RELEASE: 2026 (ongoing)
Hymns is an “open and additive opus” — a working collection of hymn-based compositions that this composer expects to grow across years, ensembles, and worship contexts. Where most opuses are sealed at completion, Hymns is a lifelong endeavor: each new hymn setting enters the catalog as the next numbered piece, with no fixed terminus. Opus 16 is held together not by a single performance occasion but by a single compositional commitment: to engage seriously, repeatedly, with the hymnody of the Christian church.
Three pieces inaugurate Opus 16:
No. 1 — Rumination (2026) is a three-station Passion meditation for hammered dulcimer and string quartet. It draws on three Holy Week hymns presented in deliberate, non-chronological order: O Sacred Head, Now Wounded (the Hassler/Bach Passion chorale), Go to Dark Gethsemane (James Montgomery, 1825), and Were You There (When They Crucified My Lord) (African American spiritual). The piece opens with the iconic image of the suffering Christ already on the cross, returns inward to the agony in the garden that preceded it, and closes with the spiritual’s second-person witness — drawing the listener not as observer but as participant. It is a contemplative arc, not a narrative one. Rumination was originally scheduled for Palm Sunday 2026 and was rescheduled to May 3 to allow for proper preparation in response to Mr. Brown’s seven-year hammered dulcimer hiatus. Rumination is also dual-purposed into Opus 17, Book of Psalm: A Lenten Experience (premiering March 1, 2028), where it functions as a psalm setting and the Part Two instrumental re-entry — following the precedent of Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi, who frequently allowed a single work to serve multiple opus contexts.
No. 2 — Fantasy on Be Thou My Vision (2026) is a Frippertronics-styled postlude treatment of the Irish hymn Be Thou My Vision (Slane), premiered as the postlude to Rumination on May 3, 2026, at Wheaton Bible Church. Where Rumination meditates on the Passion, this Fantasy turns toward consecration and sight — the hymn’s prayer that God be the seeing of the heart. The Frippertronics signal architecture (built on the looping practice developed by Robert Fripp and Brian Eno) treats the hymn not as melody-with-accompaniment but as spatial presence: the loop accumulates, holds, and surrounds.
No. 3 — Nicaea (2026, premiering July 26, 2026, at Wheaton Bible Church) is a chamber variations work on Reginald Heber’s Trinitarian hymn Holy, Holy, Holy (1826), set to the tune that bears its name by John B. Dykes in 1861. Scored for hammered dulcimer, organ, clarinet, and oboe (with English horn as a possible substitute on the lower double-reed line), the piece takes the hymn’s three-stanza Trinitarian text as its formal architecture — three sections, one ostinato treatment binding the whole. Where Rumination turns the listener toward the Passion and the Fantasy turns the listener toward sight, Nicaea turns the listener toward the Trinity itself: not as doctrine to be parsed but as mystery to be encircled. The instrumentation is acoustically deliberate. Hammered dulcimer and piano in a live worship space compete for the same resonance band; organ and woodwinds — sustained breath against struck strings — clear that band and let the dulcimer’s decay live where the listener can hear it. Dr. Tony Payne will perform the organ part, Tom Gross the clarinet, and Katie Willemssen the oboe at the premiere.
Together, the inaugural three pieces of Hymns trace a recognizable theological arc: Passion → Vision → Trinity. As the opus grows in coming years, the catalog will expand to embrace whatever the hymnal offers next — and across whatever ensembles the occasion calls for. A future How Great Thou Art for organ, piano, and hammered dulcimer would enter as Opus 16, No. 4. A choral hymn setting some years on would enter as a later number still. The opus is the container; the hymnal is the source; the years are the canvas. Opus 16 is the open shelf where that lifetime of sacred composition continues to take its place, one hymn at a time.
Instrumentation:
Variable, by piece. Each new entry in Opus 16 carries its own scoring.
No. 1 — Rumination: Hammered Dulcimer + String Quartet (2 violins, viola, violoncello)
No. 2 — Fantasy on Be Thou My Vision: Hammered Dulcimer with Frippertronics signal architecture
No. 3 — Nicaea: Hammered Dulcimer, Organ, Clarinet, and Oboe
Artwork Description:
Coming Soon — graphic designer Heidi Steiner is at work on the cover art for Hymns, Opus 16. Heidi has designed the album covers for every opus in this composer’s catalog. As with the prior opuses, her artwork for Hymns will be released alongside its own description and reflection on the design process.