Good Coffee For A Good Cause
United Church of Christ Coffee Project
Women’s Fellowship sells Equal Exchange Fairly Traded ground coffee, coffee beans, tea and chocolate bars the second Sunday of each month following worship. (Chocolate bars are not shipped May-Sept. because of hot weather so we won’t have any to sell until fall.)
The UCC Coffee Project partners with Equal Exchange which is a worker-owned fair trade organization committed to paying a fair wage to farmers, buying directly from the farmer cooperatives, providing credit that farmers can afford, encouraging ecologically sustainable farming practices and developing trade partnerships that are long-term and based on trust and respect.
By purchasing coffee, tea and chocolate you are helping to save the lives and livelihoods of small farmers all over the world. Look for us in Pilgrim Hall on August 10th.
The next meeting for Women’s Fellowship will be Thursday, September 18th.
OFFICERS were installed at our June meeting, and are:
President - Carolyn Ramsey
Vice President/Programs - Shirley Kodis
Secretary - Sandy Fox
Treasurer - Nancy Price

INSIGHTS INTO COMMON MUSICAL EXPERIENCES   By Bob Boberg--This is the first of 3 or 4 articles under this title to be included in successive Tower Chimes.
          Have you ever wondered how the names given the various voice ranges, Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Bass, came to be assigned? Historically, it started as purely functional about one thousand years ago as the earliest documentation shows about Western Civilization music in the Roman Catholic Church.
          The earliest music, for which we have knowledge, stemmed from the Roman Catholic chant used in the celebration of the various masses. The chant was a single line of melody, very free in rhythm and flowing in style, using, of course, Latin texts. Only the monks had the responsibility to provide the chant for the mass, as women were not included in the active participation in the church presentations. For awhile the monks were content with just a single line of melody. But as they grew more proficient in their singing, they also grew more inventive in their creativity. The lower voiced monks found the upper notes of some of the chants difficult to manage and tried singing the same melody, but in a lower pitch level, usually that of 4 or 5 tones lower. This created a harmony, parallel to the melody, but at a lower pitch level. This initial harmony was referred to as organum.
          It did not take long for these lower voices to become more inventive, and they created new melodies occurring simultaneously with the original melody, the given chant. Since this given chant was still regarded as THE melody, it was called the cantus firmus (fixed song) and the upper voices responsible for that fixed song were called the tenore, coming from the Latin for “holding on to” or “tenacious.” It is quite obvious, then, that the voices in the lower range, singing perhaps a different tune, were referred to as the bassus, or “low voice.”
          As the church musicians became more and more creative, melodic lines were added above the cantus firmus, creating a tapestry of three voices, the cantus in the middle, the bassus ln the bottom, and the altus on top, altus coming from the stem that gives us the word “altitude” or “higher than.” All of this was still in the church with only male singers participating. Today the alto still refers to the voice higher than the tenor, even though it is traditionally female voices of lower singing range.
          Eventually, as secular music outside the church was becoming recognized and documented, the higher voices from the female range, still higher than the highest of the church male musicians, were called soprani, from the stem referring to the “highest”.
          Realize that this is a very brief account of one of the most important evolutions in the development of Western music, and that there are full semester collegiate courses in music history that study in depth the various eras of music history, including this period known as the Middle Ages.
          In summary, the following may be a helpful graphic showing the chronological sequence:
Soprano - highest (femaile voice, usually); Altus – male voice singing a tune higher than the tenore (now a female voice); Tenore – male voice singing the cantus firmus (original chant), Bassus – male voice singing a different tune lower than the tenore.