We Want to Sing Your Favorite Hymn!

Dear Trinity Church and friends,

 

Greetings from your Trinity music department! Colin, Marissa, our 8 staff singers, and I sorely miss worshiping with you in person – and how the choirs deeply miss rehearsing to prepare for our weekly worship together. Since we’ve been apart, the Choristers and choir adults Zoom for a few minutes at the same time our weekly rehearsals would have been. During these gatherings, we sing a bit and look ahead at upcoming service music, though mostly we chat, laugh, cry, and remind one another to “unmute.”

 

During our “Worship From Home” Sundays, your Trinity musicians have navigated uncharted ways to assemble (and that’s definitely the right term) the anthems, canticles, and congregational hymns at the musical heart of our liturgies. On your screens, you’ll sometimes see choir members leading music via the app “Acapella,” resulting in the now-familiar “Brady Bunch” look. We piece together other hymns and anthems with individual singers submitting a video recording that Colin, our tech wizard, then brilliantly blends into one, giant, virtual choir. Easter Day’s “Sing ye to the Lord” by Edward Bairstow, which included choir members and alums from Boston to Berlin and Madagascar participating in this way, will surely take a historic place among Trinity’s unique musical offerings!

 

​As we now ready for a Trinity summer like none before, we need your help! Understanding the importance of our hymns’ “singability” while we worship from our kitchen tables, living rooms, home offices, we want to sing your favorite hymns, and we invite you to submit up to 5 from our hymnal. We all have them, right – those we have known and loved for years? Well, let’s share those treasures with one another and increase our collective joy. Once we have assembled a master list of your favorites, we will incorporate as many selections as we can from Sunday, June 14, through Sunday, September 6 (Labor Day weekend).

 

Here is how the process will work:

 

• By Wednesday, May 20, submit up to 5 of your favorite hymns using this easy web form.

• Please limit your selections to The Hymnal 1982.

• Because some hymns have more than one tune (e.g, “Glorious things of thee are spoken” is sung to 522 Austria and 523 Abbot’s Leigh), please include the tune name if you know it. These tune names are listed at the bottom of each hymn in italics – we certainly want to avoid the heartache of our singing your favorite hymn text to the wrong tune!

• Don't fret if you can't recall the hymn number. We'll take care of that.

• Finally, please overlook seasonal favorites such as “O little town of Bethlehem,” St. Louis/Forest Green (Trinity’s fight song); “Jesus Christ is risen today,” Easter Hymn; and “For all the saints” Sine Nomine. We all love those hymns and occasions, but we will still be singing in summertime, after all!

 

In our liturgical worship, we always aim our music in service of the Word, and we strive for our hymnody and choral music to illumine and amplify the lectionary texts of the day. We relish the challenge of incorporating your favorite hymns into this faithful mix! Let’s have some fun with this, bringing glory to God in our worship and building up the Body of Christ from Copley Square to wherever you are these days.

 

In anticipation,

 

Richard Webster

Director of Music & Organist