Leitourgeia kai Qurbana: Contra den Zeitgeist

I’ll say more about this in official channels (like my Director’s Notes blog over on the Saint John of Damascus Society’s website), but Ancient Faith Radio posted a pretty lengthy interview about the Psalm 103 project yesterday; give it a listen, and help spread the word!

Still, to give a brief rundown as to where things are at —

All of our composers are coming into town next month; they’ll all be here by Friday, 11 October, and they’ll have a working weekend where they put together their creative scheme for the composition of piece. As part of the weekend, they will do a public presentation called “Networks of Echoes: Collaboration, Community, and Creativity in the Musics of Eastern Orthodox Churches”. Each composer will talk informally for probably 10-15 minutes about their approach to collaboration, what specifically they bring to the collaboration, how they see the different repertoires people are working with fitting together, etc. There will also be a 12-piece choir on hand to sing representative musical examples chosen by the composers, and it will be conducted by Christopher Grundy, a doctoral student here at the IU Jacobs School of Music who is the former Assistant Conductor of the Yale Russian Chorus and the Yale Glee Club. After each composer talks for a bit, there will be a roundtable Q&A with everybody. It’s free and open to the public, and it will be at 7pm on Saturday, 12 October at First Christian Church in Bloomington, 205 E. Kirkwood Ave (right off of the square on the main drag in the center of town). It’s the same day as All Saints’ Festival on Fairfax; that goes until 5pm, and we start at 7, so if you’re coming into town for the Festival, please stay for our event!

We’ve been very fortunate to collaborate with the Indiana University College of Arts & Sciences Themester 2013 effort; they’ve been very generous, and we’re very appreciative of the support. Also, this program has been made possible through a matching grant from Indiana Humanities in cooperation with the National Endowment for the Humanities. The IU Institute for European Studies, the Russian and East European Institute, and the Modern Greek program have also given us substantial support.

This is a couple of months ago now, but Come Receive the Light on Orthodox Christian Network also ran a bit about us over the summer, and that’s definitely worth a listen.

In any event, we’ve got no shortage of publicity at this stage of the game — what we need to make sure we have now is an audience sitting there on the evening of 12 October. So, please — if you’re anywhere nearby, make time to come and see what we’re doing, and help us get the word out!