Valerie June Quotes

The singing of hymns and the rendition of selections from the great sacred oratorios by ward choirs all enhance the spirit of worship.

I know at my church a lot of the times we sung from hymn books and as we got older we started to change with time. I can honestly say that I was never influenced to write for the church.

But nowadays hymns are the norm, because people don't have much else to sing.

I sang in church choir all my life, through elementary school, junior high and high school.

The idea of music coming from the Church is not new.

I had always sung, as far back as I can remember, for the pure love of it. My voice was contralto, and I sang in a church in Naples from fourteen till I was eighteen.

Catholic liturgical music, it would seem, is everywhere but in the Catholic Church itself.

Music had always been the handmaid of the Roman liturgy.

There is no dogma that the organ or harmonium can be used in church, but not the drum.

At St. Francis de Sales in Atlanta, we do not have an organ. We do not have rehearsals during the week. We do not have a professional choir.

I went to, you know, a church in Chicago, and my mom, of course, was in the choir because my mom was a singer; she used to sing. I wanted to be in the choir as well, and I was like, 'Mom, please, you know, I want to sing in the choir with you guys.' I kept on asking her, and finally I was, you know, in the choir.

My parents were in the local church choir, and I used to go along and sing and play the organ at all the weddings and christenings.

My parents were both opera singers, and they also were both heavily into religious and church music.

I had experiences or exposure to music in church. I went to a church, it was very unique. It was a predominantly African American Catholic church. So they would have - one mass would be traditional church music, and then the other mass would be gospel music.

I was a choir boy my whole life.

I'm a member of the Primitive Baptist Church, and they will buy every CD that I have released, but they don't me just to bring the instruments much into the church.

Some of the stuff I'm writing is almost like hymns, some of my first singing and choral experiences were in church, the Church of Christ in Hicksville.

By itself, the question of the liturgy's essence and the standards of the reform has brought us back to the question of music and its position in the liturgy. And as a matter of fact one cannot speak about worship at all without also speaking of the music of worship.

There are a lot of bad worship songs, in my opinion, but there are a lot of good ones, too.

For me, when I grew up playing music, I played music in church and people were shouting and having a big time, and church wasn't something where it was subdued. If you played something, you brought it to church with you.

You can count on one hand the number of Novus Ordo churches in this country that feature a fully Catholic music program of any quality, consistent with the Roman rite tradition.

The most consistent musical experience I had growing up was church music.

I find most 'sacred music' pretty dismal.

I come from the performance world, but the idea of a worship song is different. It's useful music.

The democratic and pedestrian character of the new Mass itself seems to invite the ditties that pass for hymns these days.