busy days
The week after New Year’s Day is not usually this busy. But having scheduled a choir rehearsal for this evening plus scheduling them to sing the Sunday after New Years (otherwise known as The First Sunday After Epiphany: The Baptism of Our Lord), I have been sneaking in extra moments to prepare over the break.
Eileen has been very helpful. Monday we went to church. She filed the old music from the past season. I scoured Taize books looking for an entrance chant for upcoming Sundays. I had sent off an email with recommendations for what we should do this Sunday, but I was still not convinced I had made the best recommendations.
I tried to access OneLicense.net to look at all the Taize compositions there, but our subscription had lapsed. I knew I had some Taize and Iona Community stuff laying around at church.
Of course doing this kind of thinking takes time. I did manage to come up with some ideas but by that time we had spent a good portion of our day at church. I suggested that we return on Tuesday to finish the job.
I just checked my email and Rev Jen decided to go with my first recommendation. Here’s what I prepared yesterday before Jen had decided what she wanted to do.
The words are the third stanza of Hymn 133 in the Hymnal 1982. I have been using a lot of canons with the choir lately. It occurred to me that a repeating canon could work much like Taize type chant. When I was looking for stuff I was pleased to see that Berthier (the Taize composer) also has published canons for use in this way.
It will be interesting to see if this works.
On Tuesday, Eileen and I went over again to work. I legally made three sets of new anthems with the church’s photocopy machine. Eileen sorted and stuffed all the anthems from this Sunday until Ash Wednesday (March 1).
I have a little more work to do to prepare for this evening’s rehearsal and tomorrow’s trio rehearsal but I’m feeling more up to speed.
jupe’s tech troubles
I am now the proud owner of two tablets. And both of them are paid 4G subscriptions. The one on the left, the broken one, will no longer have a subscription in a few months. In order to replace it, I had to temporarily pay for both lines.
It doesn’t look too bad in the pic above, but here is a better shot.
Apparently you can’t bend these things if you’re pissed off at them.
I like this shot because you can see the photographer in the reflection.
While we had visitors, Eileen successfully stopped a loud hum by unplugging my good computer speakers. I had thought that the hum was coming from a humidifier upstairs. It was such a relief not to have a low buzz going on.
But unfortunately it looks like my good computer speakers are shot.
I have hooked up some smaller lousier ones so that we can watch TV on the computer, but they are not good enough for listening to music.
Ah well. When (if) our budget ever recovers, I’ll look at getting replacement listening speakers. In the meantime, I still have my record player and headphones.
hymns in the news
Hymns as they were meant to be sung, by aging politicians seated, wearing headphones, singing into mics, sitting on cushions and looking solemn.