This is a photo from my trip to the States earlier this year - my good friend Kenn Hughes directing the orchestra and choir at Hermitage Hills Baptist Church in Nashville, Tennessee. Kenn sent me an email a couple of weeks back, "because we have had a church contact us and they would like to do a “Hymn Tour” in the UK for the summer of 2009" (his words). He thought I might help set an itinerary and be a guide for them.Now, those of you with your UK heads on will appreciate how I felt when two or three emails later Kenn continued: "I don’t want to scare you but we are talking about the largest Southern Baptist Church in the US and they are talking about a choir and orchestra numbering approximately 200 people."
Not quite what I had expected.
But it sounds like a really interesting & fun idea, and I've just finished a first proposal for them which I hope they might like. It will take in London, Salisbury, Gloucester, Worcester, Oxford, Olney, Bedford & Cambridge, and feature a variety of hymn writers from Elizabethan times to the present, though there is a strong weighting to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Did you realise that "The Lord's My Shepherd" was written by the Speaker of the Barebones Parliament under Cromwell? Or that the composer of the tune for the US national anthem came from Gloucester? Or that George Herbert's church will need seven visits in order for everyone on this tour to get inside it once?
I hope it all works out. If it does, they will be performing concerts in five places which I hope they will enjoy, and which hopefully will be opportunities to share faith in Jesus through the music and the words of these songs of praise. I'll let you know!
2 comments:
I didn't know that about the US national anthem, and I'm from Gloucester!
Who was it?
To quote from the Gloucester Cathedral website:
"The Star-Spangled Banner:
John Stafford Smith (1750-1836) was a choirboy here, his father being our organist. John wrote a tune called “Anacreon” which became popular in America in the latter part of the 18th Century. Francis Scott Key must have had it running in his head, when, after the siege of Baltimore, he set his own words to it and it became “The Star-Spangled Banner”. There is a memorial to John Stafford Smith on the north wall of the Nave. Above it hangs an American flag, the gift of the Rotary Club of New York."
So there you go!
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