Naptastic

If we play our cards right, it might be possible to reorganize the orchestra in less than a decade. But we have to play our cards right.

We need a full-time music director. We also need at least four part-time musicians. (That includes Ariel.) Where possible, we should try to hire instrumentalists who can also be section leaders. Emerson is heavy into instrumental music; we need to leverage that.

The outer back walls of the sanctuary would really benefit from some acoustic treatment. Ideally, we would hang round diffuser / absorber panels, 3 on one side, 4 on the other. I have an idea for building some art pieces that would be acoustically what we need, and also art. There are also off-the-shelf models in sixteen different colors of boring.

This is the biggest thing I want to spend more hours on, after the sanctuary mic party is done. It's also hard because Houston's music scene is ass right now. We may be able to help. We don't sell tickets to worship service and we will always deal directly with musicians, so TicketMaster can't screw with us.

(VERY clear and strong boundaries need to be in place to make sure that stays true. We also don't sell band merch at church or plug upcoming performances in our announcements. Boundaries.)

The key is realizing that music is worship. You make music because you've got something to say. A band in a club might be saying the same things we're saying in a way we'd like, and we don't know about it.

I would like us to find local bands and musicians who share our values, who have music in their catalog expressing those values, and attempt collaborations. Here would be the parameters:

• The group provides all the music and accompaniment for a service, including hymns. Some of the music is ours and some is theirs.
• Music other than hymns (prelude, postlude, offertory, special music, whatever) can be from their catalog but our worship team has to choose it.

In return, the band gets:

• A new audience. It's not huge right now but it's people they don't already know, who at the very least share their values.
• Access to our choir, instruments, and players
• High-quality recordings:
  • live performances of a bit of their catalog (during service)
  • we offer some “studio time” to create new canned content. (Expressing our values together.)

It's likely that original songs will come out of this as well. It's clearly a lot of work, and the main reason I feel it's so important to have both a full-time music director, and that our section leaders be instrumentalists who sing.

It would be a substantial and ongoing search. We would need input from people who frequently go to shows and discover new bands from every church we're friends with.

Erin of TXUUJM has a band; I've already floated the idea of hosting them. They are a good group to ask first since they're already a “yes” and they're going to give us whatever grace we need while we make this program work.

• Musicians go to the church that pays them, generally, but this does get the musicians in the door, and they're musicians who share our values.
• The bands' fans might come to our church to see them and decide it's worth coming back other weeks as well.
• “What's on tap this week?” has more interesting answers.

The chancel is 24“, which is not very tall. There's a wall over the outer 2/3 of it. There's a massive lectern on one side and an even more massive pulpit on the other side, both of which are immovable. In this room, which is basically flat, there are only three places where you can stand and be seen by the whole congregation: the lectern, the pulpit, and when we have the stage set up for Guitar Houston, that gives us a third spot from which the whole congregation can see you.

I heard that a lot of work went into the props for last year's play. I'm not a short guy and I wasn't sitting that far back and I couldn't see any props. Or legs. Or Charlie unless he was up on something.

We should make music videos. Video productions. (Can I say 'propaganda'?) Stuff we can share. All under Creative Commons license.

Because of the way AI models got created, there is no way to use them to create art that is not copyright-encumbered. Policies and laws are likely to be in a state of flux for a long time while we recalibrate to our new reality, but at the end of the day, there is no counterargument to “AI models are built on theft”. If we use AI tools to create content, we are participating in that theft.

I don't feel passionately about this. I don't hate AI. If anything, I'm disappointed in myself for not seeing through the hype sooner. I hit this point hard because it's a moral landmine that's really easy to not step on, and for practical reasons, it would really help me out if we could just never step on it.

Patty Smith (I think?) was asking me about this. She suggested a sunday school session about the organ.

• Who are the two people named on the plaque on the organ?
• A bit about the organ: pipes, manuals, pedals, stops, yadda yadda… and here's what it all sounds like…
• Stop list this needs information about the pistons