We've officially closed submissions for Worship 3, thanks to all who have submitted! Just quickly scanning through the list of over 240 songs, there's a great blend of our old fave composers as well as some younger composers who have submitted! Very appreciative of everyone's efforts!

We will start listening to these soon, then divide up the worklist - hoping to launch the new book for May 2024, God willing. If you would like to assist with notating, please contact rachel@theworshipbook.com - please note, you would need your own copy of Sibelius and have an excellent working knowledge of music theory/notation (eg studying a Bachelor of Music).

Thanks!

Once again, it’s been a while since the last post. Covid is still here, but still new mercies and new praise is happening every day. In the past year, the Voices of Worship project has put out a few songs and tutorials which can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgz91ZPpuHOsV1cR0ZPnaOQ
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Songs are also available on streaming platforms - just search for The Worship Book and look for our logo. We’ve also continued to do the spontaneous live videos on FB:
https://www.facebook.com/TheWorshipBook

Big news for this year is that we will be announcing production of a new Worship book including a call for song submissions. Hopefully all the lockdowns have meant lots more new music!!! 

It's been a while since my last post! Enforced time away from work has resulted in time for orange worship tracks. During these last couple of weeks, I've managed to record 65 tracks and popped them online. Joseph Cheek from Island Recording Studio is mixing/mastering these, thankful for his help with this. There's still a fair few more to go but it seems like we will be stuck at home for a while yet. We've also managed to put together an international performance of Amy Parkin's beautiful 'Lullaby blessing' from the orange worship book. Daniel Melching (Germany), Dan Osborn (Canada), Nita Lawrie (Australia), Rebecca Hocking (Australia), myself on piano, and the composer herself, Amy Parkin (UK) make up the ensemble. I used iMovie for the collage video, took a bit of experimenting but I think it's ok for the first. We're hoping to get more orange worship book songs known whilst everyone is relying on the online environment to get by. Please view our video, we hope you enjoy it!

On Thursday 7th January, our books were delivered from our printer Ligare to our two storage facilities (thanks Nita and Jacqui!). Since then, we've sold over 1200 books, which shows the excitement and thirst that our community has for their own praise music. Many have said that they couldn't wait to get home and play through the book, and Wellington bible camp have even said that they will be the first to use an orange book song as their camp song - we hope they have a great week!

Last week, we had the Australian Christadelphian conference in Sydney and attempted to sightread the entire book within 5 hours. It was never going to be achievable as there's over 7 hours of music in the book, but we did get through 68 songs, which I think is some sort of Christadelphian record! 

During the conference, many of the orange book songs were played, including: Precious promises, Now is the time, Whatever is true, God's mercy, God's tapestry, Son of man, Worship the Lord, He has died, Love the Lord, Listen, Good shepherd. 

We were also asked a few times as to whether the purple book will be reprinted. At this stage, it won't be because of copyright issues. We would also need a minimum of 500 pre-orders to reprint. 

Over and out for now!

Exciting announcement! We will be recording Worship 2 and we need a confident choir to help us do this. Each piece will be recorded exactly as per the sheet music published in Worship 2 so that ecclesial musicians can have a reliable resource to help them learn new pieces of music. 

The Worship Book Choir will meet regularly to learn the choral works in Worship 2. There are many pieces to cover, so choristers need to have sight-singing skills and be able to learn repertoire quickly. No background training in vocals is needed. Timetabling, including recording dates, will be made once the choir has been assembled. 

If you feel that this is a project for you, we would love to hear from you! Please follow this link to fill in the application form.

Choral Director
Rebecca Hocking
choir@theworshipbook.com

Well, today the files have officially gone to the printers. That's been 11 months of continuous work, sorting, liaising, notating, editing, notating again, and again, and again, and again, 1st draft, 2nd draft, 3rd draft, 4th draft, .... there are so many things I would recommend to the next person who may do this job (I won't be doing it again)! I can't count the number of hours in this as so many have been involved and each have given up a lot time to do this. For me, this weekend alone was 24 hours of solid work, and it's been like that for months. My family is happy to have me back - their mantra had become 'I hate the worship book' and 'when will you finish it'. But soon, it will all be exciting once again when those books arrive, looking pretty and brand new (and then even more errors will jump out and say 'ha gotcha'). Many have told me that they're excited about the new music, and it feels worthwhile when we actually hear the music being used for the reason intended - praise to God!

Well, there's been some developments and decisions made recently. I'm running behind time because of, well, life, so the book has not been released according to my own plans in September 2015. The times have been readjusted to meet the conference deadline, where we will introduce the book, workshop it, release the teaching resources and hopefully launch the radio station. At the moment, some talented pianists are sightreading through the book to make sure everything makes musical sense - thanks to Sharon Tran, Judy Collins, Prue Philp, Annabelle Young and Rosemary Nath for this. The total book takes between 6 and 7 hours to play through, so their work is much appreciated. I'm putting together the agreements for each composer/lyricist and continually revisiting the music, which is really enjoyable to play. Looking forward to sharing that with everyone!

Well, the list as it stands has 149 songs taking up 474 pages. We only have 415 pages to work with (including contents etc) so unfortunately there will be cuts made.  These eliminated songs will still be available through our website once composer permission has been gained. One thing we've done to reduce page numbers is to use Times New Roman font for the lyrics, commonly used across many sheet music publications because of its readability. It's a smaller font than Helvetica but means the book will have a bit of a different look. Below is a picture of the completed file of notated/formatted songs... lots to go through!

We've received a fair few pieces written from pre-existing lyrics and we can only accept lyrics that are in the public domain. To check this, a bit of digging is needed. Here's a recent reply to one of our lyric queries (The Weaver) from a very helpful researcher from the Library of Congress - a really interesting read, long but worth it! If you need any information like this, I highly recommend that you use the 'ask a librarian' service at the Library of Congress http://www.loc.gov/rr/askalib/

Here's the excellent reply:
"Dear Ms. Hocking,
"I've gotten several questions about "The Weaver" in the last few years and this is what I have found in my research.
"As it turns out, there are many poems by many authors called "The Weaver," so I was not entirely certain which one you mean. When I did a general Internet search, however, I found one poem credited to Corrie Ten Boom, Grant Colfax Tullar, and Benjamin Malachi Franklin which begins: 
"My life is but a weaving 
Between my God and me. 
I cannot choose the colors 
He weaveth steadily. 

"So, I assume this is the poem you would like to know about. There are claims about several authors having written the poem.
I can rule out Corrie Ten Boom as there are a number of references to the fact that she read this poem by Tullar and then often recited it or quoted from it in her speeches giving him credit. You can find one such reference at http://www.elisabethelliot.org/newsletters/march-april-98.pdf  by someone who heard her speak. 

"I found the claim by Bob Corley about his grandfather Benjamin Malachi Franklin to be confusing. He states that his grandfather wrote the poem in the 1940s and that it was published in 1950 in The Memphis Commercial Appeal Newspaper. Mr. Corley says it was copyrighted in 2006, but I did not find anything by Franklin in the Copyright online catalog.  There is nothing like this poem under the name Bob Corley and there are many different Robert Corleys, again with nothing like this poem. When I search by the title "The Weaver" I find dozens of items. And the registration number Mr. Corley provides seems to have too many digits. 

"Searching by title is also problematic because I have found this poem on the Internet under a wide variety of titles including: 
"The Weaver 
The Weaving 
Tapestry Poem 
My Life is But a Weaving 
Master Weaver's Plan 
Upper and Under Side 

"You can search the Copyright catalog yourself at http://cocatalog.loc.gov, but I do not know if this will prove useful. The online catalog only goes back as far as 1978. You can have a search done by the Copyright Office of older card files, but a fee is charged. I also found many older examples of this poem published considerably before the 1940s. 

"I then used Google Books http://books.google.com and the HathiTrust http://www.hathitrust.org as both these sites have many digitized books and some periodicals freely available full-text prior to 1923. The following citations come from The HathiTrust. 

"The earliest citation I found was from: 
"British Books in Print, 1910, volume 2 from something called "Bagster's Quotation Cards." Just the first part of the poem was given and listed as anonymous for the author. 

"The Pacific" Vol. LXV, No. 42, October 20, 1915, page 81 also listed it as anonymous. 

"Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen's Magazine," Volume 59, 1915, page 123 and again no author is provided. 

"The Woman's Label League Journal," September 1919, p. 14 listed Rev. John Tabb. "The Holy Cross Purple, " Vol. 33, October 1920-June 1921, p. 452 also listed Father Tabb with an article about his poetry. 

"So John Banister (sometimes misspelled Bannister) Tabb, 1845-1909 is credited fairly early with this poem. Unfortunately, I have not found a specific date to tie together Grant Colfax Tullar, 1869-1950, to this poem and can not search all of his published works. You can get brief information on him from the Bolton (Connecticut) Historical Society at http://www.boltoncthistory.org/granttullar.html. 

"Recognizing that poetry was often printed in newspapers, I then turned to the Chronicling America website available at http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov where newspapers from 1836-1922 from across the United States are freely available. If you use the "advanced search" and search on the phrase "my life is but a weaving," you'll find the July 27, 1892 Somerset Herald from Somerset, Pennsylvania providing this poem with the author given as Florence May Alt. The poem credited to Alt also appeared in the Shenandoah (Virginia) Herald in 1892. 

"I also did the same search in two subscription databases. I have attached a copy of the poem from "The American Farmer" as it appeared in August of 1892 with Alt as the author. The earliest copy I found citing Alt was from the Troy Weekly Times, Volume XXXVI, issue 42, page 6 from May 19, 1892. 

"So, the potential authorship is between Alt, Tabb, and Tullar. I can pin an 1892 date to Alt. Tabb's first published collection of poetry was in 1894 and the poem does not appear in it. He could, of course, have written the poem earlier and it might have appeared somewhere other than a book of published poetry. I didn't find it in print until 1919, but there is no way to do a comprehensive search of all places the poem could have been published. Similarly, I have no date to tie the poem to Tullar. 

"Amusingly, there are questions that appeared in the 1930s in the "Notes and Queries" column in the New York Times asking who the author of the poem is. No answer is provided! 

"Without examining everything ever written by these three individuals, it is impossible for me to say for certain who the original author is. We now have three choices again, but at least we ruled out two of the three that are mis-attributed all over the Internet!

"While I am unable to rule on whether someone officially holds copyright (you would need to contact the Copyright Office http://copyright.gov/ ), it is clear that this poem was published before 1923 putting it in the public domain. Again, it might depend which version you are using, but there seem to be plenty published before 1923.

"I hope this answers your question, but if you have additional ones, please write again.

"Abby Yochelson 
Reference Specialist
English and American Literature
Main Reading Room
Humanities & Social Sciences Division
Library of Congress

Worship 2 is due to be released in September this year DV and to help our planning, we are offering a special pre-order price of $25.00 which includes one hardcover book with bonus e-book. This is a saving of $5.00 but it also helps us to place a print run that is more economical and designed to demand. 

If you're a local, you can arrange to pick up your book from one of our launch nights or the January 2016 conference in Sydney. If you want to receive your book via post, you will be invoiced at a later date for the shipment amount, but will pay the special pre-order price now.

To pre-order your book, please click here.
If you would like more information about Worship 2, please feel free to browse our website and read our blogs. Keep in touch with us via Facebook or our subscription list. If you have any questions please click here to contact us.