The Recovering Choir Director

About the Author

• View Aristotle A. Esguerra’s tumblelog, “Down the rabbit hole”

For over ten years in various capacities, Aristotle A. Esguerra has been involved in the direction, presentation and promotion of Catholic church music within its proper context.

His involvement in church music began at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. in fall 1995 when he volunteered to accompany Masses held by the Cornell Catholic Community. This involvement increased from one to three Masses per Sunday, and eventually became in 2001 a part-time paid position within the Cornell Catholic Community.

In Summer 2002, Aristotle assumed the responsibilities of Liturgical Music Director at the Cornell Catholic Community, a full-time position (and a valuable learning experience) he held for the next academic year. In this capacity, he was responsible for planning music for Masses and prayer services throughout the academic year, as well as providing music leadership for Masses at the chaplaincy’s monthly prison music ministry service project at Southport Correctional Facility near Elmira, N.Y. He also co-compiled and edited a book for the chaplaincy’s Tuesday and Thursday sung Vespers program (available for free on the Internet). He also assumed responsibility for maintaining the chaplaincy’s website.

Soon after accepting the Cornell Catholic Community music directorship, he started “Confessions of an Accidental Choir Director” (now “The Recovering Choir Director”), a weblog that was one of the first of its kind to both chronicle the state of Catholic church music at the local level, and collect links to documents relevant to church music from all around the Internet. Also at that time, he took part in an ad-hoc student-run Renaissance choir, as well as singing tenor in the Cornell Chorale under the direction of James Miller.

In July 2003, he took a self-imposed sabbatical from all church music involvement and worked in various unrelated industries. However, in 2004 at the invitation of an individual that encountered his weblog some time before, Aristotle started co-directing a small Gregorian chant choir at St. Matthew’s Church in Dix Hills, N.Y. He continued in that capacity until September 2005, when at the invitation of Fr. James Massa of the Diocese of Brooklyn and the then-coordinator of that diocese’s Ecclesia Dei community, he took the reins of that diocese’s Traditional Latin Mass music ministry, serving in that position until his departure in June 2006.

In December 2006 he returned to St. Matthew’s Church in Dix Hills and continues to teach Gregorian Chant to the schola there.

When he is not teaching chant, singing, or blogging, Aristotle teaches social ballroom, latin and swing dance at a studio in Rockland County, New York, among other places. He also does a bit of website development and consulting — unsurprisingly, he is a proponent of Web standards compliance.

Aristotle is a former member of the National Association of Pastoral Musicians and is a current member of the Church Music Association of America.