Authors: Tammy-Jo Mortensen

Summertime… Fewer rehearsals, more unscheduled time, holidays, time for creativity. Summer is always a great time to do some planning for the next year for your choir, instrumental ensembles, or handbell choir. So how do you pick music? How do you plan with your ministry team? How much do you...

Psalms are an important component of reading scripture in worship. There are many ways to use the psalms set to music. In Christine Gladu’s article “The Psalms: Jesus’ Prayer Book” (Gathering Lent/Easter 2020), she summarized much of the history of psalms, so please refer to that article for background. Here...

Do you use music to facilitate confession throughout the year? Or do you only use congregational music for confession during Lent? Is confession an opportunity to incorporate new music into your context? It seems to me that there are several ways to include music in this portion of the liturgy...

I love hearing people’s stories—listening to a United Church Women (UCW) elder tell me about growing up, hearing from a chorister who has come to recognize the power of song in their lives, being entranced by a child telling me about events of their day, absorbing biblical stories over and...

Among the many hymns and songs we have in More Voices and Voices United from various cultural contexts, Donald Patriquin has written a whole Caribbean mass. The Sanctus and Benedictus, Memorial Acclamation, and Great Amen are printed in More Voices (206, 207, and 208). But there is more! If a...

When our son was young, we attended two musical programs with him. The first was a toddler program called Music Together, and then he attended violin lessons taught in the Suzuki method before he was four. Aside from the common topic—music—I noticed many other similarities between these two programs, but...