Music directors fill their cups at choir event
The third annual Presbyterian Association of Musicians’ Mid-South Region Festival of Choirs is held in Kentucky
LEXINGTON, Kentucky — When Dr. Everett McCorvey thought about the singers before him in the choir loft of First Presbyterian Church in Lexington last weekend, he was reminded of a cartoon his daughter had given him.
It showed a person filling cups of water for people, and then that same person turning and getting water from a fountain.
“It says, ‘Givers, don’t forget to give to yourself,’” McCorvey said. “All of these choir directors are givers. They are people who give their time, their energy, their skill Sunday after Sunday after Sunday. Well, what feeds their soul, so that then they are receiving instead of always giving? I hope that this has been a weekend of receiving for the choir directors, where they can nourish their soul and they can fill their cup, so that when they go back to giving, that they’re going back in a new position because they have received.”
McCorvey, director of the University of Kentucky Opera Theatre and the National Chorale in New York City and a busy freelance conductor, was in the final hours leading the Presbyterian Association of Musicians (PAM) Mid-South Region’s Third Annual Festival of Choirs, which drew in church musicians from a five-state area for a weekend of music making.
The group was about 30 singers, most of whom had driven to Lexington and gathered in the small chapel of First Presbyterian Church for dinner and a contemplative worship service Friday evening that ended with “Day is Done,” though their event was just getting started. After worship, they went up to the church’s sanctuary that opened in 1872 and features a Kimball Organ that was most recently rebuilt in 2007.
“The space is just gorgeous,” said Stephanie Nash, director of Music at Lakeside Presbyterian Church in Lakeside Park, Kentucky. “I didn't know this was here, this historic church.”
Since Lakeside Park is a Cincinnati suburb, Nash said she often feels more connected to Ohio than Kentucky, so the festival provided a good opportunity to get to know more churches and musicians in the Bluegrass State.
“This group has never sang together before, and they won’t ever sing together in this particular form again,” said Creighton Holder, president-elect of the PAM Mid-South Board and director of music at First Presbyterian Church in Oxford, Mississippi. “But they’ve come together and they’re making something collectively that’s really beautiful, and that’s something that you only find in church music.”
The Presbyterian Association of Musicians is best known for its annual June Worship & Music Conference at Montreat Conference Center in Montreat, North Carolina. McCorvey was the choir director at one of the conferences and likened the weekend to “a mini-Montreat.” Holder and PAM director Kelly Abraham said the association aims to broaden its offerings to give church musicians more opportunities to engage.
The weekend culminated in a Saturday afternoon concert that was also the opening event of the Lexington Sacred Music Festival, a weeklong event featuring a variety of offerings.
In the sanctuary, McCorvey led the singers through a series of vocal warmups before taking them on a fairly quick read through the eight pieces they would sing, accompanied by First Presbyterian Lexington director of music and arts ministries Paul John Robinson on piano and organ. The repertoire included arrangements of “Now Thank We All Our God” and “Be Thou My Vision” by Robinson. It also highlighted arrangements of the spirituals “We Shall Walk Through the Valley in Peace” by Moses Hogan and “Ain’-a That Good News” by William L. Dawson, as well as Roland Carter’s arrangement of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”
McCorvey, whose many endeavors include founding the American Spiritual Ensemble, a professional ensemble dedicated to the preservation of the American Spiritual, talked to singers about how he regards spirituals as “the mother music” of musical identity in the United States. It was important to McCorvey that the choir performed works with deep meaning.
“I was at a conference one time for young ministers, and one of the speakers said, ‘Show me the hymns that you sing, and I’ll tell you about the theology of your church,” McCorvey said. “I thought that’s brilliant because it really does sort of signify what you believe in and what you hold true.”
McCorvey said in planning he and Robinson wanted to introduce the musicians to pieces and arrangements they could take back to their churches and present.
“Some of it’s rather hard to try to learn in two days, but I enjoy the challenge,” said Dianne Griffith of Bethel Presbyterian Church in Kingston, Tennessee, who has been to all three Festivals of Choirs.
McCorvey gently guided the choir through the music, sharpening rhythms in “Ain’-a that Good News,” coaxing “light, airy, fluffy” notes out of “Come Thou Fount” that seemed to float right out the church’s stained glass windows, and encouraging them to breathe because, “if you don’t breathe, the audience won’t breathe, because they’re right there with you.”
"He has a way of drawing it out of you,” said the Rev. Bob Phelps, executive presbyter of North Alabama Presbytery, who has also attended all three festivals with his wife, DeAnna. “He is a bundle of energy, and it shows.”
What didn’t show was that McCorvey had just returned home that evening after spending two weeks conducting in Europe. Any road weariness vanished when the choir began to sing.
“I felt like it was fish that had found water, and everybody was so excited and ready to sing in the opening rehearsal,” McCorvey said of those first moments. “It was a two-hour rehearsal. We could have gone four hours.”
See and hear more
Dr. Everett McCorvey’s appearance on PAM’s Sounding Board podcast
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