Ashes

Ash Wednesday is one of those services that often gets overlooked, and the past few years I have had the bells play since we have rehearsal at that time anyway. This year, I was sort of on autopilot when I offered this year, not really thinking of WHAT we would play. We had just done a perfect Lent-y sort of piece which I love, the famous chorale from Bach's Jesu Meine Freide. But Last year we played a piece that was very diatonic so there were NO bell changes, and we just had stands with music up in the balcony - no tables and all that!

But the Bach is very chromatic and we had to have tables. This wouldn't be a problem except when they designed our balcony, the wide step/seats are EXACTLY the same width as the tables - no room to stand behind. But my hero the DOM had a great idea! We stacked 10 hymnals in front of each leg (sadly, we hardly use them anymore) and put the front legs on the books. Not totally sturdy, but it worked great! And we are planning to have the "church men" build wooden boxes to use next time, which we can hopefully store up in the balcony. What a pain. Along with the big haul up stairs (no elevator!) and back down of everything...but they actually played pretty well!