A few weeks ago I was sitting at the piano for our Ward Choir practice and someone new came in. Her name was Linda Pratt, and the name sounded familiar.
“Are you on the Internet?” I asked her.
“Yes.” She told me with an inquisitive look. Wow, what a small world when someone who writes sheet music and puts it on the internet for anyone to download just “happens” to move in the same church ward as me. Love it!
This last week, I had the opportunity to meet with Linda and to get to know her better. It was so much fun! I thought some of you might enjoy reading some of the things that I found inspiring about Linda.
One thing about Linda, unlike me, is that Linda’s instrument in college was the piano – which means she practiced the piano from 4-6 hours every day! I could never have done that! She ended up using her piano talents to teach piano for 25 years. The reason she started putting sheet music on the internet was because she wrote piano pieces for each one of her students to play for their recitals! She wrote individual songs for each person. I thought that was so cool!
She started to get requests from her ward and Stake and she was making copies for everyone. Her daughter offered to make a website for her to make it easier to give out the sheet music to all the people that were asking. Her daughter set up her website and she has continued to use it since about 2004.
Linda specializes in making choir arrangements that aren’t too difficult for ward choirs. She was called as a Ward Choir director and started looking for simpler music arrangements for her choir to handle. She also didn’t want to infringe on any copyrights for copying music, so she started writing her own arrangements so she could write the parts and make as many copies as she wanted. (A reason I have written choir arrangements as well!)
Linda and I shared some of our personal trials in life. I think sometimes people think that just because we’ve written a bunch of music, we don’t have any trials, but it’s certainly not true. She’s just as real as I am, and I am so glad that she is in my ward!
For those that are interested in hearing some of her fabulous music, you’ll want to visit her site, at: www.freewardchoirmusic.com
You can also listen to a sample of her music here:
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