Well, it’s official, this Tuesday at 6 pm, you pastor will be conducting the Boeing Employee Concert Band! How did this happen, you ask? Well, actually Lea Louder, a new member of Bear Creek UMC (welcome Lea and Mark) is the current conductor and since they are going out of town Lea invited me to step in for her! I must tell you I’m extremely excited to do this! I haven’t conducted a band for about 30 years! In fact, the last time I conducted a concert band was 34 years ago when I conducted the band for Wakonda High School! One of my most memorable moments was conducting the fifth-grade band for their first concert. We had just finished the concert and I was praising them all. Sharing with them that they had done an excellent job when all of the sudden one of our flute players burst into tears! I ran to her side and asked her what was going on and she pointed to her music and said, “I don’t know how I could have done a great job. Look, my music was upside down the whole time!” I didn’t have the heart to tell her that it didn’t really matter, they were not going to sound any good no matter how their sheet music was placed on their music stand!
The same can’t be said for our Bear Creek choir and bell choir! Wasn’t Easter amazing?! They sang and rang in our Easter morning beautifully! We are so blessed to have such good musicians in our church. Many of you shared that while listening to the “Hallelujah Chorus” you were moved to tears of joy! I too, found myself with a line of goose bumps on my spine as I sang “And he will reign forever and ever!”
Much of the success of these two choirs comes from our wonderful leadership here at Bear Creek. Our music director, Jung Jang, is an excellent musician and has put in countless hours honing his skills at the University of Washington where he earned is doctorate in choral performance and conducting. His gifts are many, but he has a particular knack for helping our choir sing not only with precision, but with confidence and feeling! And he’s taken our bell choir from having the confidence of a fifth-grade concert band (we started out a little shaky in the confidence department) to being able to ring in Easter with the confidence that Christ really did rise!
Along with Jung, we have Catherine Feller, our piano accompanist. Catherine is an elementary music teacher in Edmonds, and every Wednesday she makes the trek over to accompany our choir. She is an incredible musician and plays with such a feel for the music. And when Jung and Catherine play together like they did on several of the hymns, and we add our trumpets, Kevin, and Ben, well let me just say that the heavens seem to open!
I’m not sure all of that is going to happen when I direct my first rehearsal of the Boeing Employee Concert Band, but I will say that Jung, Catherine, and company have certainly inspired me! May we all continue to be inspired by our musical leadership here at Bear Creek!
Your friend and pastor, looking around for my old conductor’s baton, Brook
(The last time I saw it I had lost control of it, and it had flown up and gotten stuck in a ceiling tile!)
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