Performance Projects
Low Tech Recordings of my
Arrangements on Green Staff Paper.

Contents, CD - 1, completed 2006 December 12, (c) 2006, Courtney B. Duncan

Group 1, The Good
1. How Firm a Foundation
2. Come Ye Sinner
3. Lead On O King Eternal
4. What Wondrous Love
5. Beyond Saturday Night
6. A Charge to Keep

Group 2, The OK
7. Standing on the Promises
8. Sing Praise to God
9. A Savior From On High
10. Challenger Seven
11. Procession of Nobles

Group 3, The Best
12. We Are One
13. Take Time to be Holy
14. George Gershwin Prelude I, Allegro Ben Ritmato E Deciso
15. George Gershwin Prelude II, Andante Con Moto E Poco Rubato
16. George Gershwin Prelude III, Allegro Ben Ritmato E Deciso

Here is the one original piece from that collection, the Challenger Seven (mp3).  (c) 1986, 2006, Courtney B. Duncan
(And here is Challenger Seven as an m4a.)

(If you can't play one of these, e-mail me.)

Notes on Challenger Seven, edited from my CD writeup:

In 1985-6 I had been arranging hymn tunes into instrumentals for church offertories on a weekly basis, working usually on Wednesday.  During this period the Challenger Space Shuttle was lost shortly after launch (January 28, 1986).  The following Wednesday I was unable to think of much else and, like many others in the nation that month, was hurting.  When I sat at the piano that day, I did not arrange a hymn tune but wrote in just a few hours an original piece, Challenger Seven.  The mood of the piece is not wrenching or painful but serene and light.  The image is of a flowery meadow on a bright day with puffy clouds, perhaps a time and place for a picnic.  But, as the piece goes on it becomes reflective then runs into a sudden dead end, as did the flight of the Challenger.  At the conclusion, the theme is restated.  Life goes on after tragedy, though it is then different and usually more somber.

Only after Challenger Seven was complete and had been performed several times did someone point out to me that the opening statement consisted of seven ascending notes.  The figure was intentional, but the number seven was not conscious.

The file recorded above was the only one in the 2006 CD Project that took only one take.  For more on this, e-mail me.

There was a CD - 2, personal archival only.  Recording quality that only I could listen to.

Sheet

The entire program notes for both CDs is here.

Prokofiev Piano Sonata #3
Rachmaninoff Prelude, G minor
Chopin Etude C# minor, Op. 25 No. 7, and others (i.e., Op. 10 No. 5, 6)

Next real project is to work through The Contemporary Keyboardist by John Novello.  Tim Allen (at church) gave me this book in April (09) and I'm saving up music time to work through it.

Also see Pasadena Covenant Church under Faith.

Related -- An answer to the question, "Who is my favorite pianist?"

There is William Kapell, just mentioned.

There's also John Browning who was brought out to Baylor while I was there, answered questions from students, gave master classes (in which I was one of the performers), and a recital.  Also see

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9503E7D61239F93BA15752C0A9659C8B63

"Favorite" is probably not the right word, but he is a pianist I met and worked with briefly.

Of course there's Jane Abbott-Kirk, my major teacher at Baylor.  Favorite teacher, but don't actually know a lot about her as a performer.

And there's Rachmaninoff, but I'd have to say I favor him as a composer, not pianist, though he was one of the greats of both.  (So was Beethoven, it is said)  And Liszt.  It is said of Rachmaninoff that when he heard his own Third Concerto played by Horowitz, he said he'd never perform it again himself.

So yes, anyone my age would be expected to say Vladimir Horowitz, Artur Rubinstein, or even Van Cliburn (for the kids), about whom it is said that Kapell's untimely death left room for his unique, world-changing rise to prominence.  Kapell was his teenage idol too....

There's Sviatoslav Richter, who premiered Prokofiev's 7th Sonata, the first one that the composer himself didn't premier, due to ill health.  Richter was chair of the jury at the first Tchaikovsky piano competition.  He is the one who, when he learned that others of the jury were slightly, imperceptibly weighting their votes so that their favorite Russians would win, cast all of his votes for the competitor he liked saying, "Either he can play or he can't!"  It was Richter who went to Khrushchev himself to get permission to award Van Cliburn the very first first prize, a huge cold war coup for the young American.  Khrushchev is said to have asked, "Is he the best?" and on hearing the affirmative from Richter said, "Well, give him the prize!"  Very Russian of him.

I never actually heard Richter play, or a recording of his.  My connection with him is that I played the Prokofiev 7th on my senior recital.  A similar connection with Kapell is that Kapell single handedly made the Khachaturian piano concerto famous, a movement of which I played with the Baylor Symphony.  (May 1, 1978, the Monday after the composer's death.)

While I'm thinking of every pianist I can think of, there's the Christian pop writer Kurt Kaiser, based at Word, then in Waco or the blind Christian artist, Ken Medema, a rounded entertainer in addition to being a keyboardist.  There's Gilbert Kalish of Stoneybrook (NYU) with whom I might have studied as a graduate student.  There's Susan Starr, as good of a master class teacher as John Browning was as a performer.  I played in her master class when she visited Baylor and she was very helpful.  Chopin's B minor Scherzo.

I would not have said "me."

And no collection would be complete without the gifted, erudite, esoteric, and effusive Glen Gould, or even Leonard Bernstein, conductor and composer first, but yes, a fine pianist also, or similarly Michael Tilson Thomas, for that matter.  Or Oscar Levant, Earl Wilde, or even George Gershwin himself.

These are all favorites in their own quite unique ways.

But, when I went to my room during my formative years and wore out records on my own record player, whose were they?  William Kapell.  To think on this is a journey through complicated, musty memories of a highly entangled past.

If you asked today, I might have to say my favorite musician isn't even a pianist.  The answer would be even more complicated.  My taste has evolved.  Kapell seems young and flashy to me now.  Reckless, daring, and too fast. It is indeed too bad that he didn't live to be ... what would he be now? in his 80s.  I think he might have grown up too.

Prokofiev 7^th Piano Sonata

This is generally thought the best and most difficult of the Prokofiev Sonata's and was the finale on my own senior recital in 1978.

By the time Prokofiev wrote the 7th sonata, he was in such poor health that he could not premier it himself, as he had all of his prior piano works, including the concerti.  The premier was given by Sviatoslav Richter.  Some years later, Richter was the chair of the competition committee that gave van Cliburn the first Tchaikovsky competition prize.  This is to say that Richter's rendering would be considered "definitive" if there is such a thing.  (I don't particularly believe in "definitive" myself.)

As you see from the following link, the final movement is quite flashy and seemingly impossible.  The second movement is my favorite, except for the recapitulation at the very end.  The first movement is quite strong too.  Very nostalgic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erLLwj8jP3Y

My Story of July 20, 1969

I don't really know where to put this story -- Faith?  Work?  Astronomy?  so I'll hide it here in Music.

Anyone who is interested in reading what follows will already know the significance of July 20, 1969.  In centuries to come that Sunday will possibly be remembered and celebrated as the most important date of our millenium.  It will certainly be an international holiday, perhaps nearly on the scale of Christmas.  Or maybe the big blast will be what we now call Yuri's night, April 12, (1961), the date of the first person to orbit the earth.  Or maybe the "leaving of the cradle of humanity fest" will be somehow combined and moved around for convenience.  Or maybe the spacefaring peoples who celebrate the day will no longer be on an earth calendar and such things will be observed in other ways yet to be determined.  Star Dates....

Of course, July 20, 1969 was the date when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first people from earth to land on and walk on the moon as their colleague Michael Collins orbited overhead.  Indeed, they were the first to leave earth and visit the surface any other celestial object.  And they returned safely as the President had ordered.  (It must be noted that two other crews preceded Apollo 11 to the moon and one od them, Apollo 8 with Boreman, Lovel, and Anders, was the first to leave the influence of earth, go to the influence of the moon, and return.  Brave men indeed!)  Apollo was seen ultimately as a low-value stunt or just another battle front in the Cold War, or in whatever other diminutive ways that diminutive minds that want to focus on the smallness of people and their small projects want to diminish it.  But think about it.  That generation in 1969 was the first to leave the surface of the earth, colossally difficult in itself, and then to leave the earth so far behind that a person could cover it with their thumb, and then to walk on another world, and then to return to the earth.  As great an achievement of technology as it was, it was a spiritual achievement nearly beyond imagination.

This is one of those historic moments when everyone remembers where they were.  Many of the billions of people who were on the earth that day have written or told their stories.  This tiny, poorly recalled attempt, is mine.

I was 13 and in the summer break before eighth grade.  Dad was a Methodist preacher, currently assigned to First United Methodist Church in Taylor, Texas, a small city of about 10,000 near Austin.  We lived there for three years.  This summer was the end of the first.

I had models of the Apollo rockets and spacecraft and had made a scale earth-moon system from the den in the rear of the house up the hall to the front guest room.  After all, using a 12 inch globe for earth and a 3 inch baseball for moon, the distance between them, to scale, was 30 feet!  Every day as we would hear on the news how far away the astronauts were from earth and/or moon, I would measure down the hall and move the model, correctly configured for the current part of the flight, to the correct place along the way.  (Often I had to move this tracking equipment out of the way so it wouldn't get walked on during the day.)

Before Taylor, we had lived two years in the Pleasant Grove area of Dallas and before that, back to first grade for me, we had lived in Henrietta, a small town near Wichita Falls.  It was during those years, during those three of dad's appointments, that men were first rocketing into space on Vostok and Mercury, then Soyuz, Gemini, and Apollo.  At Dallas I had Gemini models; at Taylor I had Apollo models.

The reason I mention Henrietta in this story is because of my parallel career in piano, which would play a part on July 20, 1969.

I had been a child prodigy at Henrietta, studying in the pedagogy of Liszt with teacher Don Wittenbach, himself a college-level music student.  As a child I was on the fast track, playing recitals, being featured as the most advanced student in my age group, being prepared for a Concerto Competition which would have come in fifth or sixth or seventh grade, when the Methodist Church moved dad to Dallas.  Dallas being a big place would also have had master teachers and such with whom I could have continued this career, but my family was neither positioned nor skilled at finding them, or even knowing that they should look, and so I had no training in piano for two years.  At Taylor I worked with Mrs. Vioers, an average widow-lady piano teacher with a hearing aid.

But at Taylor I also started playing in church with the organist and choir up front at First UMC.  Dad's other appointment at Taylor was Thrall.  My mother had been a voice major in college herself and the only time I ever accompanied her was as special music one Sunday morning at Thrall.

Something dad would do routinely was to arrange with other preachers to hold revivals at various places.  He did this as an extra-curricular activity from before I was born until after I had left home.  A "revival" is an event where you have church every evening for a week, or even for two weeks, and sing, preach, and otherwise work hard to stir up people's ferver for the Lord once again.  In the early and middle twentieth century a revival was a big social event, on the scale of the circus coming to town.  There was music, there was preaching, there was wailing and gnashing of teeth; people gave their lives to Christ, others recommitted themselves to the straight and narrow.

July 20, 1969 was the first day of a revival.  It wasn't at First Church Taylor; revivals would have been beneath them.  It was, as was often the case, at some church out in the country, I can no longer determine where.  I know it took about 45 minutes to get there.  We'd drive down south through Coupland.  (I would later go to high school with kids from Coupland, so it was rather small.)  Then we headed out into the country on farm roads, to the southeast I believe.  These were small farm roads somewhere out in the farmland between Coupland and Elgin and Lexington.  You'd drive along and come to a right angle turn and it would be marked 45 MPH but we discovered that if you drove through it at 35 MPH it was banked for that speed, you didn't even have to use the steering wheel to make the course change.  Well, not much.

This went on for slow mile after slow mile and then you'd come to a church with a dirt parking lot.  The name "Vashti" comes to mind but I don't think this was Vashti.  The other charge at Henrietta was Blue Grove and Vashti, in my fading recollection, was somewhere out beyond Blue Grove.  (Dad had second and even third charges at every appointment excepting Centennary in Pleasant Grove, Dallas.)  The only person I know who could possibly remember the place and name of that church was dad and he has been gone ten years now.  Even if I'd asked him eleven years ago, I would be surprised if he remembered all this accurately.

All of these rural communities were fading and obscure then.  Kids had grown up and moved into town, or to the big city.  They no longer exist in a way where google-based research can find them today.  Records from way back then aren't online.

So anyway, there we were at a small, nameless church way out in the country.  It would seat maybe 50-75 people.  There was an upright piano facing the back wall behind the preacher on the left.  That was the instrument.  This church had served a dispersed farming community at some time in the past decades and there were a few people around, maybe children or grandchildren of those farmers, or maybe new folks who lived out there for some reason, but there was enough interest that a preacher had somehow come to organize a revival and gotten other preachers to take turns preaching on different nights, including dad.

So we all dressed up, mom and dad and Wilda who was three, and got in the car about four in the afternoon and drove out to this little church a long way out in the farm country and there we were looking at the crescent moon in the west as the sun sat while we waited for church to start, must have been seven or seven thirty.  And when it did we, and thirty or forty other people went in to worship.  The preacher in charge noted that important things were happening tonight, but that the Lord was important too.

Meanwhile, at the moon, Neil and Buzz were powering down to the Sea of Tranquility where the light was just right for a pilot to land a Lunar Module, and avoiding a boulder field that the automatic guidance system was taking them in to, and dealing with computer alarms and overrides, then landing succesfully, then rumbling around in their tiny little home on the surface of another celestial body, and suiting up and going outside and taking some normal steps for men that were giant leaps for humankind, and collecting a few rocks.  But it really wasn't the rocks that were important.  It was being there.

Some of my 13-year-old friends said things like, "Oh yes, I was out and saw them earlier."  This was not true.  Nobody with their eyes looking at the moon saw anything that they didn't just imagine.  If you want we can discuss the physics and optics of all this.  This story isn't the place for that discussion.

I don't think dad preached that night I think it was the preacher who organized it.  All the preachers came every night and they all had their nights to preach.  After service we got in the car and drove home in the dark and turned on the TV just in time for the 10 p.m. news and saw the pictures of the landing and the climb down the ladder and the first steps being replayed again to an awestruck world.  Then we went to bed, because it was bed time.

Yes, July 20, 1969 was a Sunday and I also remember this.  We went every evening that week to the little church and on that Tuesday, so it must have been July 22, 1969, I was assigned to play for the singing part of the service.  This would have consisted of two or three songs before the sermon and one after, and some sort of special music, possibly brought in by a soloist, and me playing something solo out of a hymnbook for an offertory.  That was the first service that I played all by myself, no other musicians involved, except the soloist for the special music who sat something in front of me to sight read on the spot!  At least she didn't ask for it in another key.

So it was a big week in my music development and it was a big week for all humanity.

There were more Apollo missions and I followed them up and down the hall of our house with models.  I eventually had a small department store class refractor telescope and watched Mars zig zag through an opposition over a following summers, it must have been 1970 then sink into the western sunset evening after evening for the following conjunction.  We saw lunar eclipses and looked for Mercury, even in the transit of 1970, but did not see it.  Those are other stories.  In my development in music, church music, astronomy and science, engineering and radio there are many, many other stories.

But I remember where I was on the evening of July 20, 1969.  I just don't know where it was!

cbd - 2010 December 18

(c) Courtney Duncan 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013