MUSIC AT TRINITY
Music is central to the worship life at Trinity. Each week our community experiences a wide variety of sung prayer on Sunday and throughout the week. Led by our semi-professional choir and dedicated staff of musicians, there is always a place for you to enter into worship through song.
Our weekly schedule of services is as follows:
Sunday,8:00am Eucharist, Rite I
Our first Eucharist on Sunday is celebrated with hymns and parts of the liturgy sung with organ accompaniment. A full Rite I liturgy, this service takes place in our intimate chapel followed by a coffee hour with pigs in a blanket.
Sunday, 10:30am Choral Eucharist, Rite II
The main service on Sunday is celebrated with the Trinity Choir, a 20-voice semi-professional ensemble directed by the Organist & Choirmaster. This service includes hymns, sung psalms, choral anthems and more elaborate sung settings of the liturgy. The repertoire ranges from Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphony to modern choral works and spirituals. The celebration concludes with a coffee hour in the parish hall.
Sunday, 6:00pm Eucharist, Rite II
This Sunday evening service is led by guitar, vocalist and organ in the chapel. A more informal liturgy, the music tends more toward jazz and gospel than the other services. On the first Sunday of each month a full jazz ensemble leads worship.
The Trinity Choir is a semi-professional ensemble of 20-24 singers that sings at the weekly 10:30am Eucharist on Sundays, as well as feast days throughout the year. Choral Evensong is offered a few times each year. The choir rehearses 6:30pm - 8:30pm on Wednesdays from September to June, and on Sundays at 9:00am. The repertoire for the choir includes everything from Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphony to modern choral works and spirituals. Singers interested in participating in the choir are encouraged to contact the choirmaster, Paul Weber, at to schedule an audition.
Choral Evensong
The service of Evensong, or Evening Prayer, is one of the daily services that comprise the Divine Office. “Seven times a day do I praise thee, because of thy righteous judgments”, says the psalmist (Ps. 119:164), hearkening back to the ancient practice of setting aside time throughout each day to pray. In the Western Christian tradition, the practice of gathering seven times a day to sing psalms at Lauds (Morning Prayer), Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers (Evening Prayer) and Compline (Night Prayer) was established by St. Benedict in the 6th century and quickly spread across Europe (the service of Matins, with its longer readings and responsories, was also sung during the night.)
At the time of the English Reformation in the 16th century, the Divine Office was revised, and the service of Vespers and Compline were combined to create something new: Evensong. The new service inherited from its medieval predecessors a tradition of daily, sung, choral prayer, but introduced the vernacular, scripture readings, public prayers, and, eventually, hymnody for the congregation to sing.
Five centuries later, Evensong is among the greatest gifts of the English Church to people of all faiths. It is an opportunity at the end of the day to sit back and take in the beauty of the psalms, the canticles, passages from scripture, and to participate in a hymn or two. Unlike the main weekly Sunday morning services, Evensong invites the congregation into an interior participation, while the choir offers prayers and praise on behalf of the whole church; a chance to “let my prayer rise up in thy sight as incense; and let the lifting up of my hands be an evening sacrifice.”
Choral Evensong is offered a few times each year on significant feast days in the church calendar.
Church Organ
Trinity's mighty organ in the church is a 4-manual, 80-rank mechanical action instrument built in 1990 by the Redman Organ Company of Fort Worth, TX. For specifications click here.
Chapel Organ
The organ in the chapel is a 2-manual, 8-rank instrument built in 1937 by the M. P. Möller company and renovated by Holtkamp in 2009. For specification click here.
