Children’s Choir & Music Education
by Ellie Watkins
Richard Gray, our Director of Music, and Haley Olson, our new Assistant to the Director of Music, are both feeling excited and energetic about the Children’s Choir programming beginning this fall.
“We want an organized structure for Sunday mornings,” Richard explains. “We want to be clear to children and parents what their options are.”
For those children ages 5 to grade 5 who want to participate in the Children’s Choir, rehearsals will occur every Sunday at 9am in the Music Room. Haley will lead the kids in ear training, music theory, and other building blocks of music education. The children’s music program will use the internationally acclaimed Royal School of Church Music Curriculum, adapted to make sure that the choir rehearsals are accessible for all kids, even those who have never had any musical experience before. The program will be very developmental, giving kids a strong foundation that they can continue to build upon as they grow. Richard shares a quote that resonates with him: “If we don’t have good children’s choirs, we won’t have strong adult choirs.”
For Richard, it’s important that these young vocalists know they’re being taken seriously, and that they regularly get to be a part of worship, musically and liturgically. In this initial season of Fall 2019, he plans to have the children’s choir sing at several services. But he also stresses that a big point of the children’s music ministry is not the events they prepare for, but the rehearsals themselves. “They are regular meetings that provide education and also let kids build relationships with each other as peers and then as friends. They’re more likely to stick with it longer if they’re doing it together with their friends.”
The Liturgy Commission and the Music Commission are both taking a role in helping with the faith formation of these choristers. “We’ll be talking about things like, ‘Why is my family Episcopalian? What does that mean?’ What is music? What is liturgy? Ultimately by the end of the first year we want them to be able to answer those two questions.”
Originally published in the September/October 2019 Evangelist.
