It’s rather hard to believe that yet another Easter season is has come and gone. As the director of a choir in a small parish — that also happens to be my parish — it’s a time of really mixed feelings for me. On one hand, as a member of the parish I serve, it’s EASTER. The symbolism, the liturgy, the meaning — they are all things that touch me deeply and mean a great deal to me. Our “little white church on the hill” does a great job of celebrating the meaning of Holy Week, and our Good Friday service and Easter Vigil are especially meaningful to me on a personal level.
As a church musician, there are also many really wonderful things that happen in our parish. As the cantor, I have the annual honor of performing the Exultat each year at the Easter Vigil, and I also have the privilege of performing with a really good organist, with an historic pipe organ that has been recently fully (and properly) restored. Pretty cool stuff! Then there’s the reality of working in a small parish … and the challenge of finding decent music that my small choir can do, and do fairly well.
I have to preface this next part by saying that I am incredibly proud of my little choir and what they do week in and week out. I’m unbelievably fortunate to have the tremendous level of dedication and commitment that I have from my group. But that doesn’t mean I don’t get frustrated at times, and Holy Week and Easter just remind me of our limitations.
My frustrations really boil down to three basic issues: membership, the disconnect between my expectations and reality, and the limited music available for small choirs.
This year will be my 7th Easter as the cantor for St. John’s, and I will readily admit it is the most challenging. When your choir is small to begin with, loosing a member is a big deal, and this year, I lost a member who also happened to be a retired vocal music educator to another parish, and had another member join the ranks of the New Hampshire “Snow Birds” … the retiree’s who live in New Hampshire in the summer, and find somewhere warm to live during the (LONG) cold New Hampshire winters. Add to that some health problems for a member that usually fills in one of those snow bird spots, and another member who recently welcomed three small children into his family, and it’s been rough. So, I’m down 4 members for Easter. Even without the membership challenges of this year, however, Easter is a challenge for all of us that work with small choirs. Then, add to that having my best (and most faithful) soprano coming down with laryngitis just in time to not be able to sing for the Holy Week and Easter services, and, well… Membership is an ongoing challenge in any volunteer group, and I have yet to find a strategy that works for me. But I’ll save my thoughts on that for another day.
One of the biggest challenges I face, and the one that I likely have the most control over, is my own desire to try to match my choir’s performance with my personal feelings about Holy Week and Easter. There are actually two pieces to this; one is centered on my feelings and expectations about the Easter services and what I think we ought to do for these services. The other piece of this one is my own musical training and my own musical experiences. This one is hard. It would be easy to just lower my expectations… “Well, we’re just a small church with a small choir; it’s OK that we don’t sound that good…” Bad idea!
I keep my expectations high no matter what I anticipate will happen. Granted, this has to be tempered with some realism. I’d love to be able to do a huge, SATB masterpiece most weeks, but especially during Holy Week and Easter. But if I know there will only be 4 people in my choir for Good Friday … probably not such a great idea. So when I say I keep my expectations high, I mean only that I try my best to push my group to do better, despite our limitations. I do back my expectations down relating to the literature I select, choosing unison and 2-part literature with an occasional SAB piece thrown in for good measure. Which brings up the third source of frustration — literature.
As anyone who works with a small choir knows, it’s always challenging to find appropriate liturgical music in good unison and 2-part arrangements. Throughout the year, I make things “extra” challenging by trying, as best I can, to tie the anthem into the Lectionary readings. Lent and Easter (and for that matter, Advent and Christmas) just make the problem even worse because of the nature of the music available. Every time I go looking for new music for Lent and Easter, I realize that I’m not the only one that has some delusions of grandeur around the whole Easter season. Try this. Go to www.jwpepper.com and look through the Adult Church Choir music. Music categorized as for Easter: 68 anthems. Apply the difficulty filter and set it to “Easy” — three anthems, two of which are SATB and one is unison/2-part. Set the filter to “Medium-Easy” and a whole two anthems show up; one is scored as SATB, the other gives a choice of SATB and SAB. And if you have the 68 choices listed with voicings — 66 SATB, 9 SAB, 2 2-part, 1 unison, 3 listed as either unison or 2-part. 48 include instrumental parts (meaning entirely separate instrumental parts are available for purchase).
There are certainly ways to deal with all of my frustrations, but I’ll save my thoughts on each of these for separate entries. For now, I’ll just say, I’m glad Easter is over … at least until next year!
