Julie teaches private piano lessons, and she was kind enough to answer some questions for my blog readers. She is in high demand and has a waiting list for after-school hours, but for homeschooled students who can fill in earlier school hours, you’re in luck! Julie and her husband, Cory O’Neill, run Joyful Noise Music Studios in Redmond, Oregon, and between the two of them, offer a wide range of piano and guitar classes. A side note on Cory: coming up is his fabulous summer guitar camp for beginning and intermediate students, June 16-20. Classes are for 9 - 14 year old beginners, 15 year old - adult beginners, and then an intermediate class. Class includes 5 hours of instruction, CD with all the music and a binder with all the music. Held at Redmond Music Supply. For more information, contact the O’Neills at corynjulie[at]gmail[dot]com.

I asked Julie to include some details here on her little bro, David Klinkenberg, who, if you haven’t heard, is the most amazing fiddle player ever, and shares his sister’s really awesome, silly sense of humor. I can’t remember when I’ve been to a concert and seen such a dynamic connection between a performer and his audience.

Jen: How did you get started with teaching private piano lessons?

Julie: I perform a lot and have had many people over the years almost beg me to teach them too. I vowed I’d never do it, truly. I really didn’t think I’d want to do it, as practicing and lessons for me were always a hard thing to do as a kid. It takes a lot of discipline to stick with something like music long enough to be good enough that people enjoy listening. I remember as a kid, practicing the piano while my brother was down the hall practicing his violin, to the backdrop of kids outside playing. It was hard to understand why, as a kid, I had to practice instead of play. I did get to play, eventually, but there was always piano practice between me and my freedom to go play. But all along I was learning something vital - what perseverance, stick-to-it-iveness and commitment to something looked like, and now, who knows what those kids playing outside are doing, but David and I are getting to use our music professionally and are so blessed by it.

So, I ultimately was convinced to start teaching piano when I just couldn’t resist this sweet Hispanic middle school girl’s insistence that she wanted to learn from me. It took only one lesson, one-on-one with this great gal, to realize that this could be fun. One-on-one teaching with some of the best students around is any teacher’s dream and it’s what I get to do as a piano teacher. It’s also a lot of fun to have a business with my husband. We bounce ideas off of each other, manage the business together, and combine our talents to offer a studio that teaches piano and guitar. We have quite a few families where one of the children takes piano and the other child takes guitar. Families love it!

Jen: You and your husband are both involved in music ministry and music education; with your children, are you able to trade off the childcare and the teaching and cover for each other, or how does this work?

Julie: We remodeled our home so it has a studio in it. It makes it easy. When I am teaching, my husband is on kid patrol and vice-versa. Next school year, we are hoping to teach out of the music store downtown. It’s gotten more difficult to teach at home with elementary age children of our own now. To have 20 some families coming to our door each week has put some strain on the ease of family duties at home. So our goal is to have me teach one night and Cory to teach guitar the other night down at the store.

Besides teaching music, we also get to lead worship at our church together. There is hardly anything more fun than worshiping God together with music. It’s so powerful to be united in song in praise to God, building the intensity of a song together as we both feel moved to do, with one’s spouse.

Jen: I’d love for you to share a little bit of your latest adventure with touring with your brother, David Klinkenberg. I’m a big fan of his (and yours) and want to make sure my readers get a chance to hear about this piece of your life.

Julie: I mentioned a little about David, my brother. What an amazing opportunity I have recently been given to tour around the country performing with my little brother, David Klinkenberg. We have played together since we were 4 and 6 years old - countless church appearances, weddings, banquets, festivals, competitions, and other random events, but when David was approached some years ago by members of his church to go to Nashville on their dollar and record an album, my time with him was temporarily done.

Four albums later and tours with Jim Brickman, Big Daddy Weave, Mark Schultz, Richie McDonald, Lonestar and many others, David decided to give his long time favorite pianist another whirl - and it worked! We love to joke about our lives growing up together on stage, but we also bring to our shows many meaningful moments of challenge for the audience. Audiences seem to easily connect with us, as we are so real with them while on stage. Ultimately it moves many to tears to see a brother and a sister a) getting along and b)performing like we do together. I tease David that we are the next Donnie and Marie Osmond.

At a show near Nashville in February, David’s manager came to the Civic Theater where we were performing without us knowing. I caught them backstage talking with beaming smiles. Apparently, the whole show was a hit. Without even wanting to be, I was suddenly in on the national music scene. A couple days after that, I got a call from his management asking if I’d want to be his road manager - advance all the shows, do all the reports, take care of all the details for each event and much more. I recall laughing but I don’t recall screaming YES. Thoughts of my studio, my two children, my husband, my already FULL life, blocked any enthusiastic response from me. But despite that, an hour later, emails came streaming in with my job description, sample reports, sample contracts, etc. I was on.

I am glad that God sometimes works that way. He takes doubting Julie and doesn’t really give me a choice sometimes. He uses me despite me. I am teaching piano not because I purposed to do it, but obviously because God wanted to use me in the lives of students one-on-one. He wanted me to challenge and deeply love students through the medium of teaching them music and as a way to express themselves and believe in themselves.

He wanted me to tour with my brother. I would never have been able to see how this could logically work out with my already full life, but it’s been like the parting of the Red Sea. I am walking on dry land as God has parted my life and made a way. And because of that, I get to meet people all over this nation, encourage them, love them, listen to them, and pray with them. And, I get to be my brother’s sister again as we discover who each other has become. Check out David’s music at www.davidklinkenberg.com. The multi-media tab has some clips of him performing.

Jen: It’s neat how both you and your brother are such musical talents, and I know your brother started really young. What advice would you give to parents of young children who don’t have a lot of money to spend on private lessons but still want their kids to get a music education?

Julie: My parents didn’t have a lot of money either. My dad was a biologist with the Federal Government making a basic salary. It’s about priorities though. It was highly important to my mom that we take lessons. The truth is, that takes money. My parents spent a lot of money, gas, time, and tears to support us as we took lessons all the way through high school.

A music education has a lot of levels to it. Basics could simply include renting cool CDs from the library and listening to them together - check out Jazz, blues, African music, or classical CDs and listen, dance, discuss what you like and dislike. Without private lessons, most kids won’t master an instrument, but if that’s not the goal then parents could check out neat group classes like Kindermusik. I put my kids in Kindermusik and they loved it and truly learned an appreciation for different types of music, concepts like dynamics, rhythm, and acceleration and social skills as well.

Some kids, when raised in homes that support and love them and encourage them to be all that they want to be, do self-learn instruments. My husband did this with the guitar. He had a passion and made it happen.

Jen: You have many interests besides music. You’re an avid runner and you also like to write, educate people on health issues, do photography and quilting, and you’re a soccer mom, among other things. How do you find balance?

Julie: I find balance by not over-booking myself, by not letting guilt motivate me to volunteer too much. I find balance by making sure I have time to do what I need to to stay connected to who I am - that includes adequate time outside, running, alone time, reading the Bible, hanging out with girlfriends, quilting, dating my husband. I find balance by taking time to go to coffee with a friend. I also don’t try to accomplish everything you listed above in one day. I have a pretty good sense of what a day can handle and if too many things pile up for one day, I cut stuff out. Making sure that we eat a healthy meal is quite important to me so I can’t allow a day to crowd that task out, for instance.

If I ever do get overwhelmed, I stop and think: what one thing could I do on the list that would relieve that feeling of being overwhelmed and allow me to then be able to tackle the to-do list? Sometimes just getting the laundry done is all it takes for me to feel grounded again, not out of control, and able to calmly deal with the rest of the duties.

Another thing on balance for us is our choice of occupation itself (teaching). It lends itself to a work hard, play hard lifestyle, but it allows for much needed long breaks - like 10 weeks at summer of hiking, backpacking, camping, swimming, sun! We work hard to live by our wage and have been so amazed at the difference no debt makes on our life. We don’t have to work to pay off large mortgages or car payments or credit card payments. It means that we can set boundries on our time (for instance, how many students we can teach) and not be forced to have to take on more than a balanced lifestyle can handle.

Didn’t you just love this time with Julie? If you’re lucky enough to live in Central Oregon, and have kids, you may want to explore the possibility of music lessons with Joyful Noise Music Studios. If you’re a stay-at-home mom with musical talent, and have been wondering how to bring in additional income, I hope you’ve been inspired to take the leap and start teaching. And I’ll be sure to let you know if Julie and David are coming to a town near you.

Technorati Tags: Central Oregon, guitar camp, Kindermusik, David Klinkenberg, piano lessons, music education, music

My favorite hymn is Be Thou My Vision. I love the gentleness of the song, woven throughout with a call for God’s constant presence and guiding hand in our lives. This is a traditional Irish hymn, and hands down the best recording I’ve ever heard is performed by Van Morrison. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find this on YouTube, so I’ve presented here Fernando Oretega’s version. While it is still moving, the man is clearly not Irish, as Van Morrison is, and somehow I just like to hear an Irish man sing a traditional Irish song. You can find Van Morrison’s Be Thou My Vision on his CD Hymns to the Silence. When we homechurch, we always play Van’s version and sing with him - my kids love it, we love it, and I’ll bet you would be moved.

But here is Fernando Ortega with Be Thou My Vision:

This is a poignant song by some very talented ladies, but darn it, I mistake it for a Folger’s commercial every time.

I thought it was just me. But I confessed to my husband this evening that Point of Grace was sounding like an old coffee jingle, like…, “Folgers,” he finished my sentence. It’s the first lines that get me - one of Folger’s commercials starts with “Every day I wake up,” and Point of Grace (How You Live) says “Wake up to the sunlight.” That wake up part, with the same sort of rhythm and feel, and suddenly I’m grabbing for that second cup.

Technorati Tags: coffee, commercial, Folger’s Coffee, How You Live, Point of Grace, Folger’s coffee commercial, Christian music, TV jingle

People remember where they were during monumental events. Like when JFK or MLK were shot. I wasn’t born yet for those events, but I do remember exactly where I was when I heard Rich Mullins had died. He was already my favorite musician. I was standing in my classroom full of 3rd graders at Bailey Hill Elementary in Eugene, and my husband was just arriving to pick me up at the end of the day. These were the times of our tiny duplex and one car. It was a Monday, and the news had just come over the Christian radio that over the weekend, Rich Mullins was killed in an automobile accident.

He and I were both shaken and saddened. It was eerie to think that Rich had sung “When I leave I want to go out like Elijah.”

The Jordan is waiting for me to cross through
My heart is aging I can tell
So Lord, I’m begging
For one last favor from You
Here’s my heart take it where You will
………
But when I leave I want to go out like Elijah
With a whirlwind to fuel my chariot of fire
And when I look back on the stars
Well, It’ll be like a candlelight in Central Park
And it won’t break my heart to say goodbye

With this ten year anniversary upon us, it’s good to give honor and remembrance to a man I think of as a poet, a prophet, and a friend. When my husband hears a really great worship leader, he’ll say, “He has the spirit of Rich Mullins.” There have been very few he’s said that about, because it’s a rare quality. How to capture the essence of that spirit in words is difficult. It’s a humility-authenticity-passion-straight out of the heart of God kind of quality.

To carry on the “Spirit of Rich Mullins,” we can practice authentic worship and heart-felt serving. He was the kind of guy to stay up all night to talk to a friend in need. The kind of guy to not just talk about caring for the orphan and the widow, but actually doing it. The person who could easily have gathered worldly riches for himself but gave it all away. What an amazing example of Love.

Most know “Awesome God,” which is a lot like (I think) “Sing Your Praise to the Lord,” which he wrote for Amy Grant before we ever heard Mullins sing it. I saw Rich in concert in Eugene, Oregon, in about 1992. He came on stage in his bare feet and t-shirt and jeans, and walked right out into the audience to be near us. I think he was altogether uncomfortable with being up front and everyone else being out there.

Rich didn’t quite fit into the traditional Christian music industry. He did some pretty non-mainstream things like take a vow of poverty and spent the last part of his life on an Indian Reservation teaching music to the children.

I was first introduced to Rich’s music by a college roommate, Julie. One evening, Julie put this tape in the player (I had no CDs then), and got out two cups for us to play with. She taught me the “cup game” to “Screendoor” - It’s about as useless as/A screen door on a submarine /Faith without works baby /It just ain’t happenin’/…which, by the way, is also a great song and a great musical rendition of the heart of James (the apostle).

Julie, where are you? Somewhere in Texas. Those were some *very* fun days, and I even remember you writing a fan letter to Rich. :-)

Forgot to mention, but some readers may not have heard of Rich Mulllins, so wouldn’t know that he died in a tragic car accident in 1997. So you won’t find any current music… If you don’t have any of his music, I’d begin with “A Liturgy, A Legacy, & A Ragamuffin Band.” Be prepared to spend a lot of time thinking about the complex metaphors and listening to some unusual and beautiful instrumentation. And then read “A Ragamuffin Gospel” by Brennan Manning, from which book Rich borrowed the name of his band. But don’t read it if you don’t want your life to be changed, as Michael W. Smith says in the foreword.

The Color Green, from A Liturgy, A Legacy, & A Ragamuffin Band

And the moon is a sliver of silver
Like a shaving that fell on the floor of a Carpenter’s shop
And every house must have it’s builder
And I awoke in the house of God
Where the windows are mornings and evenings
Stretched from the sun
Across the sky north to south
And on my way to early meeting
I heard the rocks crying out
I heard the rocks crying out

Be praised for all Your tenderness by these works of Your hands
Suns that rise and rains that fall to bless and bring to life Your land
Look down upon this winter wheat and be glad that You have made
Blue for the sky and the color green that fills these fields with praise

And the wrens have returned and they’re nesting
In the hollow of that oak where his heart once had been
And he lifts up his arms in a blessing for being born again
And the streams are all swollen with winter
Winter unfrozen and free to run away now
And I’m amazed when I remember
Who it was that built this house
And with the rocks I cry out

Be praised for all Your tenderness by these works of Your hands
Suns that rise and rains that fall to bless and bring to life Your land
Look down upon this winter wheat and be glad that You have made
Blue for the sky and the color green

Be praised for all Your tenderness by these works of Your hands
Suns that rise and rains that fall to bless and bring to life Your land
Look down upon this winter wheat and be glad that You have made
Blue for the sky and the color green that fills these fields with praise