It's the last Sunday in July, and I'm in our upstairs studio at home plowing through reams of music (read: listening online, roving through iTunes, visiting the site of major music distributors and googling tune sources) trying to set the choir's schedule for the coming year.

It's an annual process, and one which coincides (with remarkable consistence) with Glenna's sudden decision to be downstairs, outside, over at her sister's or out of town. I'm sure this is pure coincidence and has nothing at all to do with the repetitive playings of tunes of interest or the short samplings of pieces deemed inane, syrupy, shlock-infested or simply messed up. Or with my occasional vocalizations of disgust.

One has to wade through a lot of gunk to get to the good stuff, but as my college choral director put it: The Holy Spirit is neither tone-deaf nor illiterate. We need to look for the best.

So far, I've filled 11 slots in the first half of the choir year (7 of which are new pieces - though one, Handel's For Unto Us a Child is Born, is likely familiar to most of us - though you may find it interesting where it occurs in the year - it's not where you'd probably expect it to be). This still leaves 6 slots for the fall season.

The open slots come to us courtesy the Narrative Lectionary, the four-year cycle of readings arranged in a narrative sequence to help people see Scripture as a story that has coherence and a dynamic movement. While its merits may be many, I'm increasingly convinced it was put together by someone who experienced a traumatic encounter with choral music at some time in the past.

Well, that's probably not the case, but this year's lectionary certainly presents some challenges.

The basic difficulty I'm finding is a shortage of Old Testament-based anthems, mostly within our choral library - but also in the world, at large. Most of the OT anthems I've found are very elementary - written primarily for children.

We had this challenge last year, too, but there were a couple of good spirituals (think Elijah Rock and Didn't My Lord Deliver Daniel?), and - and this is the key difference between last year's lectionary and the one before us now - most of the remaining texts were, or contained, or were related to, poems. Hannah's Prayer, The Days are Coming, Magnificat, Psalm 116 - all these were based on poetic texts.

In this fall's lectionary, regrettably, the poetry well is dry. We have interesting narratives - the burning bush, dry bones, Shadrach, et al. - but poetry to set to music is in short supply.

Stay tuned to see what we come up with.

Oh, and don't pay too much attention to this episode - I just needed a placeholder to help me set the links and design for blogs. ;)