Choral music was founded, nurtured, and developed almost exclusively within the Christian church for hundreds of years. To participate in choral singing is to participate in a historically Christian art form. If you choose to sing in a choir and do it with an accurate...
A major part of life is spent looking for community. The fact that people can reach the extraordinary intellectual precocity of great music, and experience its beauty and ethical integrity by singing together with 50 or 100 other people, that's an extraordinary thing....
There is in all true church music a spirit of adoration, aspiration and reverence, and a sense of assurance. To aid the soul to become more keenly and deeply conscious of itself, its supreme personal quality, its high and enduring worth, is the ideal of church music....
Music at its best… is the grand archeology into and transfiguration of our guttural cry, the great human effort to grasp in time our deepest passions and yearnings as prisoners of time. Profound music leads us–beyond language–to the dark roots of our scream and the...
Composers know how to use harmony and melody like a net to catch beauty's colors and radiance. And when we like what we hear, we open our pores to take in more--just as we close them against what seems ugly or offensive. Isn't that why we remember so vividly the hours...
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don't open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down a musical instument. Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
Whatever your listening experience, you take music through the senses. Hearing is like breathing, but through the ears. Sound flows into and throughout your body like oxygen. You can think of the body, with its nerves and heartstrings, as the lyre upon which your life...
Music is a lovely gift of God which has often wakened and moved me. Music drives away the devil and makes people forget all wrath, unchastity, arrogance, and the like. My heart bubbles up and overflows in response to music, which has so often refreshed me and...
Jesus said nothing about endowments, pension funds, canon law, stewardship campaigns, diocesan structures, music programs, or even potluck lunches. He didn’t mention who would own church real estate. He said nothing about altar guilds, and we aren’t even sure where he...
There is wonder all around us, and it is God’s will to fill us with that wonder that makes life enchanting and sacred. We cannot help but sing when that happens. Maybe that is why, of all the religions in the world, there is none with the wealth of music that the...