Leitourgeia kai Qurbana: Contra den Zeitgeist

This has been in the works for a little over a year, but the time approaches quickly and with the new semester upon us, I am kicking the publicity into high gear (at least as high as I can working on my own).

John Michael Boyer, protopsaltis of the Metropolis of San Francisco (GOArch), protopsaltis and Director of Liturgy at Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church in Sacramento, and one of the principal singers of Cappella Romana, will be coming to Bloomington to conduct a series of lectures and workshops at All Saints Orthodox Church from 22-24 January 2010.

The schedule is as follows:

Friday, 22 January 2010
6-9pm: Lecture, Practicum, and Q&A – A Historical and Theoretical Overview of Issues in Byzantine Chant

Saturday, 23 January 2010
9am-12:30pm: Byzantine Chant Practicum, Pt. I
12:30-1:30: Lunch (on-site)
1:30-5:30pm: Byzantine Chant Practicum, Pt. II
6pm: Great Vespers
7-9pm: Conclusion of Chant Practicum

Sunday, 24 January 2010
8:30am: Resurrectional Orthros (Matins)
10am: The Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom

Lecture, practica and services are free and open to the public; donations will be accepted, but just to clarify what’s happening here — between a private donor and very generous support from Indiana University’s Center for West European Studies, this is pretty much covered, but there are always last-minute expenditures one wasn’t expecting, and it is one of my goals to establish some seed money to be able to do something like this again. It’s good for All Saints to be able to do things like this that can draw the interest of the local and university communities, and musical events have a unique ability to attract a lot of different kinds of people. So, anyway, the point is, we’re not taking donations because this isn’t paid for; we’re taking donations because the next one (whatever it may turn out to be) isn’t.

If you want to come, there are two ways to register: You can either e-mail me at rrbarret (AT) indiana.edu and let me know that you’re coming, or you can RSVP on the Facebook event I’ve created. Either way, please let me know if you plan on bringing somebody besides yourself; it’s totally fine if you are, but I just need to know how many sets of materials to prepare.

If you want a press kit for this event to help get the word out, you can download a headshot here, get a press release here, and find a color flyer here.

(Side story about the press kits: on Monday, as I was starting to assemble a mailing of press kits to several different department chairs, newspapers, and neighboring parishes, I realized in horror that all of the materials listed the dates as 22-24 January 2009. This was, of course, after I had already spent money on color prints of the flyers, and naturally five different proofreaders had failed to notice it entirely. Twenty-four hours later, I had corrected versions of everything ready to go, and it was one of those weird quirks of fate that in putting together the 2010 version, I came up with an idea that made everything look far better than would have otherwise been the case. Of course, when I arrived at the post office with 27 individual manila envelopes to be individually weighed and stamped, the line to the counter was out the door and the line for the automated kiosk was about seven people long. Two or three of the people in line for the kiosk took a good ten minutes apiece; I felt rather self-conscious and guilty with my stack of things that was going to take a long time, and let several people go ahead of me who only had one thing to send off or who only wanted to buy stamps. When it was finally my turn, however, within about three minutes I had people hovering over my shoulders, until I finally turned to them and said, “With all respect, I let about eight people go ahead of me before you showed up.” They backed off, but I still got to be “that guy” for about 20 minutes or so. I at least waited to actually put the postage on the envelopes until I was out of line, but nonetheless, as Larry Miller said, “I was makin’ friends all over the place.”)

Anyway — more to come.

Update, 11 January 2010: A bit ran in the Bloomington Herald-Times about this on Sunday (won’t bother linking to it since it won’t do non-subscribers any good) and gave the church’s website as the only source of follow-up information. Thus, I have posted everything here.