Interchange · GIA Publications

Musicking while Female with Hilary Donaldson

March 4, 2025·59 min·5 clips

Donaldson describes how the collective resonance that makes sacred music powerful became a source of acute pain during her miscarriage at Advent.

The welcome is soft and familiar. After the GIA Summer Music Institute notice, Kate Willis introduces Hilary Donaldson as a new friend, church musician, researcher, and musicologist based in Toronto. Donaldson's path runs through church and academy, with sacred music, choral conducting, musicology, Toronto, and Southern Methodist University all part of the story. Then the conversation settles into a pastoral register. Donaldson speaks from the United Church context in Canada, naming its Methodist and Presbyterian roots while locating herself in mainline white Anglo spaces. That detail matters because she is not trying to speak for every church. She is speaking from a denomination and cultural setting she knows from the inside. She sees comfort there. She also sees gaps in how communities make room together for grief, trauma, pain, and the processing people still carry after hard years. Together is the pressure point. Donaldson is interested in liturgical and communal outlets because private comfort only goes so far when the ache itself is shared. Research comes in lightly. She mentions work through Calvin on trauma-informed liturgy as a place worth serious attention, not as a tidy solution. The last five years sit in the background. She calls them a lot, and it lands because she ties exhaustion to the lack of collective acknowledgement. If communities cannot agree on what has been happening, even naming what needs processing gets fractured. That is where womb and tomb comes in. The resource interests her because embodied experiences tied to fertility and uteruses are not shared by everyone, but still need careful communal language.

As heard by us

A thoughtful conversation about liturgy, repertoire, and the limits of church song.

Hilary Donaldson comes across as a church musician and researcher in Toronto, with the conversation staying focused on music, liturgy, and the spaces between congregational expectations and lived reality.

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Why you'd press play

For a warm, reflective conversation about music, liturgy, and the work of holding grief.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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