Time off is as much an attitude as it is a strategy. I’m planning on taking four days off next week: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. I’m hoping to spend some serious time composing. This means I can’t really hole up in a  hotel somewhere. I need my piano. Eileen would like to go to eat and maybe go to Meijer Garden. I’m going to make bread tomorrow morning.

This morning’s service went well. The prelude was the most challenging moment for me since my piano trio performed the first movement of Clara Schuman’s lovely piano trio. I was very happy with the performance. My cellist was disappointed in her performance but she set her bar very high. I am sure that our understanding and love of this piece came through clearly in what we did. I quietly asked the other players before we played, “You know what I want from you today?” They weren’t sure where I was going with it. I said, “I want you to have fun, to enjoy yourself.” My violinist said if I had given her a moment more she would have realized that what I was going to say.

The choir sang a Bach four part setting of “Out of the depths.” You may recall that Schumann uses a motif that is note for note the beginning of this chorale. I wrote a note to go in the bulletin about this. Unfortunately, we noticed this morning that the last line or two of my note was missing. it just stopped mid sentence. Oh well.

We leave in about a half hour to go back for this afternoon’s recital. I will be curious to see if there are more people from our parish in the audience. Rev Jen has been plugging it and is, herself, very enthusiastic about Nick’s piece. On the back of the program I have written up descriptions of four upcoming events. There is a recital at five PM in Zeeland today. I plugged that. Then Monday the AGO is hosting the retired chair of the dance department to talk about dance and church music. The other two events are our May and June recitals that we will give.

Writing up all of this is what took up my time yesterday. Otherwise, just doing Nick’s program would have been much quicker.

This was our postlude today.