Organ tune

To partner with our recent sermon series, relating to questions about our faith from a child's perspective, I used John Leavitt's "Scenes of Childhood" for some of the organ music at our second service. The sermon series addressed questions about our faith that were asked by children in our congregation. The music by Leavitt seemed to me a natural choice to pair with worship during the series. The series concluded today with a sermon related to what heaven is like. I used the final movement from Leavitt's suite for the postlude.

Leavitt in turn used poetry by Robert Louis Stevenson as the inspiration for his music. The composer intended that the poems be read before/after the performance of the music; we simply print excerpts in our printed bulletins. The last piece is called "Pirate Story" drawn from a poem of the same name. The piece begins with a riff on "Sailor's Hornpipe" and concludes with a riff on the Little Prelude in C attributed to JS Bach. Folks were immediately captivated by the music, many of them associating the music with the Popeye the Sailor Man television show from several decades ago. To help put the music in perspective, I tracked down a short summary of the tune.

While this sermon series has been going on, have also utilized art work by children from our congregation in our narthex gallery area. We currently have up work by older elementary children; it was preceded by work by younger elementary children. In mid-August we'll feature work by middle- and high-school students. It's been enjoyable having so much to connect to worship, and to celebrate the earnest questions children have about our faith, and their work in the arts, and music (and poetry) for them.

(After a quick look it seems the music is out of print, else I would put a link to it..)