It is a moral imperative that I inform all three of my regular readers (we’ve grown) about the redesign of Orthodox Choral Music, the website of Kurt Sander, composer of Orthodox liturgical music in the Russian idiom, scholar, Advisory Board member for the St. John of Damascus Society (website coming soon!), and all around good guy and valued colleague (insofar as I may be presumptuous enough to consider myself as having “colleagues”). Content is still being added, it would appear, but I’d say that the main treasure right now is the page of his scores. There’s a lot of really beautiful music there, and while I wouldn’t call it easy repertoire for an average choir, it’s very much worthwhile for, say, the intermediate choir that has a decent acoustic in which to sing and that can put it in the time to learn it well. It’s “American Orthodox music” in what I would consider to be the best sense of that term — settings of English texts by a native speaker in a received idiom, re-articulating the beauty of that idiom without assuming that the shift in language requires a total reconsideration of the form. Kurt understands very well the relationship between music and iconography (and based on things I’ve heard him say, he gets the difference between καιρός and χρόνος as well), and that comes out in his compositions.
Go check out Kurt’s site — it’s worth your time.
Leitourgeia kai Qurbana: Contra den Zeitgeist 
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