Summer Music School and BBC Visit

The Summer School of Liturgical Music at Holy Trinity Seminary held its annual session from July 9 to July 22, 2006. The full course of study consists of three summer sessions, at the end of which successful students receive an accredited Certificate in Liturgical Music. This year the Summer School of Liturgical Music marked both the recent seventy-fifth anniversary of Holy Trinity Monastery and its own fifteenth anniversary by recording a CD of liturgical music.

During the third week of the Summer School, Holy Trinity Seminary played host to a team from BBC Radio led by Kristine Pommert, Senior Producer of BBC World Service Religion, and the Rev. Canon Dr. Michael Bourdeaux, founder and President of Oxford University's Keston Institute, which monitors relationships between communist and former communist countries and religious communities. The result will be a half-hour radio show broadcast on the BBC presenting how choir directors and readers in the Russian Orthodox tradition are trained to sing and direct liturgical music. With the help of the staff and students of Holy Trinity Seminary, the radio program will explore why music is such a key element of worship in the Orthodox tradition, what it takes to master it, and what it is about the music that effects people spiritually.

This program will be broadcast for an international audience on BBC World Service on September 9 and 11, 2006 under the title "Heart and Soul." Listeners in Britain can listen to the program on BBC Radio 4, under the title "Divine Voices," on August 29, 2006, at 13:30 and September 2, 2006, at 15:30 (British Summer Time).