Music and the Church with Sarah Bereza

How do you design your summer in church ministry?

One of my favorite thinkers, Gretchen Rubin, talks about "designing your summer." It's a way of intentionally making the season distinct and special.

In this episode, Crawford and I talk about what we do that's different in the summer—from the mundane "file all the choir music we haven't for several months" to the wonderful leisure to play repertoire we wouldn't normally have time for.

Reset: put things away, take a vacation etc.Take Stock: what's working in your program? what could be improved or changed?Plan: nothing like a quiet summer to plan all your preludes/postludes/hymns/anthems (hey, we can dream, right?!)Have Fun: of course, what "fun" is, is up to you! Check out our episode on "Playing Music for Fun" if you'd like some ideas.

The one thing making this summer especially special for me is that I will be beginning a new position as Minister of Music at the First Congregational Church of St. Louis!

This is the last episode of Season 1 of the Music and the Church podcast! Thank you for listening! We'll be back in September for Season Two. Even though the podcast is on summer vacation, I will still be posting about once a week on the blog and publishing a monthly newsletter.

Enjoying this podcast episode? Click here to find other Music and the Church episodes, or subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts.

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If you enjoy this podcast, please consider sharing it with your friends who love church music—it's the best way for them to find the show!

You're an organist, a choir director, or other musician. Here are the top 8 things to do to get a church music job you love.

This spring I did a survey of 268 church musicians and people who have hired them. I learned a lot about what makes a great job applicant. In this week's episode, Crawford and I dig into 8 highlights:

Word of mouth is one of the best ways to find church music jobs. To find out more about a church, just call or email the search committee chair or another person connected with the church like the pastor. Seriously. Just call them already. Find out salary norms for your area. You can't negotiate well if you don't know what normal is. ALWAYS tailor your job application materials. Most job searches have fewer than 15 applicants and your application will almost certainly be read.Don't be afraid of interview questions about conflict. Every church has conflict and the hiring committee wants to know that you can work in a church setting. Personal questions are legal in the U.S. for church interviews. So think ahead about what you want to say about your faith, your family, and so on. Negotiate if you can. But not all churches are willing or even able to negotiate. Be decent and polite.

Enjoying this podcast episode? Click here to find other Music and the Church episodes, or subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts.

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If you enjoy this podcast, please consider sharing it with your friends who love church music—it's the best way for them to find the show!

Get a Church Music Job You Love Series

This series is based on my survey of over 250 church musicians and the people who have hired them.

I surveyed 250+ church musicians. Here's what I learned about getting a church music job you love.17 Places to Find Church Music Jobs3 Ways to Research a Church Music Job OpeningHow Much Are Church Musicians Paid? Here's How to Find Out.How to Write a Church Music Cover Letter and Resume (Plus the #1 Way to Make Hiring Committees Happy)29 Interview Questions You Might Get (Plus 34 for YOU to Ask)How to Negotiate Salary and Benefits (and Why You Should)4 Things You Need to Get a Church Music Job You Love (Plus 9 Big No-nos)Do These 8 Things to Get a Church Music Job You Love (Ep. 22 of the Music and the Church Podcast)

For the last few weeks, we’ve been talking about musical virtuosity. This week’s guest is Dr. Birgitta Johnson, Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology and African American Studies at the University of South Carolina, and the President of the Southeast and Caribbean Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology.

In this episode, Birgitta discusses being anointed for music ministry. In the African American churches that she’s studied as an ethnomusicologist, musical skill is important but not the be-all-end-all. Musicians should also be called to ministry.

Here's the heart of what Birgitta is seeing between virtuosity and being anointed for music ministry:

"You have some people who don't know anything about Jesus and who can play really, really well. If you give them enough tracks, or enough recordings, or enough guides—they can play it just like the most anointed musician on the pew. And so, when you start talking about how we identify what is anointing, often I've seen, it really comes down to the larger relationships that happen in music ministry."

Musicians often spend the most time together of any group in the church. And people leading music ministry often spend more face-time with lay people than other ministers can. So, Birgitta says, the relationships that a minister of music has with other musicians in the church "reveal where the person's heart is for ministry."

You can find Dr. Birgitta Johnson on Facebook, Twitter, and at her University of South Carolina faculty page.

Enjoying this podcast episode? Click here to find other Music and the Church episodes, or subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts.

Other episodes in our virtuosity series:

Ep. 18: Virtuosity, Amateurism, and Amateurishness in Evangelical Worship Music, with Joshua BusmanEp. 19: Showing Off or Glorifying God? Musical Virtuosity in Fundamentalist Christianity, with Sarah BerezaEp. 20: What IS Virtuosity? Musical Skill and Guitarist Tony Melendez, with David VanderHamm

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

Worship as a Lifestyle by Judith Christie McAllisterNo Gimmicks: Relevancy, Commitment, and Excellence in Worship Ministry by Leo DavisThe Seed of David: A Worshipper's Guide to Mend the Heart and Discipline the Flesh by Stephen HurdThe Spirit of Praise: Music and Worship in Global Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity, edited by Monique M. Ingalls and Amos Yong. This book includes Birgitta Johnson's chapter "'This Is Not the Warm-Up Act!': How Praise and Worship Reflects Expanding Musical Traditions and Theology in a Bapticostal Charismatic African American Megachurch."

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If you enjoy this podcast, please consider sharing it with your friends who love church music. It's the best way for them to find the show!

What is virtuosity? It isn't just about the sound itself, but who makes the sound and how they make it.

Today's episode is the third in our series on virtuosity. In the last two episodes, Joshua Busman and I both considered whether virtuosity is or isn't acceptable—and why—in evangelical worship music and in fundamentalist Christianity.

But today's guest, Dr. David VanderHamm, flips this question around. Instead of researching a church or denomination, and then sometimes focusing on virtuosity in that context, David starts with virtuosity.

One particular examples of virtuosity that he has studied is the ministry of guitarist Tony Melendez. Melendez was born without arms and was blessed by Pope John Paul II to share his music with other Christians. His ministry is inspirational, but his conversation with David complicates that narrative, noting that “There still has to be the time, the practice. It’s not like overnight I could just do it—I had to take the time to learn the instrument.”

Enjoying this podcast episode? Click here to find other Music and the Church episodes, or subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts.

Resources We Mentioned

Tony Melendez's official websiteVideo of Tony Melendez singing for Pope John Paul II in 1987Virtuosity can make something very difficult look like play—something we discussed in Ep. 16 with Ashley Danyew

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If you enjoy this podcast, please consider sharing it with your friends who love church music. It's the best way for them to find the show!

Should you play or sing virtuosic music in church?  Many fundamentalist Christians don't think so.

This week’s episode is the second in our series on musical virtuosity. Last week, Joshua Kalin Busman discussed how evangelical musicians might tone down the difficulty of their music—balancing their churches’ need for musical “amateurism” with the reality the “amateurish” mistakes would distract from musical worship.

In a more conservative circle of evangelicalism, many fundamentalist Christian musicians experience a different kind of tension. On one hand, they want to follow the command, “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might” (from Ecc. 9:10), and develop their musical abilities. But on the other hand, the “musical excellence” they pursue through classical training is not necessarily useful in their church services because it might sound like they are showing off.

Ultimately, ministering to their fellow Christians is the most important factor. And many musicians limit the virtuosity of what they sing or play so that their abilities do not get the attention.

Enjoying this podcast episode? Click here to find other Music and the Church episodes, or subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts.

Resources We Mentioned

My dissertation on music in fundamentalist Christianity, plus other blog resources I've written on the topicInner Singing, one way that congregations participate in instrumental hymn arrangementsJames Koerts on simplifying piano hymn accompaniment

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Musical virtuosity in church services. Is it showing off? Giving God your best? Christians often come to opposite conclusions.

Today's podcast episode is the first in a series about virtuosity. We're kicking off the series by talking with Dr. Joshua Kalin Busman, an Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina—Pembroke. He researches "music in religious communities, liturgical theology, mass-media, and identity politics in American popular music," with a particular focus on Evangelical worship music. 

Joshua Busman studies white Evangelical megachurches where virtuosity gets seen as showing off and taking attention away from God. In fact, Josh says that in these churches, "the role of the church musicians is essentially to become invisible."

But as the same time, worship music isn't an amateurish style of music (unlike, say, punk), so even though musicians aren't supposed to draw attention to their skills, they do have to be skilled to play it.

Martin Luther's contemporary, the theologian Andreas Karlstadt, wrote about this tension that we still feel over 500 years later. Josh describes Karlstadt’s “conundrum" like this:

"In order to honor God properly with worship we would want to have a performance that is of the highest possible quality. In fact we can’t imagine a context in which we would need a higher quality performance than a performance in which the primary audience is God. However, in order to execute such a performance, our attention would have to be so fully devoted to executing the performance properly that we would end up canceling out our ability to focus on worshipping, because we would be so fully immersed in trying to execute the performance properly. So there’s this double bind that is sort of seeded into the beginning of thinking about Protestant worship, in which focus on technical proficiency or skill is placed in contract to focus on proper worship.”

Enjoying this podcast episode? Click here to find other Music and the Church episodes, or subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts.

Resources We Mentioned

Music and the Church podcast episode on musical views in the Early Church

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For many Christians, the Methodist tradition is one of their most important sources of hymnody. Dr. Martin V. Clarke's new book British Methodist Hymnody explores the roots of this rich repertoire as well as the distinctive features of Methodist worship today.

Dr. Martin V. Clarke (faculty page, Twitter) is Lecturer in Music at The Open University and author of the new book British Methodist Hymnody: Theology, Heritage, and Experience.

Martin covers five main areas in our conversation:

How Methodists leaders have used hymnody that doesn't line up with their theological viewpointsAltered hymn lyrics, including Charles Wesley'sHow Methodist leaders have determined whether or not popular music styles should be used in church servicesWhat we see in Methodist services today and how a praise band can function like a choirWhat makes Methodist hymnody distinctly "Methodist"

Enjoying this podcast episode? Click here to find other Music and the Church episodes, or subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts.

Resources We Mentioned

John Wesley's Directions for SingingCrawford and I on approaches to altering hymn lyrics

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Professional musicians often associate "playing for fun" with being a kid, an amateur—being somone who isn't serious about the music they make. But playing music for fun has huge benefits, besides the obvious: it's fun.

It's not that playing music for fun has to have other benefits. But its easier to make time for playing around, when you know there are benefits besides having fun.

Today's guest is musician and educator Dr. Ashley Danyew. She says that "playing for your own enjoyment and for the sake of the music itself really feed the rest of the work we do as musicians." According to research by Dr. Stuart Brown and others, playing also preps you for "real" scenarios by giving you a safe place to learn without fear of a failure.

Ashley and I came up with ten ways we musicians can play for fun:

Learn a different musical skill (e.g. figured bass or open score for keyboardists), either on your own or in a class or workshopLearn a piece by earImprovise in a new-to-you styleReharmonize a hymnPlay with other musicians (e.g. informal chamber music)Play a piece or style that's new to you or that you wouldn't usually play (e.g. secular holiday music or playing in a band)Produce a musical eventPlay in little pockets of time if you have an instrument at homeLearn a new instrumentCompose

What makes any of these activities fun is that they are for your own enjoyment. They aren't necessarily fun in and of themselves. It's your experience that makes the activity for fun or not.

Enjoying this podcast episode? Click here to find other Music and the Church episodes, or subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts.

Favorite Quotes

"Playing for fun is coming from that place of intrinsic motivation. It can help prevent burn out, it can help you work through creative blocks, if you're getting stuck somewhere or you just feel like you're going through the motions. It can help reignite that creative spark. And it's also a way to remember why you started in the first place—what first led you to pursue music, why and how it captivated you." — Ashley Danyew

"Playing for fun makes me a more whole musician. I'm more myself because I can express myself musically." — Sarah Bereza

Resources We Mentioned

Play by Stuart Brown, MD, with Christopher Vaughn ("Playful interaction allows for a penalty-free rehearsal of the normal give and take of social groups," p. 32.)The National Institute for PlayDrive by Daniel H. Pink and Ashley's take on the bookAshley's keyboard skills course

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We use our bodies every day to make music—but we usually forget about our physical health until something goes wrong.

Certified Alexander Technique instructor Ted Gibboney, D.M.A., shares how the Alexander Technique can help church musicians, as well as other people experiencing tension in their bodies.

Ted was working full-time as the music director of a large church when he got a pain in his neck, literally. That discomfort—and the loss of control of his limbs—led him to healing through the Alexander Technique. Because of the difference it made in his life, he decided to pursue certification as an instructor and bring that wellness to other people.

Key Takeaways:

Organists: beware bench height and correct shoe size.Many people don't know what a relaxed body feels like until they experience that freedom.

Enjoying this podcast episode? Click here to find other Music and the Church episodes, or subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts.

Resources

If you'd like to find out more about Ted's practice, his email is: ted [dot] gibboney [at] gmail [dot] comThe American Society for the Alexander Technique

Do you work as a substitute organist or hire them? This episode is for you! Crawford, Catie Moyer, and I have many (many!) strategies for subbing and hiring subs.

Because we have so much to share, we decided to make this post a how-to. If you scroll down, you'll find detailed strategies, questions to ask about the nitty-gritties of each church's habits, and a checklist of things to ask when subbing at an unfamiliar church.

About Catie Moyer

Catie and I have known each other since elementary school, and we actually took organ lessons from the same teachers in high school and college! (What are the odds that two kids from a little Baptist church in middle Georgia would end up professional organists?)

Catie Moyer has her bachelor's degree in church music, and she works regularly as a substitute organist in Greenville, SC and the surrounding Upstate. She's also active in many other musical areas: her day job is as a music education specialist at a music store, she's part of the organ/harp duo Voix Celeste, and she sings alto with the South Carolina Bach Choir.

She writes that she "is passionate about making the organ and its music accessible to the average, untrained, or even skeptical listener." And she gives seasonal recitals (like a Thanksgiving recital) that help her achieve that goal.

Enjoying this podcast episode? Click here to find other Music and the Church episodes, or subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts.

Resources:

In this episode, I mention a survey for church musicians and people who've hired them. If you haven't taken it already, please take 5-10 minutes to share your insight with other people applying to church jobs: take the survey. I'll be posting the results later this spring.

How to Have a Positively Great Time Being a Swell Substitute

If you are subbing, or hiring someone to sub for you, there are lots of little details that you need to think about. Here's a guide to figuring out the idiosyncrasies of each service.

Before the service:

Get the order of worship. Then ask:

Hymns:

Are the hymns announced?How many stanzas? Are all the stanzas sung, always?

Other music:

What is the exact introduction that the congregation is used to?Are there any places for improvisation? (e.g. after a Gospel reading)What rhythms for the Doxology and is there an Amen? (Yes, I’ve played at a church that didn’t sing an amen!)Anything else musical that hasn’t been specifically mentioned? (e.g. is there a children’s sermon and an expectation of music to accompany the children’s journey out of the sanctuary?)

Instrument:

What memory level(s) or pistons can be used? What pistons have the typical hymn-accompaniment registrations?Anything tricky about the instrument? (e.g. sticking keys, ciphers, unusual method to set the pistons, how to turn it on)

Communion

This is the trickiest part of a service. Check exactly when to start/stop playing, and don’t assume that churches in the same denomination do things identically. I always ask “what will I *see* when I need to stop?” If you don’t intend to take communion and this church takes the elements to congregants (rather than having them come to the altar), you may wish to tell the deacons (not just the pastor) that  you don’t intend to partake—well-meaning deacons may bring the elements to you otherwise.

Some churches want soft music while ministers are talking, and in other churches, if someone is talking, the music needs to stop right now. Find out which kind of church this is!

Building:

Can the organist see the altar, pastor, choir director etc. from the instrument?What times is the building available for practice?How to get into the building before the service? Is there any information needed for parking?When will the church be open on the day of the service?What phone # should be called if the church isn’t open?

Other:

Are there prayers or other elements that aren’t in the order of service...