This is Part Two of a two-part series featuring interviews with Jeffrey Brillhart and Zebulon Highben, summer clinicians for the Augsburg Fortress 2013 Music Clinics. This week, enjoy some of Zebulon Highben’s thoughts on questions posed by Jane Knappe.

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This is Part One of a two-part series featuring interviews with Jeffrey Brillhart and Zebulon Highben, summer clinicians for the Augsburg Fortress 2013 Music Clinics. This week, enjoy some of Jeffrey Brillhart's thoughts on questions we posed.

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August is the time many church musicians begin planning for Advent through Pentecost. There is a multitude of composers to choose from for new music and, of course, well-known favorites. As we begin our preparations, we try to reflect the readings and prayers of a day through our organ selections, choir anthems and hand bell repertoire. However, there are many compositions of a general nature that fit many different contexts. One of these is Organ Music by Women Composers before 1800 - VIV 303. We know that women have been composing organ music for at least five centuries. Calvert Johnson, the editor of the volume writes in the preface, “The first organist, Thais, was the wife of Ctesibos, the inventor of the organ, in the third century BCE, at Alexandria, Egypt, but very few organ compositions by women before 1800 have survived. There is considerable iconographic evidence from antiquity of the activities of women organists, many of them Christian, because their sarcophagi depict the organ.”

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We choose music for worship to help us tell the story of Christ to each other. We tell this story over and over – never tiring of the details – because the subject is so rich. We tell how God loved us so much that he sent his Son into our world. We tell how Jesus loved us so much that he died for our sins. We tell how Jesus conquered death and extends his grace to us. We tell how Jesus the Christ is at work in our lives and in our community.

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I find warm-ups to be essential to any choir rehearsal for two major reasons: 1) they are an opportunity to teach musical concepts in isolation that will be used later in the rehearsal on the choir’s repertoire; and 2) they help transition the voice and the body from a day’s worth of speaking and slouching, preparing them for the very different set of demands placed upon the singer by the act of singing.

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Introducing African Hymnody

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Some of my conducting textbooks spend numerous pages on how to structure the choir rehearsal, covering a host of factors to consider. Personally, I don’t bother putting that much thought into it. It’s already all I can do to spend time getting to know the music and make musical decisions about it, let alone think about a detailed rehearsal structure. So I’ve resigned myself to simply what seems to work, which, for me, is this:

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Think liturgical music for your choir. Arrangements of the psalms abound. Sing an appropriate psalm in addition to the appointed psalmody for the day. Opportunities for attendant music are the gathering, offering, and distribution of communion.

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So you have a choir of 12 or 8 or 5 or all women and one male. The list of variations could go on. What are you, as director, to do about it? Carl Schalk has said “The smaller parish can be an exhilarating place for worship and church music, but it requires creativity and resourcefulness.” (Cross Accent, Journal of the Association of Lutheran Church Musicians, “Getting More for Less”, November 2012). Now read the same phrase substituting “smaller choir” for “smaller parish.”

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Maybe the choir’s scheduled to sing on Rally Day and you only get one rehearsal the week before…
Maybe it’s that first Sunday after Epiphany and half the choir can’t make it out of their driveways…
Maybe it’s a Sunday where nothing in the library fits and you’ve spent the choir’s budget already…

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