The Diary of a Committed Choir Member: In Three Acts
The Diary of a Committed Choir Member: In Three Acts

Author: Marla D. Larkin

Publisher: Epic Press

Published: 2019-11-19

Total Pages: 46

ISBN-13: 9781460011157

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Most choir members will attest that choir rehearsals can be exciting, exhilarating, and bring sheer joy; on the other hand, they can be arduous and boring! While one may be committed to learning and becoming the best they can be to bring honor and glory to God, there are times when frustration and sheer ineptness set in. Choir members may attribute these feelings to their current mood or to the people appointed to lead, train, and prepare singers for service. I see the choir rehearsal hall as a classroom and the choir member as the student coming to that space to learn more about the technique of singing and the reason why they sing. My perspective comes from the church choir vantage point and my experience of the styles of various musicians and directors selected to train them. Are choir rehearsals just another classroom experience where power and dominance rear their ugly heads, or are they a place where one comes to be engaged as a learner, leaving the choir rehearsal with a lifted spirit and rejuvenated to share the ministry in song to those who come to hear on Sunday morning? Well, I've answered this question. Now it is your turn--come up with your answer as you travel the pages of this documented experience! The Diary of a Committed Choir Member: In Three Acts

From Biblical Book to Musical Megahit
From Biblical Book to Musical Megahit

Author: Juanita Karpf

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2023-11-27

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 1496848918

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Many churchgoers will recognize the name William Bradbury, a nineteenth-century American composer of popular hymns still sung at Sunday services. Bradbury’s name may also bring to mind Esther, the Beautiful Queen, his choral setting of a text based on the biblical Book of Esther. The uncomplicated score became enormously popular almost immediately after its initial publication in 1856. In From Biblical Book to Musical Megahit: William B. Bradbury’s “Esther, the Beautiful Queen,” Juanita Karpf traces the work’s rich performance and reception history. Bradbury emphatically stated that he intended Esther to be sung as an unadorned religious and educational piece. Yet many music directors exploited the potential for his score, producing elaborately staged events with costumes, scenery, and acting. Although directors retained Bradbury’s original music, they nonetheless facilitated Esther’s rapid entrée into the realm of music theater. This stylistic transformation ignited a firestorm of controversy. Some clergy and religiously pious citizens condemned theatrical representations of biblical texts as the epitome of debauchery, sacrilege, and sin. In contrast, more tolerant and open-minded theater enthusiasts welcomed the dramatic staging of Esther as wholesome entertainment and as evidence of a refreshingly enlightened approach to biblical interpretation. However heated this debate seemed at times, it did little to quell the continued rise in popularity of Esther. In fact, by the late 1860s, Bradbury’s score had worked its way across the continent, north to Canada and, eventually, to Great Britain, Australia, Asia, and Africa. With performances recorded over a century after Bradbury published his score, Esther became, by any measure, an international megahit.

Brothers, We are Not Professionals
Brothers, We are Not Professionals

Author: John Piper

Publisher: B&H Publishing Group

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1433678829

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

John Piper pleads with fellow pastors to abandon the professionalization of the pastorate and pursue the prophetic call of the Bible for radical ministry.

Redemption Songs: A Year in the Life of a Community Prison Choir
Redemption Songs: A Year in the Life of a Community Prison Choir

Author: Andy Douglas

Publisher: Innerworld Publications

Published: 2019-04

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 9781881717713

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Takes the reader inside the walls of a medium-security prison and offers a glimpse at how music and the arts are offering second chances to the incarcerated. In a place often defined by trauma and control, a performing chorus composed of inmates and volunteers creates a community where healing, atonement and growth can occur.

Emilie Davis’s Civil War
Emilie Davis’s Civil War

Author: Judith Giesberg

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2016-06-08

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 0271064315

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Emilie Davis was a free African American woman who lived in Philadelphia during the Civil War. She worked as a seamstress, attended the Institute for Colored Youth, and was an active member of her community. She lived an average life in her day, but what sets her apart is that she kept a diary. Her daily entries from 1863 to 1865 touch on the momentous and the mundane: she discusses her own and her community’s reactions to events of the war, such as the Battle of Gettysburg, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the assassination of President Lincoln, as well as the minutiae of social life in Philadelphia’s black community. Her diaries allow the reader to experience the Civil War in “real time” and are a counterpoint to more widely known diaries of the period. Judith Giesberg has written an accessible introduction, situating Davis and her diaries within the historical, cultural, and political context of wartime Philadelphia. In addition to furnishing a new window through which to view the war’s major events, Davis’s diaries give us a rare look at how the war was experienced as a part of everyday life—how its dramatic turns and lulls and its pervasive, agonizing uncertainty affected a northern city with a vibrant black community.

Salvaged Pages
Salvaged Pages

Author: Alexandra Zapruder

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2015-08-25

Total Pages: 536

ISBN-13: 0300210833

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award: viewing the Holocaust through the eyes of youth “Zapruder . . . has done a great service to history and the future. Her book deserves to become a standard in Holocaust studies classes. . . . These writings will certainly impress themselves on the memories of all readers.”—Publishers Weekly “These extraordinary diaries will resonate in the reader’s broken heart for many days and many nights.”—Elie Wiesel This stirring collection of diaries written by young people, aged twelve to twenty-two years, during the Holocaust has been fully revised and updated. Some of the writers were refugees, others were in hiding or passing as non-Jews, some were imprisoned in ghettos, and nearly all perished before liberation. This seminal National Jewish Book Award winner preserves the impressions, emotions, and eyewitness reportage of young people whose accounts of daily events and often unexpected thoughts, ideas, and feelings serve to deepen and complicate our understanding of life during the Holocaust. The second paperback edition includes a new preface by Alexandra Zapruder examining the book’s history and impact. Simultaneously, a multimedia edition incorporates a wealth of new content in a variety of media, including photographs of the writers and their families, images of the original diaries, artwork made by the writers, historical documents, glossary terms, maps, survivor testimony (some available for the first time), and video of the author teaching key passages. In addition, an in-depth, interdisciplinary curriculum in history, literature, and writing developed by the author and a team of teachers, working in cooperation with the educational organization Facing History and Ourselves, is now available to support use of the book in middle- and high-school classrooms.