Mentors and trainers help Episcopal Church musicians live into their vocations
Episcopal News Service. July 26, 2011 [072611-01]
Sharon Sheridan
Kenny Lewis grew up Pentecostal and admits he hated the first Evensong he attended. But at age 17 he fell in love with the Episcopal Church, singing at one of Alabama's largest parishes, studying with its organist and being confirmed in the church.
Lewis worked at Disciples of Christ and United Methodist churches and studied organ performance at college before becoming organist and choirmaster at Saint Simon Peter Episcopal Church in Pell City about four years ago. There, he welcomed the chance to be mentored by his former organ teacher, James Dorroh, through a new Association of Anglican Musicians (AAM) program.
"He's been in the Episcopal Church as long as I've been alive," Lewis said. Dorroh helped him find suitable anthems for his small choir and learn to plan both routine and special services, including choosing appropriate hymns following the church's lectionary. "I would not have felt comfortable at all if I had not had someone instructing me on how to do that."
The AAM mentorship program aims to provide that sort of comfort and guidance for church musicians who may lack experience in directing choirs, playing hymns or worshiping in a liturgical tradition. The organization launched the program as a pilot several years ago and now hopes to spread the word and serve more musicians.
A related two-year certificate program -- the ecumenical Leadership Program for Musicians (LPM) -- also hopes to expand and to join with local AAM mentors to provide hands-on instruction to accompany new online course opportunities.
"The Leadership Program for Musicians and the mentoring program are working hand-in-hand now," said Kyle Ritter, organist and choirmaster at the Episcopal Cathedral of All Souls in Asheville, North Carolina . "The Leadership Program for Musicians is a program that lasts for a specific amount of time. It's a set of courses that leads to a diploma in church music."
The mentoring program is more flexible, focusing on specific needs the mentor and mentored musician identify -- anything from working with children's choirs to liturgy to hymn playing, said Ritter, who taught in the first leadership program in the dioceses of Virginia and Washington. "That relationship can go on for a very long time."
"It's really kind of cool that these two programs have kind of joined hands in a way," he said. "The mentoring program can kind of pick up where the LPM program stops."
Sharing wisdom
The mentoring program grew out of a conversation between then-AAM President Martha Johnson and Marilyn Keiser, who had chaired LPM during its first five years. Keiser is music professor emeritus of Indiana University and music director at Trinity Episcopal Church, Bloomington, Indiana. Johnson recently retired as organist and choirmaster at St. Peter's Church in the Great Valley, Malvern, Pennsylvania.
"I've always been interested in helping younger organists develop service-playing skills and people skills, and so we talked for quite a long time about the fact that a lot of AAM members were getting to an age of retirement and had a wealth of experience and could really help a lot of the young musicians just out of college," Keiser recalled. "One of the realities is that a lot of colleges and universities do not teach much service playing, even hymn playing, so students come out playing marvelous repertoire, but they haven't had an opportunity to learn how to really lead a congregation or accompany a choir in ways that are really effective."
At Johnson's encouragement, Keiser brought together a task force of about 15 people in the fall of 2007. They launched a pilot pairing a handful of recently graduated or doctoral students with experienced mentors. AAM now hopes to increase awareness and recruit more musicians into the program.
The program provides a formal structure for the sort of mentoring many Episcopal organists have received through the years. Keiser recalled working with Alec Wyton for four years at the Episcopal Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York.
"The things I learned, both musically and personally, have just shaped and formed my life as a church musician," she said. "His incredible openness and sense of hospitality, his phenomenal musicianship and just his spirit of joy were things that just touched me so deeply, and so I've had an intern or a young student I've been mentoring the past 26 years at Trinity Church."
The mentoring program has three goals, she said. It seeks "young musicians who are just out of school or other musicians new to the Episcopal Church who can gain from the expertise, the support, the confidence building, the advice of experienced colleagues." It encourages churches to bring a church music intern or organ scholar into their music programs to learn from their resident musicians. And it aims to "preserve the whole idea of what mentoring has meant in our profession," Keiser said. In its journal, the AAM is printing members' stories about the mentors who influenced them.
Mentoring guides Episcopal Church musicians who grew up in other faith traditions. "I would venture to say that well over 60 percent of musicians were raised in another denomination, maybe even more than that," said Keiser, who grew up a Methodist.
It also provides instruction in the people skills needed to run a church music program. "Most of us are introverts, and we spend a lot of our time at the organ, and sometimes it's very hard for us," Keiser said. "Working in a church as a musician is not always easy because everybody has their favorite hymn." Brides may request inappropriate music.
"You really have to learn how to be tactful, and most of all you need the support of the clergy with whom you're working," she said. "To me, that is the most critical relationship for any church musician."
Scott Elsholz was Keiser's doctoral student, newly in his first full-time job at an Episcopal Church in Michigan, when he entered the pilot program with the Rev. William Roberts, professor of church music at Virginia Theological Seminary and then-organist at St. John's Episcopal Church, Lafayette Square, Washington, D.C.
"I had been a church musician for many years," said Elsholz, now canon organist and choirmaster at St. Mary's Episcopal Cathedral in Memphis, Tennessee. "For me, the most important component of that mentoring program was just to have a sounding board … who could help me talk through and think through some of my frustrations at that point. It was fantastic."
Their discussions showed him he was not alone and guided him in resolving difficulties he was having adjusting the repertoire of the church's contemporary-music group to be more appropriate liturgically.
"I had come up against a brick wall," he said. "I didn't have as much support from pastoral leadership as I had anticipated. That was difficult. We eventually worked through it."
Roberts' advice? "Breathe."
"I remember just being energized by working with him and realizing that I didn't have to conquer the world in a week," Elsholz said. Roberts told him to "take time, be patient, continue to listen, continue to talk – but stand up for what you believe is good, is right, and try to bring others along with you in a pastoral, loving manner.
"He is nothing if not pastoral and loving, and he really impressed that upon me."
Now, Elsholz travels to some of the Diocese of West Tennessee's smaller parishes, doing his own mentoring with priests, musicians and choirs as needed. A member of the diocese's new liturgical commission, he also is exploring whether LPM could help diocesan musicians.
Training music leaders
LPM began as the Leadership Program for Musicians Serving Small Congregations, a subcommittee chaired by Keiser on what then was the Standing Commission on Church Music (now the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music). The impetus was a 1988 General Convention resolution asking the commission to find ways to help musicians in small churches. A leadership conference was held in 1995 to instruct attendees on establishing local programs to instruct musicians.
Today a cooperative venture of the Episcopal Church and Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, LPM is a teaching ministry of seven courses offered in a two-year cycle through local programs throughout the country, from East Texas to Northwest Minnesota to the Durham area of North Carolina. The curriculum encompasses classes in choral leadership, resources for an effective music program, liturgy and liturgical planning, Christian hymnody, teaching new music to a congregation, leadership of congregational song and philosophy of church music.
"Most of these courses can be taken by themselves, or they can also take all of the courses and get a certificate in church music," said Ellen Johnston, LPM national board chair. She worked as an Episcopal Church musician for 25 years before moving to Virginia when her husband was elected bishop there.
Although the program initially targeted musicians at small churches, it broadened its scope after discovering that musicians at medium and large churches, particularly those who didn't grew up in liturgical churches, needed assistance, too, Johnston said.
The program no longer receives funding from the Episcopal Church or ELCA and operates with a board but no paid national coordinator. Students typically pay $500 to $600 per year in tuition, with scholarship money available, Johnston said.
To help reach students in more remote areas, LPM hopes to launch online distance learning opportunities, likely beginning with its text-based courses, in January, she said. As they add distance courses, LPM hopes to match students with local AAM mentors who can provide skills training to complement the online components, she said.
"It's very rewarding to do this," Johnston said. "So many of our students don't have university degrees, and they do it because of a real love for church music. It is a vocation, and one of the things that LPM seeks to do is to give a vocational awareness and to help support that vocation with resources … This isn't just a job where you go show up and play on Sundays."
Rochelle Felsburg, music director at the Episcopal Church of the Messiah, Fredericksburg, Virginia, recently completed her first year of LPM training. Raised Baptist and a Moody Bible Institute graduate with a degree in church music, "I didn't know much about liturgy," she said.
She was part of the music staff at a large Baptist church when she first worshiped in Lutheran churches while visiting in Germany and loved it. Over time, she decided she wanted to worship in a liturgical church and felt called to be a music director. She began work at Messiah and accepted her rector's invitation to participate in LPM.
"I've learned so much," she said. "Probably the biggest thing it's helped me with is understanding the 1982 Hymnal, because it was just completely foreign to me. There were no titles [for hymns]. A lot of the pieces just were different. I have never chanted before. All of that was brand new to me."
She also appreciated learning about resources from Johnston. "She just brought piles of resources: websites, books, places to look for music, publishers. She'd bring in samples," Felsburg said. "And it's just been great working with other church musicians. We talk about things. We can relate to each other's problems and victories and share things. It's really an encouragement."
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