New Starts

Well, we made it! Chancel Choir ended the season with a wonderful choral/brass celebration and the Wednesday choir kids all moved up to the next stage. Kindergarteners are now going to be the “old pros” in His Kids; Joysong 3rd graders move into GNG and the 2nd graders become the “seniors” of JoySong. GNG kids move up a grade, and then…..and then…..

There are the 8th graders and the most fearful word of all: AUDITIONS.

8th graders leaving GNG are lining up in droves to audition for Bel Canto. They make an appointment, they bring their parents, they stand in front of the big black piano and sing. And then – even more terrifying than singing in front of your parents AND Mr. Dean! – they have to explain WHY they want to be in Bel Canto.

Horrors!

It makes me smile. A really, really big smile.

It will take them a month, maybe two, before they realize where they really are. They think they are in a high-stress situation, on a highwire hundreds of feet above a yawning chasm of hungry crocodiles. But where they actually are is right smack dab in the middle of a family of very kind, very loving folks who want nothing more than to lift them up, put them strong on their feet and shine a big light of acceptance on them, in which they can laugh, and dance, and sing, and be completely themselves.

Mr. Dean is no crocodile. Bel Canto is no alien land. They will learn this when they experience a rehearsal where everyone is laughing straight out loud, the crocodile and the aliens alike. And they will wonder what the heck they were ever afraid of.

This is a place where the best audition sets you in the middle of people who will teach, uphold, encourage, challenge, befriend, support, and carry you.

Which is exactly where you are when you give the worst audition.

Kids, listen up. It’s all about growing. And I’m talking to all kids, too, not just the ones between five and eighteen. You kids between the ages of nineteen and ninety, I’m talking to you, too. It’s all about Jesus and you, singing and breathing and living together in a wonderful place full of people who make you nervous, crazy, excited, intimidated and exasperated, usually at the same time you also are making them nervous, crazy, excited, intimidated, and exasperated. We are all in audition mode, every one, not realizing we are already in. We made it. We are here.

Right where we should be.

 

Picture Brigade!

Thanks to the excellent eye of photographer Greg DiMichillie, we have some wonderful candid shots of the dress rehearsal on May 19th for the WTM “Sunrise Mass” of Ola Gjeilo.

Click on the link and take a peek!

http://www.dropbox.com/gallery/1587661/1/Sunrise%20Mass%20Rehearsal?h=494ee5

We Did It

For those who were able to be part of the Worship Through Music experience last Sunday, a note from a member:

Dear Scott,

I’ve gone to church my entire life. I am hard pressed to think of a service that moved me as deeply as today’s worship. It embodied the words of Pascal, who wrote that “the heart has its reasons that Reason knows not of.” Christ, and the sublime reality of His truth, was honored today.

For your dedication to sacred music…for the prayerful intensity of your leadership….for the deft skill of your direction and the choir / orchestra’s unspeakable talent….thank you.

With gratitude, Jeremiah

And folks, that’s why we do it. Thank you.

Ay Caramba!

From left to right: John Leckenby, Chris Martenson, Scott Dean, Kyle Harmon.

Why? Staff lunch. Not enough explanation for you?

It’s 80 degrees and we’re less than a week from the church’s “Worship Through Music” Sunday. This is called, “decompressing.” They do it pretty well. Plus, they can make those sombreros look GOOD.

Connections

This guy looks concerned.

Let us put this snapshot in context.

This is the FPCB Children’s choir program, roughly thirty years ago. Maybe more, it’s hard to tell.

We have changed a lot since then. Our children’s choir program now has four separate choirs, His Kids for kindergarteners and first graders; JoySong for kids 2nd-3rd grade; Good News Group for kids 4th-7th grade, and Bel Canto, a university-caliber choir for kids grades 8-age 18. They don’t all come together wearing little mini-cowls with scarves like this anymore. They all sing different things, and they all learn different aspects of worship leadership, musicianship, fellowship and faith as they roll along.

But there is still one thing that is exactly the same as when this picture was taken.

Connection.

This church has a unique circumstance in that there are so many people involved in choirs and music that the life stories of all of them begin to intertwine.

A kindergartener has a grandma in Chancel Choir. A Bel Canto alumni starts singing in Chancel Choir himself, after years of moving through the choir ranks. A kid in JoySong writes a note to a tenor in the adult choir, whose daughter sits next to the kid who wrote the note, who is also related to the Bel Canto alum, who is sitting next to the tenor in the choir. The tenor in the choir comes to hear his father in law play with the trombones. The trombonist is married to the violinist who plays in the orchestra at Christmas, but who comes early to hear her daughter sing at the 5:00 service with Good News Group that evening.

This makes for a complicated emotional life.

When I first started working here fifteen years ago, I thought this was a church full of sick and dying people. I had never experienced so many people I knew personally having health issues, or passing away. It was depressing, and I began to wonder if it was just my perspective on life. Maybe I was just looking too much into the dark. Maybe I was facing my own mortality. Maybe I was becoming fatalistic. Or just feeling old.

Well, no, that wasn’t it at all. I had never experienced so many people I knew personally having health issues simply because I had never experienced knowing so many people. In other churches I had attended, I knew faces but not names, or names but not faces, or groups of faces that all looked pretty much the same to me and I clumped them under “parish council” or “altar society.” They were elements in my life, like the chairs or the walls or the cars on the street, but they weren’t known to me, nor I to them. They just were, and so was I, and if we didn’t irritate each other too much as we passed by, well, that was fine.

Here, I suddenly was dropped into the deep end of relationship. Not only were there hundreds of people to meet, there became hundreds of people to know. The choirs began to interlink, like links in a long necklace, one individual life leading to another, and another, and another. My life got BIG.

Right now, I am mourning the loss of a chancel choir member who died this week. But I am celebrating his life, too. And I am also celebrating the blossoming of a young choir member who sings her lungs out on Wednesday afternoons, which amazes her mother, who has always thought her child very withdrawn and shy. I am saddened that one of my friends in the Chancel Choir is moving because of a job opportunity. But I am also rejoicing that a friend of mine has a child who is finally old enough to join His Kids, and who already intends to sing in Bel Canto someday, like the big kids. Folks moving on, folks moving in.

It is overwhelming sometimes, like being on a roller coaster at the top, knowing that the rest of the ride will be a series of crazy loops and dives, pitches and whirls. I will be white-knuckled, and I will be laughing.

Because that’s what connections do. They scare you into laughing. They drop you headlong into joy.

By the way, Worried Looking Kid in the Photo? I know who you are, dude. I know who you are.                          Karen Nelson

Fill in the blank in the sentence below!

If I were going to tell someone why they should join an FPCB choir, I would say, “Hey! I’ll bet you didn’t know that –___________!”

“You deserve what you don’t do.”

At a conference recently, I heard this phrase and it struck home with me.  Like many people I am conflict avoidant.  Yet to correct errors in rehearsals my job as a director is to call them out–and that can create conflict.  Perhaps not everyone in the section made the error and the singers who got it right are bothered.  Perhaps the singers believe they’re singing a section staccato when what I’m hearing out here in front is mush.  Maybe I’m finessing a phrase and the choir’s patience has been used up yet there is still more work to do.  Maybe I get tired of hearing my voice again, saying the same thing to the same section every time the same technical problem arises.

Whatever the reason, this sentence reminded me, if a director hears it and doesn’t have the courage, patience, persistence to correct it then he deserves what he gets.  So I tell myself, “Remember that, Scott and have the guts to make the wrong right, even when everyone else wants to go on…”  They’ll be glad we did it, later.

Maybe….

Can’t See the Forest for the Trees

Because of the dedicated efforts of one or our loyal choristers, Werner Henn, the music we make at FPCB in worship is now available for the world to hear, 24-7, by way of videos posted on a site called Vimeo.  Just type “Vimeo” in your browser then when at the site search videos for “fpcb choirs”.  The value of seeing and hearing one’s self is turning out to be immeasurable.

I have a confession to make that I am not very proud of.  It is difficult for me to listen to recordings of the music I make.   For many years my memory of the music making was simply much more positive than the recording I heard afterwards.  I am also very self critical.  So it became a rare occurrence that I listened to the final product off the podium.  I trusted the verbal feedback I was receiving from others and my “in the moment” analysis.  That began to change a few years ago yet I still haven’t disciplined myself to regularly listen, analyze, and take notes for future growth and improvement.  So when my wife Cynthia wanted to listen to the Good Friday recording of the Chancel Choir singing the opening chorus of the St. John Passion by Bach (she was absent that week and missed the service) I listened along in trepidation.  My recollection of the service was positive and I wanted to remember it that way.  Well, I was stunned.

Of course when you’re making music you’re in the moment, not thinking about where you’ve been so much as where you’re going next in the score.  You get a sense, moment by moment, how things are going while trying to keep an eye on the overall composition though its major sections.  You compare your progress by the best you did in rehearsal for any given page, or phrase.  So apparently those invisible noise cancelling headphones that disable you from hearing the things that need rehearsal also disable you from knowing that you are achieving excellence because I didn’t recognize it during or afterwards on my own.  I just thought we were doing our job, and that we did it pretty well.  Next up?

Stunned!  I listened to a “church choir” sing this amazing chorus depicting at once the tumultuous event of Christ’s journey to the cross and every land on the globe recognizing the divinity of Jesus and praising Him as Lord. I had no idea how beautiful the moments were as they wove along, one after the other. The sixteenth notes powerfully chugged along in perfect unity, each section balanced with one another, parts weaving in and out of their complex polyphony.  Amazing and intense, I was enthralled.

Section one concludes.  Whew.  That was a lot of music.  They were amazing.  That was really good!

Now the second section begins with a new, syncopated, fugal figure that requires dexterity in the upper range after all those runs.  It doesn’t seem to faze the choir as they sing through it with utmost accuracy and control.  Stamina doesn’t seem to be an issue as the sixteenth notes return and they work their way to a glorious cadence that drives to the last note.

Then the music from the opening comes back—Bach, what are you doing?  Again?  They have to sing the entire opening section again?  And they do, again, seeming to ride the relentless sixteenth note phrases with focus, direction, intensity, as a rider on a stallion with a mission to deliver a very important message.  Finally the chorus concludes.  Wow!  That was incredible.  I can’t believe it.  I am stunned.  This is us?  We did that?  What planet was I on?

Who are these people?  What choir is this?

They achieve excellence and they are humble believers.  They bring glory to God and minister to His people like very few on this planet ever have the opportunity to experience.  They bring beauty, art, truth, faith and the Word into the world through the magical, mysterious, incredible art form called music.  They attain excellence not for their pride nor for art’s sake, but for the glory of God.  And when they do, they feel the Spirit working in and through them. They belong to God, but for the moment I also get to call them “mine”, and they get to call this choir theirs.

And best of all, everyone  —  even somebody like me  — gets to listen. Scott Dean

And From The Director….

Good Friday Tenebrae tonight at 7:30pm: The choir presents the opening and closing choruses from Bach’s St. John Passion, and selections from Part II of Handel’s Messiah, as musical meditations on the Passion of our Lord, with Ross Hauck, tenor, and Wayne Slater, organist. The Ensemble augments the service with two modern settings of traditional texts: the 14th-century prayer Ave verum corpus by Colin Mawby, and If Ye Love Me, Keep My Commandments by Philip Stopford. Make your Easter complete by going to the dark side (Tenebrae service) tonight.

Blast From The Past

How many of you remember when the Chancel Choir wore these?