The Recovering Choir Director

Aristotle A. Esguerra

For almost fifteen 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 sang in an ad-hoc student-run Renaissance choir and in the Cornell University Chorale under the direction of James Patrick 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 continued to teach Gregorian Chant to the schola there until November 2009. During this time he also was called into service as a chant director and singer at Saturday– and holy-day-Extraordinary-Form Masses at Holy Innocents Church in midtown Manhattan; visiting choral tenor at St. Mary, Norwalk, CT; visiting chant director at St. Anthony’s Oratory, West Orange, NJ; and various weddings and funerals in the Extraordinary Form.

At the end of November 2009, Aristotle will begin fulfilling the duties of organist and choir director at two Madison, Wisconsin–area churches — St. Ignatius in Mount Horeb and St. Mary in Pine Bluff.

When he is not teaching chant, singing, or blogging, Aristotle works as an Internet developer, specializing in WordPress and Movable Type installations, Internet marketing campaigns (Google AdWords campaign optimization, etc.), PHP and CSS coding, and graphic design. Some recent clients include the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, and Courtroom Communications of New York, New York.

Other interests include social dancing (ballroom, swing, salsa, and tango — he is a former ballroom dance instructor and casual competitor), current events, philosophy, business, and marketing.

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