Imagine my surprise to get a notice from the national Association of Lutheran Church Musicians office this afternoon that the latest issue of GraceNotes, the quarterly publication, is now available online. I clicked on it, and lo and behold, there was a photo of our Bach Mass in B Minor performance on the front cover! We are now celebrities in the world of Lutheran church musicians! This is announced just as we are getting on the plane to attend the biennial conference of ALCM!

When Carl first clicked on the link, his first reaction was “WOW!” Here’s what he wrote to Evangeline Rimbach, the editor:

We just received the electronic version of Grace Notes and were really quite overwhelmed by the coverage of my retirement. We thank you so much for including so much of it. My sincere hope is that some of our colleagues will be inspired to aim for the same sort of thing in their situations. If a small church in Honolulu can do this, certainly larger churches in larger cities could do the same. So often we don’t think about our responsibilities of not only being witnesses in our own communities but cultural assets as well. That certainly was the spirit of things in the years from Luther to Bach and I think is just as much needed today.

It is a bit daunting to see in review what we did this past season alone, to say nothing of the 37 years that led up to it. My sincerest thanks for honoring my work and sharing it with the ALCM.

If you would like to read the article on Carl’s retirement, you can click here, or you can click the picture above. Who knows, maybe when we go to the conference, people will ask for our autographs!