I was chatting with a colleague late last night about our current projects, during which I observed that many people do not realize that there's so much more to indexing than just making a list of words and then searching for them in a PDF. (I won't detail the process here, but for a glimpse of it, I recommend Do Mi Stauber's post on Inside an Indexer's Brain: Pilgrimage to Structure and Chapter 16 of the Chicago Manual of Style [which, not incidentally, is fifty pages long -- 145 guidelines].) On her part, the colleague lamented how, even among other publishing industry professionals, there's a lack of awareness of how there's so much more to proper book design than just setting margins and picking an image for the cover.

It's the sort of thing where, on a bad day, it gets aggravating coping with expectations that the job be accomplished more quickly and more cheaply than is realistic. On a good day, I take pleasure in possessing and wielding the expertise to help authors say what they mean (aka copyediting) and help their readers find and revisit specific things they've said (aka indexing).

Some years ago, I read an interview of a singer who compared singing Bach to swimming like a duck, i.e., "gliding on the surface and paddling like fuck underneath." I was thinking of that this morning, partly in relation to the inherent invisibility of my own vocation (if I've performed the copyediting and indexing properly, the average reader [*] shouldn't be any more aware of me than they would be of the seamstress who stitched together a ballerina's costume).

[* Being a former techie, I'm the dork in the audience studying the placement of the lights, the width of the hems, etc. And yeah, I now read indexes both for fun and enlightenment -- as I was telling someone else this week, it's like being paid to design a filing system from scratch, and a huge part of the job is coming up with the right name to print on each folder tab.]

I was also thinking about sprezzatura this morning because I'm leading hymns at church this Sunday. I spent some time last weekend researching possibilities -- sometimes determining the lineup is easier, but the subject of the upcoming service is "The Upanishads," so I ended up asking the minister about the themes she planned to delve into, looking up the lyrics to an untranslated Hindu hymn in SLT, and playing through some of the potential options on my piano to assess their singability and learnability. (One thing I've learned over the years -- and I've heard it's a principle my music director adheres to as well -- is that it just isn't wise to program more than one strange or difficult hymn per service. There's a fine line between engaging people with the unexpected/challenging/new and sucking all the energy out of the sanctuary because the text or tunes are too unfamiliar.)

So, I came up with a preliminary draft of five hymns (three morning songs [a trio of hymns to begin the service], a meditation hymn, and a closing hymn), and e-mailed it to the minister in advance. When she and I met the following day, we went over the list and I sang to her the ones she wasn't familiar with. She requested a favorite of hers ("When Our Heart Is in a Holy Place") that she felt would be a great follow-up to her sermon, so I moved the original closing hymn to the morning song set (ditching the least-familiar hymn of the three). After reviewing the lyrics to Calm Soul of All Things, she felt it would be a better fit for the meditation than Creative Love, Our Thanks We Give, so those two pieces switched places as well.

Another aspect of hymn selection is trying to fit them not only to the theme of the service, but its emotional arc: within the trio of morning songs, for instance, the ideal is
to have something lively, something slower, and something that segues well into "Please take a moment to greet one another." So I had this in mind as well when making my shortlist (i.e., the final three weren't necessarily my favorites of the ten, but they were the three that best matched the ideal outlined above): the opening hymn ("Sing Out Praises for the Journey" is triumphant and processional in tone; "Creative Love" is more introspective ("Creative love, our thanks we give / that this our world is incomplete / that struggle greets our will to live ..."); and "God Who Fills the Universe" is hopeful and soaring.

So, while revising the lineup, I mentally rechecked the order to make sure each hymn was still complementing the part of the service at which it would be sung. After the meeting, the minister sent the selections to the pianist and to the administrative assistant (who prepares the order of service on Thursdays), and I sent the pianist a separate note about the tempo of the closing hymn after checking it against my metronome (the printed tempo is much slower than the pace the minister is accustomed to, and I prefer it faster as well).

Between the meeting and this Sunday, I'll be rehearsing the hymns, in part to remind myself of the actual notes on the page (as hymn leader, I have to sing what's printed, which doesn't necessarily correspond with what I'm used to), in part to gauge which ones I can transpose down an octave (a couple of the tunes are on the high side for me), and to get my upper notes back under my command.

I don't always prep to this extent for a service -- when I fill in for the music director, he's often already selected the hymns (which I then find out about on Thursday), and I can't always spare the time to practice them beforehand; sometimes I simply run through them once with the pianist before the early service and that's it. Moreover, he's been known to change hymns between early and late service when either a song does that air-sucking-out-of-the-room thing or, on hearing the live versions of the readings/sermon, he thinks of a hymn that would be a much better fit with them.

A good deal of the process detailed above becomes instinctive after you've gone through it several times (just like typing with ten fingers, inserting serial commas, etc.), so it isn't necessarily arduous (which I fear it may sound, considering how many paragraphs I've just devoted to it), nor do I feel resentful about spending time on it. I suppose you could say I've been indulging in the pleasure of reviewing how much I've learned and how aware I've become of what is (or can be) involved in creating something well-structured.

(And then there's the sheer visceral pleasure of singing: I'm not always happy with the limits of my voice, but yesterday was one of those days when it felt good to hear myself and to work on improving the thinner parts of my range. That we are in the making still...)