Christ’s Call to Conscientious Work

· Talia Maria Sheehan 1 Leave a Comment on %s
What if Jesus isn’t asking you to go out into the deep? We heard the passage in Luke on Sunday of Jesus calling his first disciples. It’s a pretty dense story. (Duh. It’s the Gospel.) I always heard it as saying that heeding the call to follow Christ is analogous to going out into the deep, leaving everything you know…

The Least of These My Brethren

· Talia Maria Sheehan 4 Leave a Comment on %s
“I was in this gospel choir in prison. They gave me a solo. But my time was up two weeks before the concert. I asked them if I could just stay in until the concert. They said no. I was so sad. It was just two weeks. I figured it would be no big deal, just two weeks. But they…

In Praise of Small Music

· Talia Maria Sheehan 4 Leave a Comment on %s
Our Western culture has long held that to be truly educated you have to be musically educated. For centuries in the West, most people with sufficient resources received some kind of musical education, both formal and informal. But at some point in the last half-century or so, our cultural values shifted. Now, instead of being something that simply makes you…

The Rachmaninov Vigil in Context

· Benedict Sheehan 1 Leave a Comment on %s
The following is a program note for an upcoming concert I will be conducting with the Chamber Choir of St. Tikhon’s Monastery, on May 27th at 7:30pm, in St. Stephen’s Pro-Cathedral, Wilkes-Barre, Pa. Tickets are available at here. I’d love to see you!   Writing in 1915 of Rachmaninov’s newly-composed All-Night Vigil, the preeminent church composer Alexander Kastalsky effused that “one…

Building your Church Music System, Part 1: Core Singers

· Benedict Sheehan 12 Leave a Comment on %s
A lot of people who visit St. Tikhon’s Monastery nowadays remark on how beautiful the music is. I know this sounds self-congratulatory, but I don’t mean it be. The funny thing is that people tend to tell me this, as if I as the choir director were somehow singlehandedly responsible for the beauty of an entire cycle of services that involves…