What an incredible weekend we had, full of praise, amazing music making and collaborating, energy, love and lots of hard work! You can view our launch at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYOr9lY_mLg.
People came from all over Australia, even with the crazy challenging weather! Thanks to the commitment, hard work and can-do attitude from everyone who participated including:
Choir - Peter, Kyria, Nathan, Tim, Liz, Andrew, David, Belinda, Susan, Meah, Jacqui, Gabriella, Nita, Rosie, Phoebe, Madeleine, Timothy, Jonathan, Hava, Jake, Fiona, Siana, Zadok, Judah, Margaret, Anne.
Ensemble - Miriam, Carolyn, Brent, Harry, Caitlyn, Heidi, Caroline, Nita, Phoebe, Georgia, Julia, Rosie, Rhiannon, Ash, Matt.
AV - Chris, Andrew, Luke (huge thanks to Luke Wheeldon Audio)
Stage - Chloe, Ketty
Catering - Anne, Wendy, Leanne, Madeleine, Ketty, Tim
Logistics - Ali
Theatre - Christina, Dominique (huge thanks to Lake Macquarie Council)
Chairs, instruments - James, Clyde (huge thanks to Charlestown Ecclesia), Matt, Pete
Distribution superstars - Nita, Georgia

One section in our service included the dedication of the worship book and below is our dedication prayer, given during the service:
​
Dear Father
“LORD God, there is no one is like You. You never forget the promises You have made with Your people and You are loyal to those who faithfully obey Your teachings.”
Thank You for bringing us here together tonight in person from all over Australia, as well as online, from all over the world.
We now present this book, the blue Worship book, to You as an offering of our service and love to You, and as an offering of service and love to this community of believers worldwide.
We pray that the Worship book is used to glorify Your’s and Your son’s names, to help believers focus on You, to help bring them into a sacred space where they can sing and meditate and praise Your name.
We thank You for inspiring the talent within our community to produce this work - the composers, the lyricists, the musicians, the poets, the notators, the proofreaders, the distributors, the many people worldwide who have come together to collaborate on this book, as well as all the participants tonight, all of these servants of Yours who belong to You. We ask that You continue to bless them, to continue to inspire them to put their talents into service for You and for this community of believers.
We ask that You always turn our hearts to You, fill our hearts with thankfulness, help us recognise the blessings in our life that You provide, including forgiveness of sins, and fill our hearts with these good things so that we praise You joyfully with our whole being. Keep us turned towards You so that we focus on Your goodness rather than our own fears.
Please help us to remember to sing together as a congregation, in harmony with each other, focusing on our commonalities in Your love, rather than any petty differences. Help us to use this book to create more harmony, more music in our community to help unite us. Help us to listen to the lyrics contained in these songs, inspired by You, so that they motivate us in our individual lives.
Please always help us to have a new song in our hearts, for Your mercies are new every morning. We look forward to a time when Your glory fills the earth, when entire nations, not just denominations, sing with one voice Your praises, when a new heaven and a new earth is finally here.
We give all of this night to You, we give this book to You, and we pray You hear our words, hear our praise, and accept these.
In Jesus' name we pray,
Amen

We are currently working through a list of 144 songs, listening, notating, creating accompaniments, cleaning up scores. Thanks to our hard working notators from all over the world:
Timon Burney (Australia)
Dan Hardy (Germany)
Rachel Hocking (Australia)
Nita Lawrie (Australia)
Amy Parkin (UK)
​Phil Rosser (Australia)

In other news, we’re planning a launch April 6th, 2024 DV, to be held in Newcastle, Australia, in partnership with the upcoming Newcastle conference. Here’s the link to find out more about the conference: 
​https://www.newcastle2024.com/ 

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

Well, we're progressing through our task list, accompanied by the sounds of the Pacific ocean, kids, and the cricket (that last one is not by choice). Between us all around 20 songs have been transcribed/notated/edited - that's 12.5% of the book, which is progress. Amy 'amazing' Parkin from the UK has taken on some transcribing (notating music by ear, a task not for the faint-hearted).  Timon Burney, Dan Hardy and Phil Rosser are providing fantastic help, and we've also had help from Dan Osborne. I've typed out all the lyrics and they've gone off to Sam, Ken as per the last blog and Stuart Muir (another lovely lyric consultant). Our printers (Ligare) have started providing us with colour samples (see below!), updated quotes, as well as answering important questions like 'if the book is 400 pages long, how many can we fit in each box for postage?' I'm also setting up the preorders page so we can plan for print numbers. We have to finalise these numbers by April, a hard thing to judge! The other hard number to judge is 'how many songs can we actually fit into the book?' - a persistent question.

An exciting update on one of our previous blogs Moving Towards a Songlist is that Hartmut Sieber from Germany (Esslington ecclesia radio station) has offered to help with our radio station idea. We've also had helpful advice from Andrew Longman (UK - the only other Christadelphian radio station that we know of!). I'll provide more details about this project as we go, but the general idea is to have an internet radio station that is basically a playlist of Christadelphian music (not only those in the Worship book). If we can set up the project now, we can hopefully save chasing and include permissions for airplay with the Worship book printing permissions. 

It's so wonderful to have so many people contributing to this project, every single skill is needed, and the amazing technology that exists today means that we can do this across the globe. Exciting!

Well, we are right in the middle of the holiday season, challenged by the call of the pool/beach, social get-togethers, and crowded internet bandwidths. We've been spending our days lining up workloads for our lovely fellow-notators June Errington, Rosie Russell, Cameron Hillman (with more to come), and for our lovely lyric consultants Sam Dando and Ken Pooley (with more to come).  Some composers have been contacted for more information such as 'does sheet music exist for this' and 'please forward us the lyrics', but we've yet to officially notify anyone about the final song list, so please hang tight!  I've been playing through many of the songs on the piano, enjoying some of the songs beautiful chords with 7ths, 9ths, suspended notes, which really suit these blue-sky summer days that we are having. Luscious music matching divine days, praise God!

Photo: www.eurobodalla.com.au

After around 40 hours of meeting, playing, listening, reading and discussing, we've managed to bring the song list down to around 160 pieces but that could also change. We're now going over the list again, looking at themes and styles to see how we can best have an interesting representation of our community's music using a wide range of composers and lyricists. We've begun to divide up the tasks, working out how many pieces need transcribing, how many need editing, assigning names to each task, and also reviewing stats for the project. Next week's aim is to begin notating and transcribing amongst all the holiday excitement.

While I write this, I'm listening to the playlist I've created from all the submitted songs (whether accepted or not) and am loving the incredible range of music playing in the background. It makes me think that we need a Worship book radio station, something like iTunes radio or similar! My Worship 2 submissions playlist is over 8 hours long (bigger than any CD project). Any volunteers? Email me: [email protected]

Today was our first meeting since the submissions closed. After a 6 hour meeting going through the song titles alphabetically, we only got up to 'C'. There's lots of work ahead, but it's such an enjoyable process listening to audio files and singing around the piano. People have written music from their heart and we are blessed to have such people in our community.  We feel lucky that we're able to listen to such a wide range of music in so many different styles, from so many age groups, backgrounds, and countries. Our next meeting is on Monday and we hope to finish all approvals by next week as our schedule is very very tight! For those waiting on an answer, please wait a couple of weeks. (PS Excuse the mess in the picture - busy people...)

Calling all composers, lyricists, musicians, creative people....
Worship 2 is due to be published in 2015 DV and we are looking for contributions
If you are a composer or lyricist and have one or more great song/s that you know would benefit others, please submit your song/s for consideration for publication. 

Submissions can be in the form of notated music (e.g. via Sibelius) or lyric sheet/audio (e.g. mp3s, word docs) and these can be uploaded through our website.

This is the only way to submit a song, otherwise we will not be able to consider your song for publication.

Submissions are due November 30, 2014, but it would be really really helpful if you can submit your song earlier!
Please refer online to our FAQs for more information about Worship 2 including song themes and submission requirements.

We are really excited about this project and we know many others are too!
We've seen a lot of great music written since the original Worship publication and we hope that these pieces will be included in Worship 2. Please make sure that your piece doesn't miss out!

Keep in touch through our website, these messages, and our Facebook page. Please pray for the success of this project. 
God bless
Rachel, Nita, Jacqui
www.theworshipbook.com