Category: Music
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Grassroots music
On Sunday 7 May we celebrate ‘Land’ Sunday in Season of Creation, so let’s consider grassroots music in church – you might also think of ‘grassroots music’ as folk music. The soundtrack of the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? is pervaded with grassroots music of Northern America – you can listen to an interview…
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Tell out, my soul
This week we’re singing Timothy Dudley-Smith’s metrical setting of the Magnificat, “Tell out, my soul.” The text of the Magnificat, from Luke’s Gospel, is usually read in Advent, and, although in many traditions it’s part of daily prayers, at St Luke’s we don’t normally have it in corporate worship at this time of the year.…
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Breaking through structure
We’re heading towards Easter and the celebration of good news and transformation. In our Lenten study we’re up to the later chapters of Matthew’s telling of the Good News, and we have entered the portion in which the very structure of religion is disrupted. Transformation – whether you seek it or it overtakes you –…
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Invocation
Let’s hear the song “Khumbaya,” but not the song as you might know it from Guides and Scouts and campfire singing. In fact, I’ll suggest that it can be a model of liturgical prayer. The familiar campfire song, in the experience of many people, has been exploited to arouse shallow-rooted feelings of happiness and harmony. As a…
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Letting go from music into silence
Are you doing any sort of fasting during Lent? We have one fasting discipline that we are doing as a community in our Sunday morning worship – we’re letting go of some of our music. It was introduced in this way on the order of service for the first Sunday of Lent: The season of…
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Love knocks and waits for us to hear
Bossa nova means “new style” but it comes organically out of Brazilian genres such as samba; “new” does not mean completely different, but a new flowering from the same branch. Bossa nova has the same rhythms as samba, but played more slowly, and the playing and singing is always soft and gentle. We learned the…
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R-E-S-P-E-C-T
This is a strange aspect of music ministry. In two separate occasions within a week, people looked to me, as music director of the local church, to confirm whether certain behaviours among the congregation show ‘disrespect’ in corporate worship. Honestly, I had no official line to give, despite the fact that, if I lead a…
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Brighter than the sun
The concept that Christ is ‘brighter than the sun” has special force now. Epiphany is the season of revelation, with light being the preeminent symbol of God’s revealed presence in the world. In the Northern hemisphere it’s a midwinter season, and you can see lights shining in the darkness; in Australia, the brightness of the…
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How to come and adore
In the Christmas season, singing “O come let us adore him…” reminds me of devotional (visual) art, which gives the viewer some ways to come and adore, typically: Figures in the image look at or gesture to the viewer to invite you into the scene (e.g. the Botticelli Adoration of 1475, below) Figures in the…
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Blessings count! New year review of music at St Luke’s, part II
Halfway through the season of Advent, with a strong focus on preparing for Christmas festivities, there’s such a feeling of spiralling into a conclusion that it’s hard to believe that the first few weeks of the Church year have barely unfolded yet. But we are indeed still at the beginning. Here is a picture of…