Our Philosophy

It’s always hard to keep up, especially when you’ve reached a comfortable level of confidence.

Maybe you’re a reluctant organist or an enforced choir director, at last you’re a decent keyboardist, your choir likes working with you, you and your minister and your congregation are fitting together smoothly now.

Church musicians rarely are paid more than what’s essentially an honorarium, it’s mostly a labour of love on our part, and we’ve all got day jobs that demand much of our attention.

We’re doing the best we can with what we have, our worshipping communities are grateful, our families love and need us, we’ve no more time to give. 

That is until another church musician shows up unexpectedly on a Sunday.

There’s not a musician alive who won’t fluster when making music in front of colleagues, won’t cringe at the minor mistake, won’t hope for a compliment.

So there’s the truth of it, every one of us longs to be  a good musician.

The area surrounding the Grey Bruce Centre is rural and small town, our largest community is 22,000 people. There is only one community college here, and it offers no formal music courses.

That’s why our Centre has begun to take leadership in shaping the art and craft of making music in a highly specialised arena– not the academy or the recital hall, but rather the typically modest church situations in which we find ourselves. So often, what works brilliantly in London or Toronto largely misses the point in Hanover or Belgrave.

What you will see in this section of the website is a diary of how the Grey Bruce Town and Country Centre is trying to be helpful in satisfying the universal musician’s urge to lifelong learning– knowing that any church musician, no matter how overextended or how comfortable, wants to get better at what s/he does.

Given Grey and Bruce counties’ demographics and lifestyle, our Centre concentrates on courses and seminars that emphasise pastoral music making in church. What we offer is challenging, but approachable; it’s convenient, and it’s affordable.