Music

Music plays an important part in our worship at St Thomas à Becket's.

We embrace the traditional and modern in our services.

The organ is an important part of traditional worship.

In addition, modern worship songs are used for some services, led by musicians with a range of contemporary styles.

We try to offer a selection of sacred music to suit all tastes.

Music is selected on the basis of the overall service theme, as determined by the seasons, and to complement the gospel readings. Various guidance sources are available, and also a scripture index in the hymn books often proves invaluable in making the selection.

We use mainly the Songs of Fellowship books, which now run to four volumes and some 2,200 hymns, songs and arrangements are included. These range from Tallis and Luther, through Wesley and the Victorian writers such as Sullivan and Hughes, to the present day Graham Kendrick, Stuart Townend, Matt Redman, Darlene Zschech, the Gettys and many other Christian songwriters. Sometimes we make use of items "hot off the press".

Of necessity we have a large number of songs available and certain types lend themselves either to the traditional organ accompaniment or a piano accompaniment, while others are clearly more suited to a mixture of instruments. An advantage of the piano and the accompanying instruments is that they can be routed through the sound system now installed and this is picked up by the auditory loop system and is therefore available to those with hearing impairment.

There have been some experimental efforts to combine all our resources but this is subject to the vagaries of the organ tuning (highly dependent on temperature) and we are not entirely convinced it is possible to any great extent. Keep listening though!

The Church holds:

CCLI Church Copyright Licence No: 3075

PRS for Music Church Licence No: 736737