Echoes from UUMN 2015
Unitarian Coastal Fellowship
© Rev. Sally B. White and Ann Odell
August 9, 2015
1
Echoes from the Musicians’ Network Conference. The Unitarian
Universalist Musician’s Network held its annual conference in Boston,
Massachusetts at the end of July, and both our music director Ann Odell and
Rev. Sally participated. On this Sunday, they will bring home to UCF
echoes of the conference – some of what they heard and saw, some of what
they sang and played. Music leadership is congregational leadership.
Come; let music and musicians lead us– together!
Message Part I: What We Sing is What We Are
Ann’s part: Two weeks ago tonight, Rev. Sally and I returned from the
Unitarian Universalist Musicians Network Conference in Boston. We spent
4 days singing, attending workshops, plenary sessions, networking and more
singing. You may have noticed that sleeping was not included in that list
and that’s because there was very little of it. But it’s worth it!! UUMN was
founded in 1983 to develop and enrich music ministry in our denomination
and to support the musicians who carry out this vital work. It’s 600 plus
members include music directors, organists, conductors, singers,
instrumentalists, composers, ministers, religious educators, music committee
members and troubadours. There were 243 attending this year’s
conference.
The UUMN Mission Statement is “to nurture, educate, and inspire UU
music leaders to create dynamic and transformative music ministries and to
model and promote excellence in shared ministry. The members of UUMN
covenant to support and motivate one another in joyous and loving
community.”
Echoes from UUMN 2015
Unitarian Coastal Fellowship
© Rev. Sally B. White and Ann Odell
August 9, 2015
2
About a week before the conference I was asked if I would be willing to take
part in a focus group with members from small congregations. On other
days there were focus groups for staff from medium and large size churches.
It was led by Betsy Gabriel and Richard Nugent from the UUA Office of
Church Staff Finances. The topic was the UUA Fair Compensation
Program. The program suggests what UUA believes is fair compensation
for church staff. Congregations are divided into different geographical
areas of the country and then by congregation size, education of the staff
person and responsibilities. An outside consultant will be reviewing the
information from the focus groups to aid in updating the program. It was a
very interesting conversation to take part in even though it started at 7:00 in
the morning.
Our conference clinician was Brainerd Blyden-Taylor, who is the founder
and director of the Nathaniel Dett Chorale in Toronto, Ontario. We worked
with him for an hour every morning preparing 4 pieces of music for the
Sunday morning worship service at Arlington St. Church. He is an amazing
musician, soft-spoken, witty, and a perfectionist. He would go over and
over and over the same phrase until we got it, well, maybe not the tenors, but
he was not unpleasant or annoying. I heard only very positive comments
about him. The pieces of music we were learning were beautiful but quite
difficult and a challenge even for most of us who can read music. One
morning in rehearsal the woman next to me said she had just made up a new
Echoes from UUMN 2015
Unitarian Coastal Fellowship
© Rev. Sally B. White and Ann Odell
August 9, 2015
3
part! It was music I would never have the opportunity to sing anyplace else
and that’s rewarding.
There were about 34 workshops offered, usually 4 or 5 taking place at once
so the choice had to be made about which one to attend. Some of the
offerings were on Jewish music, leading hymns, a hospice choir, getting
along with staff colleagues, song arranging, multicultural competency and
cultural misappropriation. There were others on writing lyrics, how to
calculate how much time your job really takes, music for children’s choirs,
beginning drumming, using technology to build a music ministry and
copyright issues. Those are just some of the workshops that were offered.
There were worship services every morning and repertoire sessions every
day. Immediately following lunch there were recitals with various members
presenting a piece of music, everything from a ukulele trio to pianists
playing Chopin and vocalists belting out music from Broadway. One night
we attended “The Sanctuary Boston”. This takes place twice a month, once
at First Church Boston, UU and another time in Cambridge. The organizers
felt that in a world that is hard, where no one’s a stranger to loss or
loneliness we need to remind one another that we are sanctuaries, each made
holy, each loved. There were joys and sorrows expressed, candles lit, and
much music. Some of the music from today’s service was sung that night.
All of the music you will sing or hear today was sung or played at the
conference.
Echoes from UUMN 2015
Unitarian Coastal Fellowship
© Rev. Sally B. White and Ann Odell
August 9, 2015
4
There are many opportunities to reconnect with friends made at past
conferences and to make new ones. Activities were in 3 different churches
so there was time to chat walking from one to another. It’s fun to round up
first-timers to go out to dinner together. One day after lunch we saw Mark
Freundt from the Greensboro UU Fellowship. We arranged a date for him to
bring his choir back to UCF for a music service with our choir. That will
take place Sept 27th and I hope you all can be here.
It’s difficult for me to think of anything more moving than singing with 200
others. To sing beautiful music and hear the many unwritten harmonies
being added as we sing, to hear the soprano voices soaring up in the
stratosphere and Leon Burke, from St. Louis, adding his gorgeous, very deep
voice, can move me to tears. Another wonderful conference is a thing of the
past but I have come home with new enthusiasm, new music, new
knowledge and an appreciation to all of you for sending me.
Sally’s part: In 1954, five year old Mark Reed, his little brother Philip and
his baby sister Carole were named and dedicated in the First Unitarian
Society of Chicago, the first African American children to be dedicated in
that church since its founding in 1836. In 1957, Mark was the second black
child to join the church’s children’s choir – now the Chicago Children’s
choir, a multiracial, multicultural chorus that has grown to more than 3000
children. [Mark Morrison-Reed. In Between. 2009. p. 35]. Today Mark, now the
Echoes from UUMN 2015
Unitarian Coastal Fellowship
© Rev. Sally B. White and Ann Odell
August 9, 2015
5
Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed, is retired from thirty years in Unitarian
Universalist parish ministry. He still actively researches, writes, and teaches
at Meadville-Lombard Theological School in Chicago. Mark is recognized
as the premier historian of the African-American experience in Unitarian
Universalism. [UUMA summer conference program book 2015, p. 25].
On Saturday morning in Boston, Mark led the musicians network through a
survey of Unitarian Universalist hymnody – the hymns we include in our
hymnbooks, the hymns we sing. “What we sing is what we are,” he told us.
“What we choose to sing reflects who we are, and who we were, and who
we hope to be.”
In 1937, the American Unitarian Association published “Hymns of the
Spirit,” [Ann begins playing hymn #7 softly in the background] the so-called
red hymnal. This is a collection of traditional hymn tunes, most written by
European musicians. Every hymn ends with a sung Amen. If you grew up
in an American Protestant church, you will recognize these hymns. The
readings in this hymnal are overwhelmingly Biblical, or Biblical-sounding:
“Praise ye the Lord.” “Bless thou the Lord, O my soul. “And the Lord shall
reign over them for evermore.” This book reflects and reinforces a Unitarian
church that is white, male, and looks to Europe and to the past for example
and inspiration.
In 1961, The American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of
America consolidated to form the Unitarian Universalist Association of
Echoes from UUMN 2015
Unitarian Coastal Fellowship
© Rev. Sally B. White and Ann Odell
August 9, 2015
6
Congregations, of which our congregation is a member. A commission was
formed to compile a new hymnal for the new denomination – a first, proud
statement of our evolving identity. The nine members of the commission
included two women; several of the members, UU leaders all, were active in
the ACLU, the Urban League, the Civil Rights movement that were
gathering momentum and energy across the nation. They worked for three
years to create “Hymns for the Celebration of Life.” [Ann begins playing
hymn #76 softly in the background]. For hymns, it still drew heavily on
classic hymn tunes, but omitted all the “amens.” The commission reached
out, also, to folk music from many lands. The readings reflected the
diversity of the world’s religions: the Bible, the Dhammapada, the Tao Te
Ching; Gandhi and Gibran and the modern humanist Universalist minister
Kenneth Patton. Given the day, the time, and the personalities involved, you
would expect hymns about diversity in America, too: racial justice,
integration, civil rights. Mark Morrison-Reed’s voice thickened with tears
as he told us, “not one word about African Americans. Not one spiritual.
Not one reading.” [pause reading until music ends]
Over the next five to ten years, African Americans came into Unitarian
Universalist churches because of our visible and vocal public activism on
Civil Rights. But they found no African American voices – not in the
pulpits, not in the hymnals. A few stayed, but most did not.
In 1979, Unitarian Universalist women began to speak out and to sing out
about the prevailing patriarchal, hierarchical language in the hymns. The
Echoes from UUMN 2015
Unitarian Coastal Fellowship
© Rev. Sally B. White and Ann Odell
August 9, 2015
7
Commission on Common Worship – seven men and three women including
the Rev. Til Evans, mother of our late member David Evans, revised a
collection of hymns from the blue hymnal and published the collection as
Hymns in New Form for Common Worship. Listen to the difference as I
read…[Ann begins softly playing hymn #62 from the blue book; Sally reads
the words of the first verse from the blue book, Ann plays the hymn a second
time and Sally reads the “new” words from the green book, #62n].]
A new hymnal commission was gathered in 1986, and charged to produce
“an inclusive hymnbook,” one that “proclaim[s] our diversity;” music that
gives us roots and wings. [Ann begins playing hymn #123 (Spirit of Life)
softly in the background]. [SLT preface, p. vii]. The commission wrestled
with questions of language, meaning, and philosophy, and particularly with
the ways that our language commonly uses images of darkness (or
blackness) to represent fear, evil, and ignorance, and images of light (or
white) to represent hope, goodness, and enlightenment. Over seven years
they created “Singing the Living Tradition,” published in 1993. Here,
finally, are 24 African American spirituals. Here is De Colores, an anthem
of the United Farm Workers; here are music and texts from six continents
and words from the world’s sacred writings. Here are words and music of
Africans and African Americans and native Americans, women and men,
gay and straight, ancient and modern. [if necessary, pause reading until
music ends]
Echoes from UUMN 2015
Unitarian Coastal Fellowship
© Rev. Sally B. White and Ann Odell
August 9, 2015
8
In 2001 William Sinkford was elected president of the Unitarian Universalist
Association, the first African American to serve in that office. In 2003, he
attended the UU Musicians Network conference and was asked “what can
the musicians’ network offer to the UUA?” [Ann begins playing hymn #1024
(When the Spirit Says Do) softly in the background]. The answer appeared
in 2005: “Singing the Journey,” the teal hymnbook supplement, a collection
of hymns that, in Rev. Sinkford’s words, “touch the heart as well as the
head,” and “express a Unitarian Universalism that lives and ministers in this
complicated world where freedom, peace, and justice are so hard to create
and sustain.” This book as largely moved beyond the old European hymn
tunes to new music, folk music, world music. [if necessary, pause reading
until music ends]
We remember the experience of those African Americans who came through
our doors and soon left, hearing no echoes and no affirmations of their
voices, their experience, their tradition. We note their absence, and we
regret it. Perhaps we can learn from our past. As we move deeper into the
twenty-first century, we begin to reach out to what the editors refer to as “the
vast Spanish-speaking world” [Ann begins playing hymn #3 (Gracias por el
amor) softly in the background] with its voices of joy and pain, its
experience of greatness and of deep longing, its diverse musical traditions, to
affirm their yearning for a musical expression for a liberal faith. In 2011,
“Las Voces del Camino” (Voices on the Journey) was published as a
Spanish language companion to singing the Living Tradition.
Echoes from UUMN 2015
Unitarian Coastal Fellowship
© Rev. Sally B. White and Ann Odell
August 9, 2015
9
And…not everything we sing is in the hymnal. Not every song is sung by
the congregation. Sometimes, somebody sings to the congregation, and this,
too, becomes our music.
Musical Interlude:
Ann and Sally sing “Draw the Circle Wide”
Message Part II: Draw the Circle Wide
Our music creates a circle that encloses us and also defines us. As we sing,
both music and words become a part of us; they tell us who we are. As we
sing, music and words move outward from us into the world, like ripples on
a pond. They tell visitors and newcomers, neighbors and friends, who is
here, who is welcome – and who is not here, not part of our circle.
“Worship is time set aside and to which we come yearning,” Mark
Morrison-Reed said, “[yearning] to be stirred by the sacred, to hear the
unexpected, to feel what we too often push away, to awaken to this moment.
What we sing, and do not sing - its imaginings, language and rhythms - not
only tell us who we were but who we are, and shapes who we are becoming.
The aspirations we utter, and songs we sing imprint themselves on our
beings, or if you will, our souls – that place where intellect, emotion and
body, self and community, meet and are given voice. Thus, ‘We sing
ourselves into being.’” [Mark Morrison-Reed “We Are What We Sing” script, p. 15.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_5iQFFHhsmYMExtQkNmeHpkcDQ/view?pli=1].
Echoes from UUMN 2015
Unitarian Coastal Fellowship
© Rev. Sally B. White and Ann Odell
August 9, 2015
10
One more story – a true story – that I heard in a workshop at the conference.
In a worship service, a predominantly white UU congregation sang the
African American spiritual “No More Auction Block for Me.” Let’s us do
that now; will you open your gray hymnals to #154, and sing the first two
verses with me? You may remain seated.
sing #154, verses 1, 2
At that worship service, an African American woman commented to the
white man next to her, “I don’t know why you white people sing this song.
None of your ancestors were ever on that auction block!” And the man
replied, “Oh, my ancestors were there. They were there, on the other side of
that auction block. And I sing this song to remind myself of that hard truth.
I sing because I never, ever, want to let myself be involved in anything like
that, ever again.
Sing it again with me, just the first verse…
sing #154, verse 1
Draw the circle wide. Draw it wider still. Thus, ‘We sing ourselves into
being.’
Echoes from UUMN 2015
Unitarian Coastal Fellowship
© Rev. Sally B. White and Ann Odell
August 9, 2015
11
Take a moment now, in silence to listen to the echoes of all we have heard
here this morning, spoken and unspoken. The bell will lead us into silence,
and music will lead us out.
Bell
Silence
Music
Blessed be and amen.
Ann, will you play an “amen”?