This morning I woke up at 3:30 a.m. and could not get back to sleep. Usually in these cases I get busy doing something, and then go back to bed when I feel sleepy. This time I never felt sleepy. As I am writing this, it is 9:30 p.m. and I have been up for 18 hours and I still do not feel sleepy, I know not why. So I had all this extra time in the wee hours, and decided to use it to do something I had been putting off, and that is advertising this website.

So for five hours I searched for places to add my link. During the process, I found two very  interesting websites, sites I would never had discovered if I had not found myself in the middle of the night with nothing else to do. The first is http://www.musicianspage.com/  where I found that I can post my own compositions using my notation program, Sibelius. I posted three pieces, and found that it was much easier than it is to post on  www.sibeliuismusic.com  where most of my compositions reside. So that was a happy day—no,  I mean happy sleep-deprived night. The second site that especially interested me was a blog by organist Robert Ferrell, a composer who is offering a free “prelude of the month club”, where if you send him your E-mail he will send you an organ prelude once a month in PDF format. I had never heard of a “prelude of the month club,” but it sure sounded like a great idea. I promptly e-mailed him, and he just as promptly sent me an organ prelude. Here is his site address if you are interested. http://www.sacredsoundworks.blogspot.com/

So I hope that now people will begin to find this site, as the old one disappeared a few days ago when the service provider went out of business. Please sign the guest book and tell me a little about yourself. Most of the sheet music is free, and you have my permission to print a copy for yourself, as well as copies for your choir members as needed.. 

 


 

A year and a half ago I purchased her organ piece,  "Introduction, Theme & Variations on ALL CREATURES OF OUR GOD AND KING".  I did not learn the whole thing, just chose some of the quieter variations to play for prelude music. Now I find myself learning the organ accompaniment to her choral arrangement of "Lead on O King Eternal." It is not for the faint hearted. In typical Bish style, it is filled with countless running sixteenth notes in various permutations, including quintuplets, and some fancy foot work at the end. The main difficulty I see is that that the tempo is quarter note =100, which is fine for a virtuoso organist like Diane Bish. For the rest of us she offers no slower tempo (we can only hope that our choir directors have mercy on us). She does however offer us a life-boat on page 9 where she has sixteeth note scales going up and down with the left hand, with various different tuplets: 14, 12, 11, 13, 10, and 9 to be played against the right hand dotted rhythm. After trying it a few times: it was more irritating than impossible, I chose her alternative at the bottom of the page where she writes, "For faint hearted organists R.H. may be doubled octave lower in L.H."

Here is Diane Bish playing this. Watch her fingers fly! 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ron3Vp_NHhw







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Hymns are Music Too

I once attended a choral music workshop in Ridgewood, New Jersey with Anton Armstrong. Dr. Armstrong (who has strong ties to Michigan, by the way) is a faculty member at St. Olaf College, in St. Olaf, Minnesota. You may have seen him on television Christmas specials, directing the St. Olaf choir. The workshop choir was a combination of a large church choir and members of the local chapter of the American Guild of Organists. What Dr. Armstrong reminded us is that hymns are music too. Along with various anthems, he led us in some of the hymns. Dr. Armstrong has a wonderful voice, and he demonstrated exactly how he wanted us to sing them. The difference between how he sang them and how most choirs sing them was staggering. He sang them with a depth of feeling, and consummate musicianship, that I had rarely heard before. To a certain point, you can hear this sort of thing when The Mormon Tabernacle Choir sings hymns for general conference, something that would probably make Dr. Armstrong (who is no stranger to this choir) sing for joy.

 I do not see any reason why we cannot train our choirs to sing hymns as music. I am sure that many choir directors have often heard the complaint from choir members, “we don’t want to sing just hymns.” It seems that some people perceive hymns to be in a different category from other church music. The fact is, a hymn is music if we treat it like music. If not, well, then it is just another hymn.      





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