[Editor's note: Last week we heard from Karol Kimmel on building your youth choir program, with ideas about scheduling, worship suggestions, and continuing education. This week: more ideas from Kimmel on choir visibility, rehearsal punctuality, recruitment, and team-building.]

Read More > >

[Editor's note: Rally Day and the startup of choral seasons is upon us, but there's still time to get organized for fall! Thanks to Anne Krentz Organ for writing these seasonal pointers, helpful whether you're highly organized or running last-minute. Either way, we're here to help with Prelude's ever-growing resources. Blessings to you in your music ministries this September.]

Read More > >

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.”

Read More > >

With Easter but a week away, it seems somewhat odd that I would be working on writing this blog about planning. But then again, this is precisely the time that I had planned to write this blog. So to everything, there is a time and a place.

Read More > >

You probably will read this posting during Lent with its familiar themes and moods. Lent also plunges us into complicated, intense pastoral realities. The forty days invite us to admit our private or public grief, anger at God, confusion at injustice and pain, need for reconciliation, and despair over sin. The pastoral use of music in these deep-toned times of confession and renewal can be a true challenge.

Read More > >

There’s a kernel of wisdom which has been true for me more often than not: “The journey is more important than the destination.” Unfortunately, when it comes to worship planning, something eventually has to make its way into a bulletin for Sunday morning, so we can’t just bask in the glory of the journey forever. But when time is short and worship has to get planned, it’s easy to let the destination (the bulletin) control the journey instead of the other way around. With that in mind, I’ll let you in on my own planning process and hope that it may inspire you to let the planning inform the bulletin more often than not.

Read More > >

I recently took a new full time call as Minister of Music and Worship in a large, thriving ELCA congregation. Before this I was a teacher in an Episcopal school and part time Minister of Music in a small town congregation, doing as many do in juggling responsibilities, commitments, and beyond. I left a music program that I had built over ten years, serving since my high school days. I had a choir of forty, a full handbell group, a volunteer directed children’s choir, numerous instrumentalist, really it was a music program that anyone would be satisfied to lead. But this awesome and secure position was not full time and I was ready for more. I am sure many of you have had this feeling and possibly even acted on it. So with a great leap of faith, prayer, and hope I took my first new call, ever.

Read More > >

I’ve always been a big fan of Advent. Of course, in my childhood it was easy to associate Advent with preparation for Christmas—stores, home, and church being decorated with evergreens and colored lights, the house filled with the scent of cookies and breads in the oven when I came home from school, and carols playing on LPs on our big wooden cabinet stereo. The South Dakota winter was growing colder, darker, and snowier, but indoors was a four-week bustle of growing anticipation.

Read More > >

 

Read More > >

 

Read More > >