When you made this planet

Some time ago, Thomas Thurman drew my attention to a text to try setting as a hymn. The story behind the text, as well as the text itself, is here. After spending the requisite months sitting in a "drafts" drawer while I got distracted by other things, and some help with editing from various people (Dr Christopher Parker at St Mary's Addington was particularly helpful), I think it's about as...

Multi-tracking chant experiment

This is a brief experiment with multi-tracking Creator lucis optime (English) by artsyhonkerYou see, I've got this hare-brained idea about podcasting a sung Compline online, possibly in some kind of Whitacre-style virtual choir. That's hard to coordinate, with chant: the pulse is directed by the words, so metronome markings are no help, for starters. But gathering together a little schola...

Dances, not dirges

On Saturday I had the pleasure of conducting the <a href="http://www.lgq.org.uk">London Gallery Quire</a>, not once but twice. We started with a service of Mattins at St John's, Fulham, and then in the evening made our way to St Peter's in the Forest for a concert as part of their Flower Festival.Elsewhere there are conversations going on about music and liturgy, and as usual there is...

Big Hymn Sing 2011

This Saturday there will be a Big Hymn Sing at 1pm at St Andrew's Leytonstone. The congregation have sponsored about 30 hymns and I will add some more that I think are worth singing, for a total of about 48.The more people turn up the more fun we'll have! We'll sing for about twenty minutes at a time and then have a ten minute break; Café Refresh will be open, and I hope people will feel free to...

Adventures in hymn selection

In the Common Worship lectionary there are two options for Eastertide. One uses an Old Testament reading, a reading from Acts, and a Gospel reading each week. The other uses an epistle instead of the Old Testament. The point is that Acts is required.Somehow, I thought we were using the Old Testament readings, and chose hymns accordingly. So this morning we had a lovely reading from Acts, then a...

In the great congregation I will praise…

Though my diocesan cathedral in Chelmsford is a bit of a trek for me, I'm privileged in London to be within easy travel distance of both St Paul's Cathedral and Southwark Cathedral.Yesterday, partly out of curiosity and partly out of a desire to attend a service that I couldn't mess up by playing the organ in the wrong place, I attended the Chrism Mass (actually called "The Renewal of Ordination...

Words, words!

When I write music, I struggle with the words. As a child I was a decent poet, I'm told, but at some point I lost the habit of writing poetry in a notebook in spare moments. I think it may have been around the time I took up playing the horn and got a paper route and somehow seemed to always be out at one rehearsal or another! These days, most of the words I write are typed directly onto a screen...