What are your favorite hymnals? Crawford Wiley and I talk about our top five favorites. Since none are hymnals that our congregations sing from, we use them in our service planning and sometimes devotionally.
New year, new decade – pretty exciting stuff! (Or, you know, totally arbitrary….try explaining why today of all days is the “new year” to a 3-year-old!) So today, 12 resources for a thoughtful, organized year – I hope some are helpful to you. Happy New Year!
How can singing foster our relationships with strangers? And how can singing not just foster relationships, but be a powerful means of hospitality? Dr. Helen Phelan draws on her ethnographic work with a Congolese-Irish choir to show the potential of “sonic hospitality” through singing together.
For those of us seeking to support women composers and increase representation in our teaching…a new initiative I’ve started: The Women Composers Challenge. This past year I bought 50% music by women composers and tried (mostly successfully) to program at least one choral or organ piece by a woman composer in every concert and church …
An excellent new collection for the organist who has everything. Musician’s earplugs, for safe, unmuffled listening.
We are blessed with a wealth of hymns that are suitable for funerals and memorial services. As you select music for your loved one’s funeral – or as you help a family choose music for a service – it can be helpful to see a list of hymns to select from. This post gathers together …
What language does God speak, and how can the metaphor of language help us better understand our relationship to God? Dr. Jean Kidula, Professor of Music at the University of Georgia, shows how thinking about dialect expands our ways of thinking about the music we use to worship God.
In this conversation with Dr. John Witvliet, director of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, we talk about making change in our churches in a week-by-week process, the importance of resources to validate aspects of ministry that aren’t currently supported, and – the big one – how important teachability and curiosity is to leadership.
Want to avoid dead air and awkward pauses in worship services? Planning for flow can help. Bill and I share how we plan for a smooth flow in worship services, plus the small steps we take that make a big difference.
Learn about: the Old Hispanic Chant, methods for analyzing music we can’t hear, and what we can learn from medieval processions. Here’s the Big Why: “I think these artifacts that we have – these musical and liturgical artifacts – are as valuable as a Gothic cathedral. And in a way even more valuable, because a …
Old Hispanic Chant with Emma Hornby, on Music and the Church Ep. 42 Read More »