Sunday by Sunday

Sunday by Sunday

NON-SEASONAL MODERN ORGAN MUSIC OF MODERATE DIFFICULTY FOR USE BEFORE AND AFTER SERVICE

1)   LIVE CONTAINERS
Two building containers in the garden telling fragments of witnesses recorded voices: fragments of memories, thoughts and visions about the fire, the church, and the community.

2)   SCATTERED SCORES
Pages of burned music scores  scattered by the wind of memory around the garden.

3)   DARKROOM OF THE VOICES
Acoustic fragments of the choristers voices diffused in the obscure choir vestry.

The three-part installation Sunday by Sunday uses sound, light, photography and music to evoke the story of the catastrophe and the unquenchable life of the church.
Outside the west end, containers hold relics from the fire – half burnt statues, bits of candelabra, even nails and bits of wood. From these containers, the voices of two people who witnessed the fire emerge, breathing the story in half-heard fragments of sound, while sheets of music damaged by fire and water carry the message in a visual form. The third part of Wolf’s installation is in the strange vault-like space which was at the heart of the fire – the vestry and the choir practice room beneath it. Here the artist has created visual images of the church, its physical destruction and its spiritual life, accompanied by echoes of the choir as they practise for Sunday services.

WORDS OF WITNESSES
Performed within the containers

… on June 9th 2000 the first thing that I heard was the phone ringing and it was our vicar Robert Titley and he said: ”Ted I’m ringing around telling people: the church is on fire!“, and my answer was:” Coming!”…

… by the time I came around, the roof over the sanctuary and the roof over the nave were gone and all one could see was spouts of flames still coming out and we could only just look to think how our wonderful church where we had beautiful services had utterly gone; it was something like a film set, or something that reminded me of the war and here it was our beautiful church gone; it was indescribable, it brought tears to our eyes, I could only look at the other people around, the church members, and we just held each other and I just wiped the tears from my eyes, I couldn’t believe it. There was one good thing: the Lady Major organised the neighbours to make tea for us, and that was helpful as a comfort to know that other people were around. One very touching moment was: we were watching one of the chaps who I knew, an older chap about 70 or 75 who used to come to the jumble sales, I recognised him, he recognised me, and he could see how utterly devastated we were, and he just came and put his arm across my shoulder as a comfort, he didn’t have to say anything else, that was all that was required, he was with us, he was sorry, he couldn’t do any more …

… was the church going to just fold and were we going to be dispersed? We are a good community here, a good church and many activities and I always felt this church was a power house for God for positive goodness … why did the Lord let it happen?…
– Ted

… I felt very sad about it, but still I was grateful that there was no one inside, I could easily have been inside myself ecause I used to spend a lot of time inside the basement in the choir vestry dealing with music and so forth…

… I did actually think of course that probably all the music had gone up in flames, and then I thought again myself that as I knew it was under a stone floor, a lot of it might have escaped … and all my organ music went up in the flames…
– Tim

… the roof was still intact but you could see the whole church was glowing inside … the whole of the church was alight inside so that at some points the flames just burst through the roof and then you realised that possibly not much was going to be left … pieces were flying through the air … the heat seemed ferocious … it was bigger than words … a huge shell which was completely alight inside … what was quite dramatic was that you gradually saw more of the fire inside as the outside began to disappear… … the bare bones of the church were left, then the timber started to come down … it was just a ghostly ruin with a bit of smoke coming out, and that whole process took about five hours … it was very tragic and quite unreal, but I couldn’t stop watching and thinking … it was like an enormous piece of drama … it made me think about the elements and humanity …

… it has been part of my landscape for the last fifteen years, the church is almost part of my house, I looked at it in the evening, and in the morning, I felt fond of it, I liked having the church there, I liked when the light went on in the evening… … something that is very close to me is being destroyed in front of my eyes … and I still look outside and I like the look that I have at the moment, but now you actually see the sky through the building… the light reflects on the walls, they light up the shell of the church sometimes …  that is all very nice to see …
– Jane

… I just couldn’t believe my eyes… it was going up just rather like a volcano, it was a beautiful clear blue sky and a sunny morning and there was this absolute horrid fire down the road and I had a perfect view of it … and I thought I must be dreaming … and I stood there watching the fire getting worse and worse…

… what I was seeing I felt quite paralysed by, and then I thought of the terrible loss, not just to the congregation who worshipped there, but to the whole community to whom that building had meant so much over more than a hundred years…
– Audrey

….Music is one thing that actually kept the church going …  it certainly played its part in keeping the moral of the church going.
– Tim 

“…we have a good range of people that can sing here, it’s a real pleasure to listen to them, and again it’s really essential to hear a good choir because that brings people’s mind to God, and that is the whole point of them, they are not there for their own benefit, they are there to help us worship…”
– Ted