The Recovering Choir Director

I am another beginning MD, more work than you, slightly less money (but as in many places, the funerals and weddings make it comfortable.)

I offered to do it for less, but the pastor is a very fair man.

Parochial musicians’ salaries have certainly risen more than apace with inflation in the past generation or so.

I suppose it doesn’t begin to make up to musicians as a class for years of over-word and underpay at the hands of God’s church.

The notions of reparations has me thinking.

I’ve been reading much about the magdalene laudries lately, will the maggies ever get paid for their years of servitude?

Let’s consider all the undervalued and UNvalued huma beings of history, and try to make it up to all of them.

Perhaps there out to be a fund-raiser like the national telethon Phil Donahue and Regis Philben di for impoverished retired rligious a few years ago; for all those sweet old ladies and effete gentlemen of decades past who duitfully cracked the St Gregory hymnal every Sunday and did their best to make music to the glory of God.

As Pastor I paid a full time organist/music director $45,000

I also installed a Pipe Organ and changed the parish from missalettes to Hymnals.

BTW $45,000 is not a generous salary for any full time worker in the San Francisco Bay Area, especially if they seek to establish roots, own their own home, etc.

Peace, all.

Fr Jeff’s sensibility and wisdom isn’t surprising to me. Sadly, many parishes and pastors expect to have wonderful music plop on their doorstep for free or cheaper.

It might be inappropriate for a parish music director to own a house in a parish where everyone is renting or scraping by in their cars. Likewise, a suburban parish with fine schools, shopping, home ownership, and the like should be able to support a church staff who live pretty much as the parishioners do. An arrangement otherwise would be seriously sinful on the part of pastor and lay leadership. It would be interesting to assess how many fairly wealthy suburban parishes have live-in-the-boundaries staff members who are the primary breadwinners for their families.