Dedication

This album is for three of the most important women in my life:

Maureen Seymour — aunt extraordinaire, who always believed that ugly ducklings may grow into swans;

Pauline Clapham — whose piano fancies and flourishes taught six-year-old me that I didn't have to stick to the notes written in the hymnbook. (My piano teacher was appalled, but the lesson stuck!)

Vivien Harber — friend and mentor, whose many conversations about theology, hymnody, and liturgy provided the foundation for the Hymnody Project, and who has generously supported it for many years.

Thoughts on Hymn Texts

Over the centuries there have been many attempts by hymn publishers to keep the great paeans of the past alive as society and culture shift. Many of these efforts have been fortunate — not least the translation of texts into English. Others, however, have been more mixed: there are plenty of examples where attempts at modernisation have unintentionally warped the text, sometimes to the point where the original theology is obscured. 

When I was a teenager, the trend was to take verses of Scripture — often straight from a 17th-century translation — and set them to folk-hymn melodies. Now, in the early 21st century, hymnwriters and publishers are wrestling with questions of inclusivity. Many of us recognise that God is far too vast to be compressed into human stereotypes such as gender, and so the work of reshaping our hymnody continues.

The Hymnody Project is probably most useful to those who are comfortable with older versions of these texts — but that is not, I think, sufficient reason to continue propagating the myths of previous eras. 

Two of the hymns in this collection are by Carolyn Winfrey Gillette, an acclaimed contemporary American hymnwriter. I have made no changes to her texts. You can find hundreds of her published hymns at carolynshymns.com, as well as in many printed hymnals.

In preparing to record older hymns, I considered these issues carefully, often referring back to the original sources. Some texts I left untouched; others I edited lightly. With St Francis’s text, I was encouraged to revisit the original Umbrian Canticle of the Sun, which inspired many of the changes you will hear here.

Credits