Jonathan Cordova is a self-professed choir baby whose grade school years were punctuated by the boisterous sound of three- and four-part harmony wafting through his childhood home.  He accompanied his father's church choir on the keyboard as a sixth-grader, and returned again and again to church music throughout high school and college.  He completed a double major in music and media communications from Saint Peter's in Jersey City, and began serving as music director in a succession of local churches including Our Lady of Mt. Carmel in Nutley, Saint Ann's in Parsippany, Saint Anne's in Garwood, and Immaculate Conception in Secaucus, where he directed three choirs, six solo cantors, and a group of several instrumentalists.

 

While many church musicians find music to be instinctively spiritual, for Jonathan, the music of the church is a crossroads between spirit and intellect. Like all spirituality, our musical lives find fullness when heart and head are united.  Music is the desire to praise God with a joyful noise, bound together with the mischievous desire to praise God with the full strength of our minds, to grow in wisdom and grace, to make full use of our talents.

 

And for Jonathan, the ministry of music is about responding to the simple faith of churchgoers.  He has always found the highest inspiration from the talent of choir members and other musicians, who all praise God with a simplicity of heart.