Today I have a large, difficult funeral to play. My boss and I met for an hour yesterday strategizing about the service. I like working this closely with the celebrant about a service. I pointed out to her that usually I have to make decisions on my own because we don’t have time for this kind of fine tuning.

Decisions like what style to do certain hymns in.

The sequence hymn today is “We’ll understand it better by and by” by the gospel music composer,  Charles Tindley.

I found this lovely video on YouTube which gave me some ideas how to lead it today.

I will playing music by other African American composers in the prelude as well as some pretty soothing Anglican organ music by Vaughan Williams and Parry. The extended family of Dr. Young, the deceased, has been Anglican for generations.  She herself received her doctorate from the prestigious Howard University and taught African American literature as well as a course on hip-hop.

It will be an interesting funeral.

My trio also rehearsed yesterday. We manage to recover our equilibrium after having our performance pretty  much ruined by thoughtless people Sunday.

We played through the Haydn piano trio movement we played Sunday with the repeats. We didn’t do the repeats Sunday due to length considerations. But we tend to prefer to do them if possible. Repeats enhance the meaning of this music and affect the interpretation.  I always think about how I’m going to do sections when I play them twice.  When a melody or a significant cadence occurs twice, I feel like I have to reconsider what I am going to say with it. Of course this kind of subtlety is pretty moot when people interrupt your performance like they did Sunday. We have decided to learn the rest of this lovely trio. It’s not all that easy but it’s a good choice to work on.

After this rehearsal, I went and sat in my Mom’s tax people’s office. Wrapped up her 2010 taxes and then went grocery shopping. I’m a busy little bee.