Dear lovers of music, mystery, and meaning, 🌲 This time of year, the unfiltered winter sun and the shorter days always bring to mind my favorite composer. Monday was the 160th birthday of Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. I’ve been slightly obsessed with Sibelius for the last quarter century, and I’m celebrating my favorite composer all ...

Dear lovers of mystery, music, and meaning, ⏳ Thanks to BookTok, I became aware of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume series. I’m currently reading the second novel, which was translated into English and published earlier this year. The series is an exploration of a “time loop” experienced by the protagonist who awakes to find...

Dear lovers of music, mystery, and meaning, Happy Thanksgiving! 🥧 I hope you're enjoying your traditions this holiday. One of mine has become making Hilly's Pumpkin Caramel Pie. It's really over-the-top, but ever since it went viral on TikTok a few years ago, I haven't looked back. 🪚 Last week I heard a musical saw as part of the Aram ...

Dear lovers of music, mystery, and meaning, 🎹 I’ve been focused on J.S. Bach lately. I guess organists always are to some degree, but I’ve been amping it up more than usual. This fall I've been revisiting Christoph Wolff’s biography and frequently consulting Peter Williams’s guide to the organ music. And it was only a few weeks ago tha...

Dear lovers of music, mystery, and meaning, 📖 Did you know that the Church Hymnal Corporation shipped 750,000 copies of the brand-new The Hymnal 1982 to Episcopal churches across the country on November 18, 1985? I know this thanks to a new book by Marty Wheeler Burnett, Shapers of the Hymnal 1982: Our Faith in Words and Music. Dr. Bur...

Dear lovers of music, mystery, and meaning, Fog, Isaac Watts, and incense coalesced around All Saints’ Day for me this year. This past Sunday, I woke up in a fog. I had gotten a good night’s sleep, so it wasn’t that I was groggy or confused or anything. It was a literal fog. An unexpected one. What happens when what is familiar to us i...

Dear lovers of music, mystery, and meaning, ✊ If you’re like me, you’ve never heard of Kjempevise-slåtten (The Ballad of Revolt) by Harald Sæverud (1897-1992). It was written by the Norwegian composer upon seeing a Nazi presence in his homeland. At the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra concert on Friday morning, guest conductor Tabita Bergl...

Dear lovers of music, mystery, and meaning, ⚾ No one in our house is rooting for the Dodgers. Still, it was hard not to be captivated by Shohei Ohtani’s historic performance in Game 4 of the National League Championship Series on Friday: ten strikeouts (as a pitcher) and three home runs (as a batter), one of which literally left the pa...

Dear lovers of music, mystery, and meaning, ⚾ There’s a slight chill in the air, and there’s baseball on TV every night. It’s one of my favorite seasons. And Monday night’s near-grand-slam turned double play in the Dodgers vs. Brewers game was just plain wild — not just for the Major League Baseball postseason, but for any time. It lef...

Dear lovers of mystery, music, and meaning, 📚 Over the summer, I had a strange epiphany that my new book was by an author my son had also read. I asked him if he had read anything by Katherine Rundell, and sure enough, he came back with his copy of Imaginary Creatures. I was reading her nonfiction book Super-Infinite: The Transformatio...

Dear lovers of music, mystery, and meaning: Happy October! (Rabbit, rabbit) 🎻 Last Friday morning, I went back to Powell Hall for the first time in a couple years. This historic home of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra has undergone a two-year renovation, and it is looking and sounding better than ever! There was even a spot for me to ...

To all lovers of music, mystery, and meaning: • ☕🍪 Last week, the Church remembered Hildegard of Bingen. As it did, I stumbled upon this TikTok from saintfluencer that suggested we have Hildegard to thank for Pumpkin Spice Lattes. And while it's true to that Hildgard dubbed the combination of cinnamon, nutmeg, and clove the "Spices of ...

To all lovers of music, mystery, and meaning: • The ninetieth birthday of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt snuck up on me last week. One of the best books I read last year was Between Two Sounds by Joonas Sildre, a beautiful biographical graphic novel about Pärt that blew me away. I especially loved how Sildre depicted the shape and size of...

Hello, friends, Advent is getting real now, today, December 17, which is noted in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer as "O sapientia". This single entry in the prayer book calendar marks the beginning of the sequence of seven "O" Antiphons leading to Christmas (we sing these seven Antiphons in the hymn "O come, O come, Emmanuel," and The H...

Many times at this season of the year I'm busy practicing a choral requiem for All Soul's Day. So I've come to see this time of year as having "Requiem Weather." It's the color of the leaves, the bright, clear sunshine in the crisp autumn air. For most people, it's probably just "Fall." But I think it's Requiem Weather. And this has be...

Last Sunday I enjoyed playing and directing music by Ralph Vaughan Williams in a celebration of his 150th birthday. Looking ahead to this Sunday, October 23, I am looking forward to another birthday celebration, that of American composer Ned Rorem, who was born in Indiana in 1923. I was aware of Rorem's music at a young age. One of the...

I keep thinking that I don't have enough material for a weekly email newsletter, but you wouldn't mind if these were short, would you? 1. Wednesday was the 150th anniversary of the birth of English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. On that day a wonderful read about Vaughan Williams appeared in the NY Times: Vaughan Williams: Complicate...

Dear friends, I've been heartbroken ever since learning about the death of Herman Whitfield III in Indianapolis last week. Herman was in police custody when he died. The tragic outline of this story is all too familiar. I pray for the repose of Herman's soul and for his family in their grief. Herman was larger than life. He pursued mus...

Dear Friends, Happy Eastertide! Leading up to and on Easter Day, I had conversations with two dear friends and colleagues about that remarkable piece of organ music that one really must play on Easter morning: the Saraband for the Morning of Easter by English composer Herbert Howells. One friend remarked to me how vividly the soft sect...

Hello again on this Good Friday, friends: Not even 24 hours after writing my last email newsletter to you (...and turns out I never hit "send"? You can read it here: Passacaglia of the Passion) I found myself on the organ bench playing the Crucifixus from Bach's B minor Mass. And I thought to myself, "is this not a passacaglia?" And in...

Hey there, friends! There's something about a good passacaglia that makes me think about Jesus' Passion. There's no overt connection to Passiontide that I know of. Passacaglias are not sacred music, per se. But in these pieces, there is a kind of teleological solemnity that leads me to think about the events leading to Jesus' death. If...

Happy Monday, friends! Here are a few things that have caught my interest recently. 1. TikTok Duets Are Reviving the Exquisite Corpse (from Wired) When you think about it, yeah, TikTok could be just a big surrealist art project, right? 2. Did they mention the music? by John Rutter I often forget what a good writer Rutter is. Here, he u...

For the first time in my tenure at St. Peter’s, St. Louis, we will offer the Great Vigil of Easter. It is, in my opinion, the single most important service in the Book of Common Prayer. If you want to know what Christianity is about, come to the Easter Vigil. But, for the first time in my career, I was faced with the challenge of findi...

This my third and final reflection on music sung one year ago: the last time I directed choral music in a service of worship at St. Peter's Episcopal Church, St. Louis. The church was in a quiet state of preparation before the funeral. There was an ornate fair linen on the altar, not the one that we normally used for the burial of a ma...

“Remember, O Lord, your compassion and love, for they are from everlasting; –from the Introit for the Second Sunday of Lent (Reminiscere)” If any new music director of a church learned that not only was the music critic for the local newspaper a member of the parish but a member of the choir as well, they would be somewhat apprehensive...

Welcome to this email newsletter doohickey. You're probably thinking about what this time was like a year ago. I am too. My story isn't special, but I do have vivid memories about our last three Sundays in worship. This is a reflection about the first of those days, March 1, 2020. One year ago was a time of new beginnings at St. Peter’...