What’s this?
It’s a section of this Substack containing videos of my choir’s anthems, along with comments.. A longer description can be found on the About page. If you subscribe to this Substack but don’t wish to receive notifications for this section, select Manage Subscription from the upper-right menu and turn this section off there.
Psalm of Celebration
From one of the distributor’s pages:
We are delighted to present this timeless Hayes anthem with a new orchestration. The uplifting text, exciting rhythms and a stellar piano accompaniment make this a classic that you and your singers will enjoy rehearsing and performing.
We did indeed enjoy rehearsing and performing1 this piece. The rest of the choir rehearsed the music while I rehearsed my screens work.
I won’t comment on the livestream sound quality this time. I did, however, put in an offer to volunteer to help with livestream sound (or anything else sound-wise that I can offer given my physical limitations) over the summer when not running screens. We’ll see where that goes.
I did this partly because I know they need volunteer help and I am well qualified, what’s left of me, and partly because it feels so weird — during the late spring/summer when the choir doesn’t sing — not getting up every Sunday before dawn, going in an hour or two before the service, and doing something as a volunteer.
Call it what you want. I can imagine. I don’t care.
This anthem post had to wait until Monday, not because of software issues but because I woke up at 4 AM, was at church from 8 AM to I-don’t-know-when because of an all-church meeting after everything else, after which I went to lunch with a friend and didn’t return home until something like 6:30 PM. After which I sat down in my recliner, leaned back, and slept for hours.
We had a good lunch, and I once again enjoyed red-pilling my friend, who kept asking more and more questions.
The rehearsal and service also went unusally well from a tech team viewpoint. There were the usual technical problems, but no tech crises. I say this because the last two times I ran screens I ended up having to delay the service start time (by delaying the countdown timer) when I ran out of time cleaning up slide messes. Stressful. This day was not, and I was overjoyed.
Recorded at Christ Community Church, Carmichael, California, April 14, 2024
Excerpted from this livestream.
Some people cringe at the thought of calling what the choir does a “performance”. As one of the performers on most weeks (not this one — I was on screens, part of the tech team), I don’t. The fact is, the entire service is a scripted performance. The theatrical lighting (for which I am the programmer) offers a clue. We hope and pray that what we do is beneficial.
The script (which I decided not to reproduce here in detail) called for a 63 minute service, not including the 5-minute countdown timer and the three-minute prelude (which went 30 seconds or so overtime, by the way). We don’t hit the planned times and durations exactly, but we usually come pretty close. There’s about a 15-minute buffer at 11 AM allowing the service to run overtime if need be.
It can’t run too far overtime because there is another service in the other building that begins at 10:45 and most of the leaders, apart from our traditional service worship pastor, must appear approximately at their time in the plan, and then move on to the remaining service, having come to ours from an earlier service in that other building.
This arrangement is less than ideal, and the church is studying the problem, but there are reasons why the schedule is what it is that aren’t particularly easy to change, having to do with the larger attendance at the other two (contemporary) services, the seating capacity over there, and the potential effect on visitors of having an over-full space if the other two services were combined and scheduled to not overlap.
A rather typical medium/large-size church, nothing unusual here. And yes, performance.
Very nice!