TITLE: (1) ALBERT SCHWEITZER; (2) NO ORGAN CD’S AT BOOKSTORES;
(3) BILL MOORE, MUSIC PERFORMANCE PSYCHOLOGIST, INTERVIEWED IN “AMERICAN MUSIC TEACHER”
Two factors caused me to write about Albert Schweitzer this month: I saw the ad for the “Albert Schweitzer Organ Festival” in The American Organist recently. It was held in September ‘08 at First Church of Christ in Wethersfield, Connecticut. The second reason I chose the topic was that ever since I began organ lessons, I have owned Volume V of organ music by J.S. Bach, published by G. Schirmer, the trio sonatas and concertos, and on the cover it says, “edited by Charles Marie Widor and Albert Schweitzer.” I always wondered, “Who is Albert Schweitzer?” I got some books out of the library about him.
There was an item in the Potomac Chapter AGO newsletter, the “Heel and Toe,” around June about an Organ Composition Competition, its deadline is January 14, 2009 (Dr. Schweitzer’s birthday). It involves writing the music for a 16-minute Tone Poem for Narrator and Organ entitled the “Albert Schweitzer Portrait.” The words for it were selected by Thurston Moore and approved by Dr. Schweitzer’s daughter. Visit the Tennesee Player’s web site for the words and for the competition entry form, http://www.TennesseePlayers.org
Here is the first installment of my report on Dr. Schweitzer:
Dr. Schweitzer (1875-1965) was a philosopher, theologian, physician, musicologist, and organist. He won the 1952 Nobel peace prize. In his photo in The World Book Encyclopedia (1957), he looks a little like Steve Martin, the comedian!
Albert Schweitzer was before my time–he died when I was a teenager. The book I used for this report, Albert Schweitzer’s Mission, Healing and Peace, published by W.W. Norton & Co., was by Norman Cousins, for many years a writer for the Saturday Evening Review Magazine, who in 1978 became a professor of medical humanities at UCLA in California. It is about Schweitzer’s years at Lambaréné, Africa. There was a film about his life which was playing when the Doctor was 82. During this period “Le Grand Docteur,” as the people there called him, was worried about the international accumulation of nuclear force and wrote letters, 45 between 1957 and 1963 which were received by Norman Cousins, to foreign leaders about his concerns: The leaders were Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy in the US, Krushchev in the U.S.S.R (formerly the Russian and nearby nations), and Nehru of India. On April 27th, 1957, his message about the nuclear threat was displayed electronically in Times Square, New York City. In 1957 and later his messages were broadcast over Radio Oslo, Norway.
This book is about his work at Lambaréné, where he built a hospital, and many of the aforementioned letters are printed in the book beginning on p. 244. Clara Urquhart worked in Africa with him as his interpreter, since he spoke fluent French and German but wasn’t comfortable speaking English. He provided health care to the natives in all areas of medicine and even treated tuberculosis and leprosy there. Dr. Schweitzer believed that “people are more respectful of advice, especially of a medical nature, if they have to pay for it,” Norman Cousins wrote. Many of the staff members at Lambaréné were from the Netherlands. The hospital was on the Ogowe River, and the Africans who took passengers upstream in canoes could paddle for hours!
The book gives general descriptions of his interactions with people there. The Doctor was kind and loving in his outlook toward the patients, but some people thought his manner toward the native Blacks was unfeeling and authoritarian. “He is a patriarch,” they said. The Doctor was married. Mrs. Schweitzer spoke English.
One of my favorite passages in this book was on page 17, a description of the piano the Doctor played there. Dr. Schweitzer was in the habit of playing one hymn for the staff of 15 to sing with him at the end of their evening meal. The author mentioned that humidity and native creatures could cause problems, and told how goats and ants had eaten some of the Doctor’s unpublished manuscripts. On page 17 the author, who reported that the Doctor had renounced a distinguished career as an organist and pianist for his medical work, describes the condition of the piano the Doctor had to endure: “It must have been at least fifty years old. The keyboard was badly stained; large double screws fastened the ivory to each note. I tried to play but drew back almost instantly. The volume pedal was stuck and the reverberations of the harsh sounds hung in the air. One or more strings were missing on at least a dozen keys. The felt covering the hammers was worn thin and produced pinging effects.” wrote Norman Cousins.
(2) NO ORGAN CD’S AT BOOKSTORES
I was shopping at Border’s Bookstore recently, but I believe one would find the same situation at all of the chain bookstores. They had a good selection of classical music CD’s on the shelves. However, under the sections for César Franck, Ned Rorem, Olivier Messiaen, and Max Reger, there were NO recordings of organ music! I felt as though I had been socked in the stomach, that the door had been slammed in my face! Music lovers are missing out on the most beautiful and most heart-rending compositions by these four composers, since their compositions for organ are not represented here.
(3) BILL MOORE, MUSIC PERFORMANCE PSYCHOLOGIST, INTERVIEWED IN “AMERICAN MUSIC TEACHER”
In the October/November 2008 “American Music Teacher,” the MTNA magazine, Jane Magrath, a well-known piano teacher from Norman, Oklahoma interviewed Bill Moore, a musical performance psychology consultant. Dr. Moore emphasizes that performers should realize that there is a difference between the psychological skills useful for practicing music and those useful for performing music. For practicing, he says, “three psychological practicing skills [are] (1) the ability to self-monitor correctness, (2) the ability to give self-instruction, and (3) the ability to analyze cause and effect with regard to mistakes,” but he says “these same mental skills get in the way of performing our best.” He says, in effect, you must practice the performance mindset.
He defines the mental performance skills required for a good performance: “Courage . . . the ability to direct your will to overcome internal and external forces” [such as] “fear, self-doubt, over-thinking, . . .and others’ expectations and/or environmental conditions.” He says the second performance skill is trust, “trust what you have trained . . . and accept the ability to see things as they are, without judgment as to right or
wrong . . .” He suggests that performers need to have “vivid and accessible memories or sensations of playing great.”
Furthermore, he defines trust as being separate from confidence. An example of confidence he gives is “I know I can play this passage.” Bill Moore defines trust as “the ability to free oneself from any conscious control over correctness at the moment of skill execution.” He explains that trust can be unstable and that it’s a challenge to maintain this feeling for a whole performance. Finally, he differentiates confidence from arrogance thusly: “When someone is confident, they have respect for the difficulty of the task they are getting ready to take on, but believe they can meet the challenge. Arrogance is not respecting the difficulty of the task.” [“American Music Teacher,” October/November 2008, pp. 61-65]
I found Dr. Moore’s analyses to be largely true. Some examples of times when I was unknowingly acting out his principles: (1) about 10 years ago when I was to perform, from memory, piano works such as Chopin waltzes and “Flight of the Bumblebee” by Rimsky-Korsakov at a very noisy shopping mall, I prepared by playing my pieces at home with a loud radio blasting away nearby, to help concentration. (2) last year I played Duruflé’s “Prelude sur le Nom d’Alain”, 1st half, from memory at a church service. At the service I didn’t trust my memory and had some slips but kept going. After the service, inspired by the Reader’s sermon about trusting the Lord, I played it perfectly! It was a good feeling.
November 17th, 2008 at 12:06 pm Dr. Schweitzer was truly a beautiful man.