Ngarra Burria’s “To Listen To Sing” ABC album, that includes my Kooranginy suite, was nominated for an AIM Award this year – among other impressively stellar works.
Nominees Announced for the Australian Independent Music Awards 2023
— Read on musicfeeds.com.au/news/nominees-announced-for-the-australian-independent-music-awards-2023/
Copyright ©️ Elizabeth Sheppard 2015. All Rights Reserved.
There are thousands of skilled female Church musicians in Australia. Two of the most skilled and dedicated practising Church musicians I know are my friend Antonia Deasey, an Anglican music teacher at Trinity Grammar School, Sydney, who also has private pupils and sings in a Cathedral choir, and my Anglican sister Anne Speer, who teaches violin at three Church schools in Western Australia, teaches private pupils, directed her local parish choir until recently, and plays with a regional orchestra. These two gifted, talented women are well employed by the Church, but are owed much greater recognition as professional Australian Church musicians and teachers. The private recognition they receive is not comparable with the public adulation regularly heaped upon their male Church music colleagues. Among many others, Rosalie Bonighton (dec.) is another under-recognised Australian Church musician who springs to mind, together with my Presbyterian aunt Jean Fullard nee Simpson, who served as the organist of St Andrew’s Peace Church, Wonthaggi, Victoria, for many years, and Robin Ruys, current Music Minister of the Anglican Parish of Hunters Hill, Sydney NSW.
In Australia, it is not unusual for fully trained, qualified female Church musicians to be undervalued, underpaid, and grossly overworked. Reform of this aspect of Church music ministry is overdue. Part of the problem is the assumption that technical skill and a willingness to serve voluntarily, is all that is necessary to be a Church musician. In reality, much more is required, including ethical Christian conduct and many years of enculturated, disciplined liturgical experience. Male Australian Church musicians seldom show concern about neglect of female Church musicians – on the contrary, indulgence in tasteless jokes ridiculing female Church music performers and composers, while basking in mutual male praise, is common among Church men. I have been fortunate, in my own Church music work, to be regularly employed as a Cathedral Cantor, and I learned much from the professional example of Catholic Cantor Kathleen Boschetti of St Francis Church, Melbourne, Anglican Church music composer Rev. Elizabeth Smith, and Catholic Cantor Donrita Reefman of St Ives Cathedral, Sydney, about working with clergy and lay ministers and requiring their respect. I trained entirely at my own expense. In 2013 I wrote a blog about my positive experience of being a Cantor – see
http://australianchurchmusic.blogspot.com.au/2013/02/the-growth-of-women-church-cantor.html.
Elizabeth Sheppard vested for Church Cantor ministry, 2010
I loved Church Cantor music ministry and was praised for my success at it. In addition to exercising musical, liturgical and compositional skills, it required tactful multi-skilled liturgical coordination with a large group of male clerical and lay supervisors and female assistants. When liturgical worship is smoothly coordinated and the whole community is in tune with the Holy Spirit, Cantor ministry has its own very special rewards and fruits, not the least of which are enduring community friendships.
Copyright ©️ Elizabeth Sheppard 2013. All Rights Reserved.
The effect of globalisation on Australian Church music has been as dire as its effect on that Aussie icon, Vegemite. Although many talented Australian composers continue to produce uniquely Australian Church music in many genres, Australian Church music governing bodies and clergy are paying minimal or no attention to local Australian Church music. In Australia, Church music licensing is dominated by globalised corporations who promote non-Australian Church music over the work of local Australian and Aboriginal composers. Australian Church music selection committees overwhelmingly favour non-Australian music over Australian Church music. Some Australian parish music programs use exclusively non-Australian music repertoires and genres. Public infusions of forward-looking, hopeful, uniquely Australian musical expressions of Christian faith are increasingly rare, ephemeral, and excluded from music examination lists.
For insight into why this has happened, read Jeffrey Tucker’s 2002 article about a multinational corporate Church music publisher whose policies and business ethics are not in tune with Christian beliefs, principles or practice (see link below)
The globalisation of Church music is also discussed in depth by a shocked Richard Barrett on the Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy (Orthodox Christian) blog –
Copyright ©️ Elizabeth Sheppard 2013. All Rights Reserved.
Even in Church music, the smart phone app has its uses. Church music geeks compose and make music online as well as in real time, with human hands and feet and eyes and ears and voices.
The phenomenon of the virtual choir (if you don’t know about this, google Eric Whitacre) has blown preconceptions about tying Church music to a particular time and place, sky-high. Whatever the virtues of real-time interaction (which are unsurpassed, and should never be discounted), as Church musicians we are now stuck with the digital app addictions of the upcoming generation for a long time.
In cyberspace there’s an app for every task you can possibly imagine. Enterprising Church musicians design and market Church music apps, thereby solving their income problems forever. Apps that help with a specific task can be uploaded to smart phones or computers quickly, and used immediately. For instance, I have a virtual piano keyboard on my iPhone that I use for composing.
This is not an app marketing blog, but I believe in giving credit where credit is due. From time to time I’ll be reviewing Church music apps (e.g. ear training apps, chant databases, music theory apps) that I’ve found helpful and time-saving. Make your own judgements!
App-phobia has crept into the mindset of many Church musicians who
Changing deep-set attitudes like this takes miracles. Hang on, Christians believe in miracles!
If you have a music director that insists on making your church music work as difficult as possible by refusing to adapt to digital technology and app networking, or doing a go-slow on this, it might help to pray loudly and publicly about it.
Copyright ©️ Elizabeth Sheppard 2013. All Rights Reserved.
Lamenting the great Aussie government-induced church music cringe. See link at
Michael Kieran Harvey: What Would Peggy Do? – Arts – Browse – Big Ideas – ABC TV
This online lecture (see link above) refers mainly to contemporary secular Australian art music composition, but it is also relevant to Church music in Australia. I love classical Church music, and many other music genres, and I support maintaining a repertoire of “traditional” Anglo-European Church music. But I object to the way non-Australian Church music repertoires have recently been imposed holus-bolus on Australian Church communities, without parishioners’ consent – just when a new crop of brilliant Australian church music composition was taking off.
Imposing this overseas monopoly has smothered and stifled Australian Church music, and has created a musical generation gap in many parishes, that seriously impedes local religious and cultural education. The practice of culturally gagging Aussie congregations and ordering them to worship God with second-hand imported music, has done enormous cultural damage to Australian churches.
The fact is, imported non-Australian Church music repertoires, however excellent (or cheap), come from a different time and place and population. Although we may empathise with and appreciate non-Australian musical expressions of Christian faith, it is impossible to reach the deeper communal levels of faith as Australians living in Australia, unless we worship God directly with our own unique Australian music, that comes from the beating heart of Australia. Much of our Australian Church music (from such tiny colonial churches as the one pictured below, at Greenough, Western Australia) has not been fully documented, and many original scores are stored in the Australian National Library in Canberra, awaiting re-discovery and re-publication.
Greenough Village Church, Western Australia
A survey of just how many Australian-made compositions are included in, and excluded from, Australian Church music repertoires and licensing lists, is badly needed. Editing out or minimising local Australian compositions in our church music repertoires degrades, and threatens to destroy, our living, dynamic, developing, inherited tradition of Australian Church music. Australians who attend Churches are often musical, and many have produced original musical concepts, ideas and creations. Our original music is expressed and sometimes briefly admired, but our work is seldom promoted, simply because the composers are local, Australian, and therefore deemed unimportant. Australian composers and performers who hope for proper recognition or publication are currently forced to seek this outside Australia, and once recognised, few of them return. Promoting a token number of Australian Church music composers is seen by Church music repertoire selection committees as an acceptable, cheap and easy solution, but why should the majority of Australian Church music composers be relegated to oblivion, to benefit a privileged, elite few?
Typical Church music repertoires in Australia include only 5% of Australian Church music compositions at best. Overseas visitors, who expect to find a flourishing local Australian Church music repertoire, find this extremely odd. The percentage could easily be increased, as many new Australian compositions are available. Unfortunately, those responsible for Church music selection are often in economic thrall to corporate or monocultural giants, and this hampers their ability to promote locally enculturated faith development through local Church music.
If there is an Australian Church music composer in your congregation or nearby, you should seek them out, encourage them to continue composing, listen to / workshop their music with competent performers, and arrange for it to be included in church services on a regular basis, with the usual royalty payments that all overseas composers receive. There are composers of all ages and cultures in Australian church communities, and their works reflect significant Australian faith experiences of many different generations. Ask your local composers to compose easy versions of their music, and publish them as audio tracks and pdf lead sheets, for online purchase. Buy them and play them as background tracks at parish parties, and provide lead sheets purchased from the composer, to spread the word and familiarise parishioners with the tunes. Research your local Australian Church music, and compile a local Church music list for family and church group services. You may be surprised at the quality of the compositions you find, and their morale-boosting effect on your community.