As the number of organists continues to fall, churches employ technology to keep the hymns playing

From Reading-

It's no secret that church organists have become scarce these days, as fewer young people are interested in studying organ, and older organists are retiring.

An article by Jonathan M. Pitts in the Baltimore Sun on April 7, 2017, tells of a 200-year-old Episcopal church whose organist retired, and a six-month search turned up only one applicant. Pitts also cites a 2015 survey by the American Guild of Organists showing that 60 percent of its 16,000 members were 58-plus, and only 11 percent were younger than 37.

So what are churches in which organs have always been a staple of their worship doing?

The congregation of St. Thomas Episcopal Church, Morgantown, has found one solution that fits its small group perfectly: a Rodgers digital organ that has the technology to store and play, with a simple touch of a button, hymns, preludes and postludes even when there is no organist available.

More here-

https://www.readingeagle.com/life/article/technology-can-help-make-up-for-a-decline-in-the-number-of-organists

LDS musician writes music for St. Mary's Holy Week celebrations

From Utah-

For the Christian world, Sunday begins the celebration of Holy Week, the days leading to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, also known as the Passion. It is followed by Easter Sunday, and what Christians believe was his resurrection.

To celebrate these series of events, St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Provo will feature special presentations from Christian Asplund’s “The Passion and Resurrection according to St. Mark” at 7:30 p.m. Good Friday and 8:30 a.m. Easter Sunday.

Asplund, a Mormon and professor at Brigham Young University in music composition and music theory, is known for his avant-garde pieces and garage/home performances.

The Asplund version of the Passion involves a marriage of classical and jazz with a bit of hymns from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints blended in for choral pieces.

“I’ve been doing house concerts all my life,” Asplund said. “I do music that’s between the cracks.”

More here-

https://www.heraldextra.com/news/local/faith/lds-musician-writes-music-for-st-mary-s-holy-week/article_40f30315-c49e-5b04-8a4d-9c4f030be1f0.html

A better way to authorize liturgical texts

From Liturgy and Music-

For the next several weeks, the SCLM will present an essay describing a portion of its Blue Book report and explaining the thinking that shaped our conclusions. We invite your comments and hope that our conversation here will be beneficial to the legislative committees of General Convention.

This essay explains the SCLM’s response to constitutional and canonical issue that complicate the consideration of many liturgical issues, including some that will come before this convention. As Paul Fromberg writes: “Texts that churches use every Sunday, across the breadth of the Episcopal Church, have very tenuous constitutional and canonical authorization.” The SCLM believes it is time to create a more rational process for authorizing such texts. For that reason it recommends passage of Resolutions A062 and A063.

On the surface, the work of creating beautiful, meaningful liturgy may seem to be all about the poetic. Liturgists are like poets to the degree that we attempt to give a shape, in language, to all of our inchoate experiences of God. But there are also a lot of nuts and bolts to the work of crafting liturgy, and not just rules around grammar or rhetorical structure. The SCLM has found that, at the bottom of our toolbox, one of the most powerful tools we must pay attention to are the Constitution and Canons of the Church – vessels that hold the order of the church for the sake of our shared life.

more here-

https://standingcommissiononliturgyandmusic.org

The SCLM Report on Prayer Book Revision: Welcome to the Conversation!

From Liturgy and Music-

As the Blue Book report and resolutions proposed by the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music become available online, the SCLM will present essays about its work at the rate of no more than one essay per week to allow for focused conversation. We invite your comments and hope that our discussion here will be beneficial to the legislative committees of General Convention.

Through resolution A169, the 2015 General Convention directed the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music “to prepare a plan for the comprehensive revision of the current Book of Common Prayer and present that plan to the 79th General Convention.”

At the outset, it’s important to remember that General Convention did not ask the SCLM to begin revising the Book of Common Prayer! Rather, it asked for the construction of a plan for revision for the 79th General Convention to consider. The request was for a thorough and linear process. No efforts to revise the Book of Common Prayer took place this triennium, because that was not what the SCLM was asked to do. The Episcopal Church, through General Convention, has yet to decide whether to revise the prayer book. It will have that conversation this summer at the 79th General Convention in Austin, Texas (July 5-13, 2018). To convey your opinions about prayer book revision, it will be important for you to speak directly with the elected deputies from your diocese, and your bishops.

More here-

https://standingcommissiononliturgyandmusic.org/2018/02/13/the-sclm-report-on-prayer-book-revision-welcome-to-the-conversation/

God’s Own Music

From The New York Review of Books-

The Anglican choral tradition is one of the great successes of English cultural diffusion, to rank with Association Football (soccer), cricket, and the works of William Shakespeare. It has a cultural heft way beyond its parochial and very specific origins, and it turns up in the oddest places. The most incongruous example must surely be the upmarket gloss that Thomas Tallis’s forty-part motet Spem in Alium lends to a down-and-dirty scene in the film Fifty Shades of Grey.

I’m often surprised by how far this music travels. The transposition of the Anglican sound world into the urban jungle of New York seemed rather miraculous the first time I walked into Saint Thomas Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue to bathe in the glories of stained glass–inflected light and English-inflected harmonies. On another occasion, I was in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, for a concert, arriving just after a school shooting in next-door Jacksonville that had made me preternaturally alert to the cultural differences between the Old and the New Worlds. But it turned out that the concert was in St. Paul’s by-the-Sea Episcopal Church. Our greenroom was the church vestry, and I felt strangely at home among the cassocks and surplices, The Oxford Book of Tudor Anthems (some nice Tallis there), and the familiar hardcovers of Hymns Ancient and Modern and The English Hymnal, the red and the green.

More here-

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/02/22/english-songs-gods-own-music/

Organists declining but still in demand for Easter

From RNS-

Eileen Guenther, a church music professor at Wesley Theological Seminary and music lecturer at George Washington University, said the top pulpits in the country that offer good salaries to organists still have applicants lining up for them.

“But the places where it’s trickier are smaller, (with) less dense population, whether it’s rural or suburban,” said Guenther, a past president of the American Guild of Organists. “It’s an aging population in terms of some places. I have students here at the seminary that will say, ‘This woman has been our organist for 72 years.’”


A 2014 survey by the AGO tells the story: More than half of members surveyed (58 percent) reported serving 31 or more years as organist at a religious organization, and most of the members were in their mid-50s to mid-70s.

“In the next two decades, current Boomer members will ‘age out’ of the AGO, with strikingly few younger members able to ‘take their place,’” the 97-page report warned.

More here-

http://religionnews.com/2017/04/13/organists-declining-but-still-in-demand-for-easter/

Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music will present options to General Convention on possible prayer book revision

From ENS- (lots of links)


The Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music (SCLM) plans to present the 2018 General Convention with four options regarding the possible revision of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, said the Rev. Devon Anderson, commission chair.

The options, discussed in detail on the SCLM’s blog, are:

Revision of the prayer book beginning after the 2018 General Convention;
Creation of a book or books of alternative services beginning after the 2018 General Convention, with no accompanying revision of the prayer book;

A postponement of the decision on the prayer book and supplemental resources until the completion of a church-wide conversation on liturgical theology and practice during the 2018-2021 triennium
A step back from liturgical revision and a commitment to exploring the theology of the current prayer book in greater depth.

More here-

http://episcopaldigitalnetwork.com/ens/2016/12/06/standing-commission-on-liturgy-and-music-to-present-options-on-possible-prayer-book-revision/