The Royal School of Church Music (RSCM) invites churches to celebrate church music and musicians with the Big Hymn Sing For Music Sunday on 9th June 2024
Music Sunday is an annual event presented by the RSCM to celebrate and give thanks for the music and musicians that enhance worship in such a meaningful and powerful way.
This year the RSCM is encouraging churches to put on a Big Hymn Sing For Music Sunday and it has created resource pack which can be downloaded from the RSCM’s website. Churches are encouraged to do something special - it might be their own Big Hymn Sing for Music Sunday, holding a special service, using special prayers, putting on a concert or having a social event. Above all, Music Sunday is about celebrating church music and the work of all church musicians.
The resource pack includes a brand new hymn written especially for Music Sunday by award-winning British composer Thomas Hewitt Jones, with words by Dr Gordon Giles, Canon Chancellor of Rochester Cathedral. Sing to the Lord, a new song of creation is a wonderfully rousing hymn in five verses, with a soaring descant in the final verse.
Thomas Hewitt Jones says, “Gordon Giles and I have had enormous fun writing this new hymn for the RSCM’s Music Sunday. It celebrates in words and music the joy of singing together in a spiritual context – one of the most uplifting things that any of us can do. I’ve written tune in E-flat major, which is a very warm key, and there are one or two harmonic surprises which I hope reward both singer and listener alongside Gordon’s beautiful text. Here’s to us all lifting our voices together for the fantastic cause of encouraging and protecting the value of singing together – and thinking beyond ourselves – both now and in the future.”
VIDEO Thomas Hewitt Jones introduces his new hymn https://youtu.be/ofiXWwj_kEc?si=wuwujnSyMCcbMa9c
Gordon Giles says, “With this hymn specially written for music Sunday, inspired by Thomas’ magnificent tune, I wanted to write a set of words which ebbed and flowed, rose and fell with the arc of the tune, and which not only drew on scripture but enabled us to sing about singing and its purpose in worship - to praise God. Drawing on the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (who was an accomplished pianist) and Paul Tillich, I wanted to reference the idea of God not just as ground of our being, but ground bass - the metaphorically musical foundation of all the spiritual counterpoint that our lives weave above and around the fundamental concept of God as creator, saviour and inspirer of everything, including faith, hope and love.
There is also something essentially trinitarian about the harmony of earth and heaven, expressed in the triad - the three-in-one chord, which is both the basic structure and harmonic variation of music with endless and eternal possibilities. The harmonies we make and sing with our God-given voices are expressions of both divine and musical trinities of melody, harmony and counterpoint all working together yet sounding as one.”
The other hymns in the RSCM’s Music Sunday Big Hymn Sing resources pack were selected following a public vote and include well-known, much-loved hymns such as Dear Lord and Father of Mankind, Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer and Love Divine, All Loves Excelling.
Full details of the Big Hymn Sing for Music Sunday, including the downloadable hymn pack and a toolkit to help plan and advertise events, can be found here: https://www.rscm.org.uk/whats-on/music-sunday/
