DW: I’m a URC minister. I did 15 years in the East end of London in Newham. I retired or I was forced to retire because I reached retirement age and I was very unhappy about being forced to stop something I loved doing. People said “Now you can do what you like”. I said “For 40 years I’ve been ministering in churches, I’ve always done what I liked, so don’t stop me now!”
It was inevitable though and I was kicking and screaming about something out of my control basically. The only other thing I wanted to do, because I love music, and my wife is a music teacher and coach, was write a version of the biblical story for choral singers, in a device called oratorio – like Handel’s Messiah.
There is a phenomenal interest in choir singing. There are 25,000 choirs up and down the country which are registered and also spontaneous local church choirs that are not registered and cathedral choirs and that kind of stuff.
Vast numbers of them perform Christian material. They perform sacred works by Handel or Bach or Haydn - Haydn’s Creation is one particularly that inspired me. But what we thought was that all this stuff is brilliant music, but it’s in old English, King James English, or Latin or German. Like Bach’s nightly Passion – the whole Gospel week of the Passion and the crucifixion are described – but it’s all in German.
There are very few good English translations and it’s not sung in English anyway. So what I wanted to do was put together a libretto – a text – which is lifted from the Bible, cut and pasted from new biblical translations like the New International Version and the American Standard Version and so on.
A lot of schools do Joseph and his Amazing Dreamcoat. Not that they use much Bible – they use Bible stories. But my view was that I wanted Scripture to be sung in a credible and accessible way so that people who are new to the Bible have to come to terms with it because it is in language they can’t run away from.
CT: How did you set about making the dream a reality?
DW: All the while in the background was a friend of mine from the Surrey area in Guildford. We did seven or eight music programmes together before, some of which have been televised and a number of which have been used for fundraising for churches in the Newham area.
His name is David Perkins and he is the youth director for music at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford. He makes youth musicals and a couple of musicals for adults. He has a wide variety – he is a jazz pianist, and does Scott Joplin and that kind of thing. He does quite a wide style of music.
But over the years, partly through my influence I think, he has developed a sacred works portfolio. He wrote a song which was prepared for him by a guy who was dying of cancer named Terry Reid. He was dying of cancer and he was a lapsed Catholic. But he came back to faith when he discovered that he was likely to die from the disease.
In the latter months of his life he read the Catholic missal, he read the Psalms and he took eight psalms which tracked his spiritual history back to the Lord, through grief, through tears, through anxiety and eventually through a resignation and back to faith.
On the day of his funeral, his family gave his extracts from the Psalms to my friend David and said, “This is Terry’s legacy to you. Will you write some music to fit it?”
