Back to the weekly grind. I haven’t had a regular schedule like this in quite sometime. At this point I only have one day a week (Saturday) where I don’t have work scheduled. The ballet accompaniment at this point adds up to about 13.5 hours a week. Officially at church I work 20 hours but it’s always more than that. So I have a pretty full schedule. For me.

I felt a bit vindicated this weekend. I recently murdered some music in public. The piece was an organ work by C. Hubert Parry. It was based on the melody “Rockingham.” It is a lovely little thing and fits nicely on my tiny romantic organ.  I pulled this piece out again for the funeral on Friday as well as another by this composer based on “Martyrdom.” I also played the latter yesterday for the prelude. In all cases I performed this little pieces well. I felt sort of like I owed it to Parry.

We also had applause after our choral rendition of “Jesus Met the Woman at the Well.” I ended up accompanying it on piano and playing in a Taj Mahal blues like manner, mostly understated and just supporting the singers. You can find recordings of it by Peter, Paul and Mary and others on Youtube. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the one that I transcribed by Chanticleer. I did find one that I quite like:

In the afternoon I scanned in the first twenty pages of my Dad’s chronology/memoir.  My son has asked me for copies of this material. I figure I can scan in twenty pages or so and eventually have the entire thing in pdfs. It’s only 160 pages.  I emailed copies to everyone in the family and asked them to let me know if they want to be in on future emailings.

I’ve had a lot of nice compliments on my playing at the recent funeral including a couple of appreciative emails from my boss. I never quite know what hits people about a certain performance. I was at the piano and the organ for a good portion of two and a half hours at Friday’s funeral and played a lot of different music. I figure that different people take away different things from something like that.

One prof corralled me after church and complimented me on the funeral. He told me he liked the way I went from doing a gospel version of “Amazing Grace” on the piano and then went to the organ and played a different version of it. I thanked him and told him the organ piece was by George Shearing.