It’s Heinrich Schütz week and we’ve already had three rehearsals for Saturday’s concert, “From Venice to Dresden,” May 7 at the Lutheran Church of Honolulu at 7:30 pm. The concert is the last one for the season for Early Music Hawaii, and will be conducted by Scott Fikse.

Singers include Honolulu’s finest early music performers, many of them recognized as veterans in the performance of this and other major repertoires of the professional music world in Hawaii:
Emily Herivel, Mihoko Ito, Sydney Branch (soprano);  Sarah Connelly, Melissa Glenn, Sarah Young (alto); Brian Minnick, Tomás Ramos (tenor); Scott Fikse, Keane Ishii, and Buz Tennent (bass).

The instrumental ensemble draws on leading early music specialists, who also perform with major local institutions, including the Hawaii Symphony Orchestra and Hawaii Opera Theater. Darel Stark, Sophia Park (violin);  Kathleen Long (cello)Jason Byerlotzer, Josh Malone (trombone) and myself, Katherine Crosier (organ).

We have one more dress rehearsal tomorrow night and, if I do say so myself, this is going to be a terrific concert! The high level of singing and playing is incredible and is not to be missed! Go to the Early Music Hawaii website to buy tickets — the concert will be livestreamed for those who cannot attend in person.

In my last post, I wrote about having to play tonight’s rehearsal at St. Andrew’s Cathedral because their organist is on vacation. The director, Nicholas Lee, emailed me the music early Tuesday morning. Because I’ve been so focused on the Schütz concert, I hoped that I would be able to learn the Cathedral music in one day—that meant TODAY is the day I have to learn this music before I attempt to play the rehearsal tonight!

A couple of things makes this kind of task easier these days.

First of all, Nick was able to email me the music, and I printed out the PDFs on my home printer. I didn’t have to take the time to go to the Cathedral to pick up the music.

Miracle of miracles, I found every single piece on tonight’s rehearsal order on YouTube. Why is this important? To me it’s like that old saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” That can be translated in this instance to “Hearing a recording is worth a thousand notes!” In other words, hearing the music first before attempting to play the music myself will speed up my learning process— especially since I’m reading from “open score.”

This notion of hearing a recording first as part of the learning process was even authenticated by my favorite musical blogger, Noa Kageyama, a performance psychologist at the Juilliard School of Music who writes a blog called “The Bulletproof Musician.” He wrote a post called “Evidence That Listening to a Recording Could Accelerate the Learning Process,” and says that listening to a recording first is “A bit like being able to see what a 10,000-piece puzzle is supposed to look like before trying to put the pieces together.” Furthermore, he writes “it seems that having an auditory model can accelerate our progress and help us get to a higher level of performance quicker.”

In addition, because I’m having to read “open score,” hearing the music first supercharges the visual aspect of having to read so many staves of music at once. Open score means that there’s no keyboard reduction of all the vocal parts for the accompanist to read from. What it requires is a quick vertical scan of every single measure, in other words, a “smush” as my friend Cindy Scheinert would say!

Come to think of it, I had to create my own keyboard reduction for 90% of the music I’m playing in the Schütz concert — it was all basically “Open Score” and I had to create a basso continuo part. That’s why I took a week to prepare my own keyboard accompaniment for this upcoming concert.

Here’s an example of the rep I’ll be playing tonight:

Other pieces I’ll be playing tonight is Eriks Esenvalds “Magnificat;” William Smith, “Preces and Responses;” Gerald Finzi, “I Praise the Tender Flower;” Ola Gjeilo, “Ubi Caritas;” and Giovanni Matteo Asola “Surrexit pastor bonus.”

All of the music is new to me.

Now, I must admit that some of the YouTube performances were less than stellar — in fact the Asola piece was performed during communion where the sound of babies crying is heard in the background, and the sopranos got lost in several places!

And yet… they put it on YouTube!