioning and instructions begin.
We church musicians started our training with prepubescent piano lessons. A couple of years later we were initiated into music ministry., although it was never called music ministry (only wealthy Protestant churches had music ministers whose names appeared on the official church stationery), when we were drafted into service to play for benediction and maybe the daily high Mass.
My initiation was to play the “Stabat Mater” verses between the Stations of the Cross and then “O Salutaris Hostia” and “Tantum Ergo” at benediction. Oh, and then there was a Polish hymn that the women’s chorale—a.k.a. the bubbas, in full vesture of babushkas and over-sized dresses—sang.
Other than the Polish Chorale, does that sound familiar to some of you?
Wittingly or unwittingly, our preparation for a lifetime career in some type of church music was launched. It is a career that consumes most of our waking hours and sometimes is the cause of our worst nightmares.
I will wake up in a swat during a dream where I can’t find the organ key or the choir didn’t show up. The doctor says I will get over it. Hmmm. It’s easy for her to say.
This summer many of us will meet at the NPM conventions or at St. John’s, Collegeville, Minnesota, study week on sacred music or at the Chicago AGO convention.
The conversations will be universal as we trash some of the music at the liturgies, brag about our Holy Week and Easter triduums, laugh hysterically at the latest wedding from hell, and just ventilate to people of like minds and like backgrounds.
It’s like meeting favorite cousins seen only at weddings and funerals. We may not have the same concert aspirations as last week’s piano whiz kids, but we had the same early formation of piano lessons and practice, practice, practice.
We may not have had nazi parents who diminished our self-worth or a “nutso” piano teacher of dubious qualifications as in last week’s TableTalk, but we did have a commitment to become better at our craft and art.
For us organists, we achieved a higher place in the music ministry ladder when we sat down at a console with two keyboards, one pedalboard, and booth of our hands and both of our feet.
If we were really, really good, we used not only our left foot but also our right foot, both of which were covered in cute little black shoes, each with a pronounced heel.
Not many of us play for hundreds of spectators like Tiger Woods or Diane Bish, but if we would count up the number of folks at the Saturday–Sunday liturgies, we would come close.
None of us command the fee or championship dollars these pros command, but we . . . , but we . . . , but we . . . —let’s not go there.
Happy midsummer
