Some years ago, a singer who was primarily active in Russian Orthodox choral music pulled me aside at a church music event. “Can I be honest with you about something?” this person said to me. “I don’t understand Byzantine music. To me, it looks like it’s either a soloist or a group of mostly men; […]
The joke is at times heard that in the chapels of some of our seminaries, they “don’t worship but workshop.” The sense of this witticism is that what happens in their services is experimentation with rubrics, texts, service order, with an impulse towards “reform.” Over the course of this last summer, however, I was blessed […]
The state of affairs for English-language liturgical texts is fundamentally unstable. A core problem is that there is no existing body that has either the mission or the competence to review and approve English-language liturgical texts, so there is no settled path to a text being adopted once it is produced. In addition, differing jurisdictions […]
It has been over five years since The Saint John of Damascus Society commissioned The Psalm 103 Project, a big idea that brought together the work of six great composers, Matthew Arndt, John Michael Boyer, Alexander Khalil, Kurt Sander, Richard Toensing (+2014), and Tikey Zes, to create a unique, collaborative choral work that would be a model of […]
It has been a little over two years since my last update on The Psalm 103 Project for Orthodox Arts Journal, so, perhaps now would be a good time to bring everybody up to speed again. The Psalm 103 Project, for those just now joining us, is a major undertaking of The Saint John of Damascus Society. It […]
In June of 2014, I was a participant in Kurt Sander’s Pan-Orthodox Liturgical Music Symposium at Northern Kentucky University. While I was there, a gentleman whose acquaintance I had newly made, one David Lucs, on hand to give a presentation on children’s music education, was rather excitedly asking virtually everybody during a coffee break, “Are […]
Recently, an online exchange about public outreach efforts with respect to various aspects of Orthodox music and music of Orthodox composers led the following comment by a discussant: What exactly is so “Orthodox” about any kind of pure music? […] [T]o associate any composer with the Church is an empty exercise, since music has only […]
The 2014 Pan-Orthodox Liturgical Music Symposium took place July 12-15 at Northern Kentucky University. The following is a series of reflections upon the symposium written by some of the main organizers and participants. I highly recommend that anyone who did not attend the event should read this. It paints an inspiring picture of an American […]
Back in April, I posted about the Saint John of Damascus Society‘s Kickstarter campaign for the first phase of the Psalm 103 project. I’m happy to say that it was more than successful, and we’re just about to deliver on one of the first parts this phase. Before I get to that, let me tell […]