Raluca Bojor

Hi, my name is Raluca and I absolutely LOVE old church hymns. I grew up in a Romanian Baptist church where we were singing timeless hymns such as Amazing Grace or It Is Well With My Soul in our own Romanian language.

I am also a classically trained pianist, which means I learned piano the traditional way – scales, chords, etudes, repertoire, juries etc. When our church needed a pianist, I was the most “qualified” person for the job (around age 13) but I did not know how to play piano by ear. And our hymnal only had the melodic line written in:

Because of this limitation, I had to figure out the accompaniment by ear. Some Sundays it sounded really great. Other Sundays, it was a survival experience! Imagine 13-year-old me trying to figure out the harmony to Schubert’s “Holy Holy Holy” without any reference . . . 🤣 We just did not have access to any church piano sheet music back in post-communist Romania.

Now as a piano teacher in the United States, I have access to a lot of hymn arrangements in any style and at any level. However, when thinking of my piano students, I know best what their strengths and limitations are. Some of the existing arrangements were just not a good fit for our lessons. So in 2020 I started writing my own hymn piano arrangements (easy and advanced) with my own students in mind.

I was surprised to see that other teachers found my arrangements to work well with their student also!

So I started selling them on musicnotes and other online platforms.

But sheet music (as individual purchases) is expensive.

The average price for one download is $5.

Some families cannot afford that on a regular basis . . .