A Day in the Life… Musical Diversity
January 27, 2012
“Live from Fairmont – the one and only Fairmont Gospel Revue!” Many’s the time we have heard that said. Oh – you haven’t? If you show up tonight, you’ll have a priceless initiation into an integral part of Fairmont’s musical life. Who could have imagined in the fall of 1997, when we first pulled together some of our interested (and interesting?) musicians, that the project would have legs? And keep walking into the middle teen years? 14?
Unless you just came in, you know that music to be our own brand of “gospel jazz.” Drawing on the rich tradition of R & B, which has its roots in the church, our gang has arranged spirituals, classics, hymns, and rock and roll to give them all a gospel-jazz feel – in an array of styles. While a core of musicians has remained from the beginning, we have been enormously blessed to make music with a sampling of the finest musicians from Fairmont and the wider community.
It might not have happened, had our church not already had a “bent” toward what I’m calling “musical diversity.” That may be most evident in our choir, made up of singers who faithfully rehearse and lead us Sunday by Sunday. We’re blessed with the longevity of several, including our organist, Dayle Welch and our director of music, Eric Grush. Week by week, the choir shows the deep and wide range of music that has inhabited the choral camp – for centuries. The addition of instruments is another way to make that oh, so biblical “joyful noise” (Psalm 100:1 – you can look it up!).
Our young people, from children through youth and college, also lead us with music in worship settings ranging from Sunday mornings to the special programs that frame the seasons. Who would suspect that so much humor (joy?) could be found in music?
Psalm 150 names a number of the instruments of King David’s day: trumpet (of course), lute and harp, tambourine, strings and pipe, cymbals – the really loud ones! Throw in some “dance” and you’ve got a Psalm 150-style celebration, where “everything that breathes praise(s) the Lord!”
We’ve added even more instrument (although there should be a Hebrew word for trombone). Our hand bell choir continues to ring in the good news, season by season. Their recent journey to Durham for a nine-choir workshop is another step in their remarkable development. People! This is good stuff! Add in our young people using hand-chimes and there’s a kind of all-age, all-instrument, all-style continuum across the musical spectrum.
That’s a spectrum which includes all the people. Yes, we get to sing, don’t we? It’s our heritage as the people called “Methodists.” There was a time, a great time, when we were known as “the singing Methodists.” John and Charles Wesley made it so. Charles wrote over 6500 hymns, of which we still have a double handful – alas, we don’t have any of his usual 16-20 stanza hymns currently in use! Man was a poet without end…
We sing what we believe. That’s one reason “new” hymns give us pause. Without even thinking about it, we may be asking, what’s this saying? Do I believe it? Then there are those pesky tunes, but no matter. In Wesley’s instructions for singing (on page vii of our hymnal), “Learn these tunes before you learn any others; afterwards learn as many as you please.” Reckon how Mr. Wesley would feel about an “other” called “Jesus Is The Rock and He Rolls My Blues Away” ??
Pastor Steve
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