The Desire to Conduct

So, yesterday afternoon the choir director of my church called to let me know that she would be unable to rehearse with our vocal and bell choirs that evening. She asked if I would be willing to do the rehearsals. This would seem like a no brainer; after all, my undergraduate degree was in music education (with an emphasis in choral directing!).

However, there is a reasons I am not a choir director. I don't enjoy it. I discovered this with about one year left in my program while I was doing my clinical. I thought to myself, "I can't do this as a job...I would go crazy!" I was so far into my program that I did not want to change majors. So, I gutted it out and managed to get through student teaching, although I would easily consider it the worst 18 weeks of my life. It solidified the fact that I wanted nothing to do with music education.

If you didn't already know, I was the choir director of FUMC Oshkosh for one year. I did this when I graduated so that I had a source of income while I was doing my graduate school search for student affairs. I enjoyed that to some degree, mostly because of the people. The members of the congregation were wonderful and supportive. In fact, it was mostly because of them that I chose to come back as a member when I made my way back to Oshkosh.

To get back to the current story, I told Cara I would direct the choirs but I was not really happy about it. She understood, but was also very grateful. In the end, I can do it. It helped that Roger Lalk was willing to help with bell choir so that I could play bells. That made things a little more tolerable.

By the way, will this week ever end? It has been crazy busy...and this directing gig last night didn't help.