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Dear saints,
Many of you may already know that I grew up a chorister. I was immensely fortunate to have been a member of a church choir that was led by a truly gifted organist and choirmaster. From when I was about nine years old, our parish choir began traveling around England to sing in some of the most glorious sacred spaces in Europe: Westminster Abbey, York Minster, Salisbury Cathedral, Chapel Royal Windsor, and St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, just to name a few. On the more extensive trips we would sing for a weekend and get to spend the night in the cathedral school dorms or some other adventurous place. At our height, there were fifty of us in the choir stalls, all volunteer singers, with the tenors and basses taking their duties seriously to keep young choir boys and girls in check.
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Of course, the excitement of those trips wasn’t hurt by the fact that in London and Windsor especially, we felt a little like mini-celebrities when tourists would stop us to ask if they could take our photo in our choir robes. “We’ll think about it,” we would cheekily say in our Birmingham accents. I don’t think they understood us and they took their photos anyway. We got special tours of the whispering gallery in St. Paul’s famous dome, and one of us was sure they saw the Duke of Edinburgh listen to us rehearse on one of our visits to Windsor, although that particular boy was rather prone to exaggeration. I loved every minute of it, and still deeply miss those days as a singer.
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Our own music program is no small reason why All Saints’ feels so much like home to me, as I know is true for many of you. We are blessed with one of the leading church music programs in the country. Our organ is an instrument organists admire far and wide, and the members of our music staff are not only outstanding musicians, they are also caring ministers of music and of people. And our parish choirs are a profound gift in the life of this church, helping to make the ineffable present to us.
I am sure that you can remember a time when music touched your soul. Perhaps it was Laura English Robinson singing ‘Were You There?’ on Good Friday? Or maybe the music played at your loved one’s wedding or funeral still resonates for you, all these years later? Or it could be that you are like me, and the strings and organ and choir on Christmas Eve are of a beauty that is hard to put into words.
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I went to visit a parishioner of All Saints’ recently who sang in the choirs at All Saints’ for over half a century. She recalls the early days of the choir cramped into the small rooms by the old chapel. To say that they were creative users of space would have been a profound understatement. Of course, for many years since then, the music department has mostly been housed in the basement of Egleston Hall. One of my favorite things about Wednesday nights at All Saints’ is being able to hear the choir rehearse down there.
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| |  | Music is one of the marks of All Saints’ that makes us who we are. It is a core strength that we are known for in the wider Episcopal Church. The reality of that justified reputation, however, is that the space where our musicians rehearse and prepare for worship is no longer fit for purpose. The combination of structural damage to the space, poor ventilation and inaccessibility means that the fact of the matter is that we house a key asset of our life as a church in a setting that fails to support music-making as it should.
The great opportunity our master plan imagines for music at All Saints’ is the ability we will now have to design a space for music that will be a match for the level of excellence of the program. We will be able to move from a space that we have to ask Atlanta’s finest musicians to forgive, to a space that would make us the envy of any church music program in the city and beyond. In other words, the high quality of music we all have enjoyed through the years at All Saints’ will at last be matched by the quality of rehearsal and program space. That, for me, is an investment well worth making.
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| | | The other opportunity for music-making that our master plan envisions is the creation of new spaces for music performance that mirror the diversity of ways music is a bridge-builder in our life as a city church. The spectacular success of our new Jazz Concert Series has shown us how much people in the metro area are looking for places to make and hear good music. As music staff and parishioners worked to create our vision for the block, one of the imagined outcomes was a smaller performance space that would allow us to gather in a variety of ways, and with a variety of ages and stages of musician - from high school youth to seasoned professionals.
The call before us, as we work to execute the first phase of our master plan, is to invest in what we believe in. Music has made the hearts glad of this parish and of so many who have come here to enjoy it in an abundance of ways. Some of Egleston Hall’s earliest uses were for music and theatrical performances. We are returning to our roots, and we are branching out in new and exciting ways. Such is the life of faith. 'Is anyone happy? Let them sing songs of praise’ (James 5:13). Sing on!
Peace,
| Rev. Dr. Simon Mainwaring, Rector | | | | |
