Hymn festival featuring Bruce Neswick comes to Trinity Episcopal Church

Bruce Neswick, director of Cathedral Music and Organist at St. John the Divine in New York, will be the organist for a Hymn Festival on Sunday at Trinity Episcopal Church. The concert is free.

The Columbus chapter of the American Guild of Organists is bringing in Neswick, formerly Canon for Music at the Cathedral of St. Philip in Atlanta.

“The organ’s most important role is to lead congregational song. Bruce Neswick is at the forefront of church music today as a composer, organist, choir trainer and recitalist. The Guild is happy to collaborate with Trinity to offer this unique celebration to the community,” Rick McKnight, dean of the local AGO and organist-choirmaster at St. Thomas Episcopal Church, said in a statement.

“We can do more together than any of us can by ourselves. Trinity is so pleased to work with the Guild and bring together the leading church musicians in Columbus,” added Michael Snoddy, director of music at Trinity, where a new Letourneau pipe organ was recently installed.

The theme of the hymn festival is “We Believe in One God — Hymns of the Church Year Through the Nicene Creed.”

Choirs from both churches, and others affiliated with the AGO, will sing.

Readings from the Bible, followed by congregational songs that Neswick composed, are part of the program.

Bach’s “Prelude and Fugue in E-Flat Major” will open the festival. This organ work is considered by many to be Bach’s greatest testament to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.

This Hymn Festival is the first in a year-long series of concerts featuring Trinity’s new organ.

In his work at St. John the Divine, Neswick directs the Choir of Girls, Boys and Adults and has oversight of the many musical offerings that happen on a weekly basis at the Cathedral. The Cathedral’s choir, which draws its scholarship choristers from the resident Cathedral School, traveled to Montreal last summer and just returned from a two-week tour of England, where it sang daily services with the choirs of the cathedrals in Sheffield, Manchester and Southwark in London.

Neswick holds the Fellowship degree from the Royal School of Church Music in the United Kingdom, where he’s conducted several courses for boy and girl choristers. He has served on the faculties of and performed for several church music conferences, including Master Schola, the Mississippi Conference, the Association of Anglican Musicians, Westminster Choir College Summer Session, the Montreat and Westminster Conferences of the Presbyterian Association of Musicians, the Disciples of Christ Musicians, the Conference of Lutheran Church Musicians and the Sewanee Church Music Conference.

He’s a graduate of Pacific Lutheran University and of the Yale School of Music and Institute of Sacred Music.

As a recitalist, Neswick has performed extensively throughout the United States and Europe.

Allison Kennedy, reporter, can be reached at 706-576-6237

This story was originally published September 9, 2010 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Hymn festival featuring Bruce Neswick comes to Trinity Episcopal Church."