Last week, a neighbor three doors down invited our dog, Rory over for a dog play date. While Rory and Red chased each other in a loop around the backyard, we admired the garden—azaleas, forsythias, pink flowering almond, and blue phlox. Hasta, wild violets, Japanese water iris, an old dogwood tree, and a large weeping willow in the middle of the backyard.
For those of you who work in a choral setting, you know that a big challenge is working with adults who don’t read music. How can you teach music-reading in a group setting when your rehearsal time is limited each week? How can you empower your adult singers to develop these skills on their own?
Doug Hanvey—a pianist, adult educator, and composer—has a few teaching tips (and a free printable resource) to share so you can help your adult singers learn to read more confidently and develop their sight-singing skills. Enjoy!
Ordinary Time, for most Protestant churches, begins the week after Pentecost and runs until the beginning of Advent. Some churches also consider the period between Epiphany Sunday and Lent Ordinary Time, making it the longest season of the liturgical year (source).
Are you doing the math? That's 33-34 Sundays in Ordinary Time in any given year. That's a lot of anthems!
I thought today would be the perfect time to share some of my favorite anthems for Ordinary Time. Most of them work really well with small choirs (or large choirs—whatever you've got!).
Without further ado, my top 25 anthems for Ordinary Time:
I've been reading The Next Right Thing by Emily P. Freeman. The book is about making decisions and creating space for your soul to breathe and I don't know about you, but I can always use the reminder that my soul needs to breathe.
I first heard about this book from one of my grad school professors.
We were sitting around a long table one snowy January evening at our annual dinner for current and prospective doctoral students. I asked my professor about books he was reading lately and he named several including Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers and Carol Dweck's Mindset.
