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Music at Towson UU Church

By Joseph Gascho

While there are many people to thank for musical contributions over the last weeks, its been especially good to have John Gaccek singing again at TUUC - first in singing a number of Bob Dylan songs, and then more recently doing a few songs by John Lennon.

I guess its the UU music director's challenge to come up with music appropriate for services ranging from minority bioethics to atheistic spirituality, but its also my blessing to have so many great people to collaborate with here at TUUC...such as

Kyra Mahoney for her beautiful singing,
Abby Mahoney for her great piano playing (and sharing a love of Tolkien),
Spice Kleinmann's continued singing and leading,
Jane Beatty's great harmony singing and songleading,
and of course the TUUC Choir which always works hard, and sounded especially good singing Mozart on Easter Sunday.
Donna Plamondon took over for me on upright bass today and sounded great. I'm looking forward to working with her more.

Also today was the debut of the TUUC folk singers, which should probably just be called the Arts 4 All Choir. With just a handful of us, we still made some nice music and had a lot of fun.

A big thank you to Neil and Judy Cohen for hosting a great fundraiser party for the church, where the Bald Mountain Band played about as well as we ever have. I also made my TUUC debut on cello there, and hope to play it again sometime in a service here. We're also very lucky to have Judy join the music committee, as well as Jim McGovern who's been the choir's librarian for some time now but will now also be on the music committee.

The choir celebrated the retirement of Dick Fellows with a potluck a few weeks back. We miss you, Dick, and thank you for your years of service to the church through your singing.

We're continuing to look for new singers, so if you'd like to try singing in the choir, please talk to me about that - esp. now that we have more than one possible ensemble. At our special music service on May 30, a new choral work by Nathan Shane will be premiered, as well as a choreographed work for the choir with dancer Angela Castillo-Epps. The choir will be featured prominently, and we're already hard at work preparing.

Speaking of hard work, I'll be performing two solo recitals for my doctorate on May 4 and 11 down at the Univ. of Md. These are completely separately programs, but it was impossible to schedule them farther apart, so I'm practicing a minimum of fours hrs a day for the next month and taking lots of Advil.

After those recitals, I have a chamber program at the Strathmore Fine Arts Center in Rockville and several concerts for the Washington Early Music Festival, and then the summer music begins with concerts in Duke and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and then two weeks of teaching and performing at the Oberlin Conservatory.

As always, I welcome your musical and artistic contributions and discussions, and look forward to seeing you at church.