Incarnation Music Report

Specific to the Upcoming All-ages Service:

To help reflect the intention of an all-ages worship time, I would like to incorporate young musicians into the service, particularly the young instrumentalists, hopefully for hymn accompaniment and/or music for communion.

Also, an idea that has been suggested is to have one “station” as a music-centred activity. This could be something like learning a song that would then be taught to the congregation later in the service. I could also meet with a group of children and work with them on a song to teach the rest of the congregation. Brainstorming ideas welcome here!

A Musical Overview:

At Incarnation we continue to strive to incorporate a wide variety of musical genres into our services. Right now we don’t have a readily available guitarist to lead in guitar-based singing, although Josh Thatcher is willing to play when he’s available, and Phil Jones has come in for the Easter Vigil. 

A conscious effort to use a range of musical genres, including music from other cultural traditions and in other languages. Variety in musical styles has also been part of the music committee’s intention. 

As music director I hope to foster a musically inclusive environment in our congregation. Some ideas of how to foster this on different “fronts” are as follows:

1. For the congregation, I believe that including the music for the hymns will help to develop a greater participation of our own congregation to join in the singing and will allow visitors who read music to more readily participate. 
2. I would also like to see more hymn books available. At the moment the choir each has a hymnal and there is one extra available in the music room, but that is all. If we bought more hymnals we could have a stack available where the bulletins are given, for anyone wanting to look at the music. Before buying more Voices United hymnals, it is worth a committee assessment as to whether we would like to continue using Voices United as the primary hymnal or rather add/switch to the Anglican Common Praise. A small committee will look at both hymnals, hopefully sometime in fall.
3. We always would like to have more people join the choir – it’s a small faithful group. I would like the congregation to feel that there is no barrier to join, even on a short-term basis. I think the extra participation at Easter started to develop an environment of more choral participation among the congregation - several joined just for the preparation of that one service, which seemed to work well. The idea of short-term participation is ideal for services such as Christmas and Easter.

There has been some activity towards getting an acoustic piano into our space, either lent or bought. This would be a wonderful addition to our worship music and space and would open further opportunities for Incarnation to host various musical events and thereby become more of a musical presence in our community at large.

Finally, on a very brief, final note, an ethos I would like to continue to develop at Incarnation is a sense of musical participation from within the entire community. I do not believe that worship music should be a spectator event, but rather that the entire community should feel a sense of involvement. Along with fostering more communal involvement, it is also important that we aim for the highest quality of music for our worship time.

- Charlene Pauls, Music Director