Back in northeast Ohio

I've been back less than 48 hours, but it feels like a week has gone by. This past fall I heard Myron Scholes give a lecture in which he stated that understanding the markets means understanding "volatility-time." By that he meant that markets react differently based on how much trading activity is going on. I think it's a powerful analogy if only because we can all relate to it; time does seem to compress and expand based on how busy we are!

Last night was the first worship and music committee meeting of 2010, and we made plans and selected hymns through Palm Sunday. For me this is a season of anticipation and planning - the semester is about to begin, a new church season is only a few weeks away, and of course the New Year always brings renewed resolve. Our lives are full of such moments where we pause and form plans for the short term.

Recently, though, I was reminded of the macro picture of time. A recent acquaintance of mine works as a military consultant in Afghanistan, and he said the biggest problem in the Middle East isn't anything that the average person would normally list. The biggest problem, he argued, was the lack of consistent long-term goals, as administrations and personnel change at all levels from enlisted men and women to the President. How can you work effectively on a daily level if you don't know where you're headed next year?

What's true in that setting is also true in so many aspects of the world. How can elementary school teachers create standards and lesson plans when the next pedagogical revolution or testing regime might be just around the corner? How can a church grow in faith and community if there is no long term vision? We've made our plans for the spring now, and it's important that we plan for next Sunday and also for 10 years from now.

Back on the micro level, music is shaped in time. Rhythm defines the structure by which we sing liturgy and hymns. I found a hymn text that reminds us of the importance of perspective on time that I thought I'd share in closing today:

Life at best is very brief,
Like the falling of a leaf,
Like the binding of a sheaf,
Be in time!
Fleeting days are telling fast
That the die will soon be cast,
And the fatal line be passed,
Be in time!

Merry Christmas!

It's ironic that in this season where church music is everywhere my blog became silent. Perhaps it's fitting: we all know the tunes and the texts - what could I add? But we did have very successful Christmas Eve services at Bethany this week, in my opinion. I hope everyone enjoyed our guest brass players. They are all students at Baldwin Wallace college and are excellent players, who provided our services with festive hymn arrangements to celebrate the holiday.

I also hope that you found the Proclamation of the Birth of Christ to be a meaningful part of the service. David spent many hours on his computer writing up the music for us, and there was a great deal of input and participation by many others on the Worship and Music committee and staff. We took an ancient text and modernized it, used some familiar hymn tunes, and hopefully got the Christmas service off to a great start!

Thanks also to the Chancel Choir and Bell Choir for their participation and to the Altar Guild who decorated the church so beautifully. It was a great holiday thanks to everyone I've mentioned and no doubt many more. I hope everyone enjoyed the day with family and friends.

Tomorrow will be our service of lessons and carols. Christmas continues! Come join us to sing the hymns that celebrate the season. And tune back into the blog next week as life returns to its more typical schedule and pattern!

Liturgy tweaks and some favorite hymns

The worship and music committee met this week to make plans through the end of the church year, as well as some preliminary discussions about Advent and Christmas. Just as we're getting settled into the fall season, we're already trying to get ready for the winter.

Among our decisions for this coming Sunday, we decided to make a few minor tweaks to the liturgy. During the Alleluia, the choir will be singing the verse before we all repeat the refrain. Then we'll be bringing back the sung responses before and after the Gospel lesson. The committee agreed that singing "Glory to you, O Lord" and "Praise to you, O Christ" is much more joyous than mumbling. In our opinion, it was a mistake to omit them from the ELW. You're always welcome to provide your own feedback on such issues, but we think it will be a welcome change to the service.

Of course, now that the choir has returned, we're also singing the Psalms again. This Sunday they will be singing an antiphon as well, further enhancing the Psalm. These aren't major changes, but just enough to help keep things fresh. I recently read O Clap Your Hands by Gordon Giles, and he wrote some thoughts related to these changes: "Our worship needs to be kept alive, kept moving by the familiar but also awakened by that which is new, challenging, or striking. Newness in music is not therefore necessarily something freshly composed, but something newly encountered."

This Sunday will also include some great hymns: "Lift High the Cross," "God of Grace and God of Glory," and "What a Fellowship." The last of those was composed by Elisha Hoffman, who has a Cleveland connection. The forecast is for a beautiful Sunday, so we can all get started with beautiful worship music and enjoy a great fall afternoon.

Happy Easter!

Alleluia! Christ is risen indeed! I hope that everyone had a wonderful holiday, likely eating too much good food with family and friends. We are, as always, a post-Easter people, living joyously in these beautiful spring days.


I want to thank everyone who helped fill Lent, Holy Week, and Easter with such wonderful services: the choir, who sang superbly on some challenging repertoire; Cassie and David, for their beautiful solos on Easter; Tim, who enhanced our Easter worship with his trumpet playing; Linda and the volunteers of the altar guild, who did so much work during and between services; Pastor, ushers, acolytes...and everyone else I may be forgetting. It's amazing how many people put forth their effort to serve our church.

I've heard some positive feedback about this blog lately, and I really appreciate knowing that my readers are connecting with Bethany and our music ministry in particular. Your comments and participation are always welcome.

Since I've been asked recently, the way to add your comment (and read others' comments) on the blog is to click on the word "comment" at the bottom of any given link. But you're also welcome to converse with me or any member of the WAM committee anytime. We won't put too much pressure on you to join the choir, I promise, but we sure do welcome participation and suggestions in any form!

Once again, Happy Easter, and we sure hope to see you all back in church next week. Check back here to find out more about the music we'll be singing!

Excellence and joy

One of my recent posts drew a greater than usual number of comments, and we spent a brief moment discussing it at the recent Worship & Music committee meeting. I mention it because it exemplifies the purpose of this blog: to spark discussion and feedback. Thanks to the joy of Google Analytics, I know that our readership has been steady, so if you're reading this I encourage you to join in and leave a message anytime!

Another thing I loved about the earlier discussion was that we ranged from classic Lutheran hymns, Bach, and Mendelssohn, all the way up to Duke Ellington and country-western music. I'd say a rough consensus was that we do need a variety of styles in church, all done well and balanced over time. We can't sing your favorite, though, if you never tell us what it is.

Church music is about more than just who composed it, and my philosophy is to strive for excellence and joy in the presentation of any music. If the musicians don't feel confident joy about what they're singing, how could the congregation?

Joy, you might be asking - during Lent?!? Yes! We are in a season where a part of our soul should be giddy with anticipation of the greatest news ever received. The climax of the Gospel story is near (and Gospel means "good news," after all).

Rather than prattle on in my own feeble attempt to explain my musical philosophy of Christian joy, I'll leave it to you to hear it in my music, as well as in this quote from Gene Robinson's autobiographical work In the Eye of the Storm:
"If we acted as if we truly believed the message of Incarnation...if we believed that human flesh was an appropriate and honorable abode for God and for ourselves...if we saw our souls and bodies as a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice to God...then people would be beating down the doors of our churches to find out what makes our lives so joyful, our relationships so full of mutual respect, and our outreach to the world so central to who we are."

Talking about music

Tonight is the Worship and Music Committee meeting, a group of people who spend a significant amount of our time involved in the task of talking about music. It's an inherently odd endeavor, to talk about music, just as odd as writing about music. It works best if we share an aural language of sound in our collective memory.

What we'll try to accomplish tonight is an appropriate mix of musical styles, familiar and new hymns, appropriate liturgy for the season, and all of it in the Lutheran-inspired, God-focused endeavor of worship. Quite a task!

In a brilliant autobiographical play of Maria Callas, Terrence McNally has her recite this line: "Vowels are the inarticulate sounds of the heart. In consonants lie the meaning." That's such a simple but intriguing approach to music. So many emotions can be easily conveyed in simple, vowel-based sounds: gasps of surprise, an "oooo" of admiration, the "mmmm" sigh of relaxing in a warm bed on a cool spring night. So we can think of music as emotion mixed with intellect, pure sound with added layers of meaning, all projected through the wonder of the human voice.

Not everyone talks about music in terms of composers and music theory, not everyone wants to talk about the minutiae of pronunciation (as outlined in the diagram), but if you simply want to share an opinion about what music gets sung in church (and when and how), then you're always welcome to join our online conversation here or in person anytime!