Thursday, May 15, 2008

Church choir/orchestra music prep

I have sung in church choirs nearly continuously for over 45 years, ever since my teen years when Elinor Knobloch came to Ascension Lutheran Church in Chicago, began a youth choir, and taught a dozen of us teens how to sing. Since then, music has been a large and joyous part of my life -- a continuing adventure -- and I've learned much from the dozen or so different directors I've had at 6 different churches.

Thirteen years ago, I joined the Village Church of Barrington's choir seen here along with with our church orchestra at a Christmas concert...


... and for the past 6 years, I've spent most Thursday mornings preparing the choir and orchestra music for that week's rehearsal and services. Our choir of about 30 and our orchestra of about 20 all need music for the anthem and also for the half-dozen or so hymns and praise/worship songs for the week. We have 30+ drawers of sheet music, some of which can been here...


...and I need to pull the appropriate pages of sheet music for the director, organ, piano, 4 violins, 3 flutes, 2 cellos, clarinet, trumpet, French horn, saxophone, bass, guitar, and drums, (this week's music can be seen on the table to the right) and distribute all to the correct person's box, as well as re-file last week's music so it can easily be found the next time it is needed. Sometimes a song is new, so I have to find the original sheet music in the folders seen on the left table and copy the appropriate pages so the instrumentalists can write on their own copies of the music.

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