|
This past week I’ve been preparing for our new chant year – practices begin on August 22nd, and our first Mass is September 19th. As before, I was able to have a 1-on-1 discussion with almost every member of our schola, and got some great feedback and ideas about what challenges we should take on [...] You might have heard the notion of leader as servant. I imagine that it might be based in the model of Christ as servant of His people, I’m not sure. But I have some experience with the idea that I might like to share. Here’s the core of the idea: The group is the ones [...] I’m really enjoying God’s gift of yearly cycles. During the summer, especially, is my time to refresh, re-energize, and re-commit. This is possible because so many things slow down during this season as people focus on vacations and family. Sometimes the summer “break” feels a little weird because our kids are grown up and I’m [...] If you want the audio recordings from the 2008 or 2009 Sacred Music Colloquiums in Chicago, drop me an email. They’re available on the website at music.dierschow.com/2008Colloquium and music.dierschow.com/2009Colloquium, but the recordings are pretty huge if you want to download ALL of them. I’ll also be making recordings next week of Colloquium XX in Pittsburg, [...] For the third time now, we pulled together all the chant choirs from the parishes in Fort Collins to do a single Mass. Or in this case, two: one at my home parish, and one next Sunday at the most traditional church building in town. I’m glad that this one wasn’t the first time we [...] There was an interesting piece on a local news channel about a teacher at the University of Northern Colorado who uses the Ward Method to successfully teach music. I haven’t met her yet, although I’ve been interested to attend one of her workshops. The reason for mentioning it here is that our chant schola is [...] I absolutely love this time of year. Easter is a chance for a deep spiritual renewal – in so many ways. I’m heavily involved with the RCIA program in our parish, which builds toward the Night of All Nights that we just experienced yesterday. A three hour Mass brings into clear focus how we are [...] Back in November we got people from all the parishes in Fort Collins together to sing sacred music for Mass. That was so wonderful, we’re going to do it again! We’re looking at the end of February, at my home parish. [...] In my last post, I talked about the first city-wide chant scholae Mass that we put together. Well, the Mass was last night, and… [...] Last time I talked about the upcoming big chant gathering we have next Sunday. Well, we had our practice yesterday, and finally got a chance to meet and find out what we’ve learned, and whether it was the same thing. [...] |