Listening to the music

Working on this web site has had a couple of unexpected benefits for me...

First, it allowed me to revive some somewhat dormant skills a bit: HTML/CSS/Javascript/PHP, etc. It was actually quite a bit of fun to put the front part of it together, with the music, a couple of photos scanned from a yearbook, etc. And finding and configuring the community portion was interesting to me.

And listening to some of the music? Beautiful! In fact, I'm going to try to convince our church choir that we can sing "How Unto Bethlehem", as I really love the sprightly tempo and the harmonies. And there might be more "gold" I can mine just from those song lists.

Well, I found and bought enough copies of "How Unto Bethlehem" for our church choir. We took our first look at it at our weekly practice on Thursday, and I think everybody liked it. Of course, I've been practicing the tenor part(s) at home - there's an open-source program called MuseScore that lets you construct and play back a musical score, and it's very useful for this sort of thing!

Sigh. We (our church choir director) had planned to sing "How Unto Bethlehem" on Jan. 9, as it would appropriate to celebrate Epiphany. For some reason, though, the choir virtually disintegrated right after Christmas. In fact, we were badly short of voices for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. So that song has been shelved for this year.

We're starting up practices again this week to prepare for Lent and Easter, and I really wonder at this point how many people will show up. It's a problem in most small church choirs, I suspect.

Maybe next year.