London SH at the Ordination of Ewan King

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Aug 14, 2013, 3:35:39 PM8/14/13

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London SH at the Ordination of Ewan King, Minister at the Heath Street Baptist Church, Hampstead

This church is the location for two of the London weekly singings and – untypically – came about not after a long search, but when Ewan King approached Michael Walker to offer it for SH singing after a service had featured Breakspear Southern Harmony, which had gone very well.

Michael considers the acoustic of the basement to be the best out of the three current London venues as it rings like a bell.

Ewan sometimes attends the singings, and choose three SH songs to be sung at his ordination on 13 August (406 New Harmony, 95 Vernon and 352 Swanton). None of these are familiar songs to London singers.

A small group of 12 turned up, led by Fynn Titford-Mock. We were going to be joined by some of the singers from the Heath Street Choir, which is a community choir based at the church and who sang a number of songs, accompanied by a band, during the service.

All of them looked like music students, if not professional musicians, but out came the dreaded Fa So La sheet and Fynn gave them a crash course in reading SH music. Duane advised them that there is only one dynamic in SH singing: loud! Most of the singers were basses and I don’t think they got their early entry in Swanton quite right.

We adopted what seems to have become the usual positioning in these public, ‘performance’ events, of forming a semi-circle, with voices ranged from high to low. All in all, I think we sang creditably, given the unfamiliarity of the tunes, the low number of singers and the completely new singers in our midst.

Faced with the three unfamiliar SH tunes, it surprised me that the first two hymns to be sung were Come thy Fount of Every Blessing and Jesus, Lover of My Soul, which we sang lustily, but not to the SH tunes. Simon Jones, London’s resident expert on matters religious told me that they were both hymns sung in most Christian denominations, though I don’t remember either from my days long ago in Roman Catholic services.

The next time I see Simon, I also want to ask him why one of the preachers introduced a reading from the Bible as being from ‘the so-called Authorised Version’...