One sunny Tuesday at the 1990 Mount Hermon Music Conference, Dana Vivit asked “Why haven’t you written anything for the Brass Angels yet?” We’d been friends for some years by then, and so I responded, “Well, name it.” “Holy, Holy, Holy.” “You got it!”
Not knowing how to leave the thought alone, my mind started cranking away. By Thursday, about two-thirds of the arrangement was done, and by the end of the next week I’d sent it off to Dana.
The Brass Angels dropped by Mount Hermon as the final stop of their 1991 summer tour, and had some incredible stories to tell about the arrangement (which they played as the finale of their program):
- One of their ringers’ friends would visit their rehearsals just to hear “Holy, Holy, Holy”.
- At a church where they stopped on tour, the pastor asked them to reprise the song as a backdrop for his closing prayer.
People remembered it!*
“Holy, Holy, Holy” has been a signature piece of the Brass Angels ever since. Unfortunately, it’s out of print now. The last known publisher was Gold Coast Music Company, which decided to end its operations in 2009.
*Well, except for me. It turned out that the suggestion-to-mailing sequence had gone by so quickly that I completely put the arrangement out of my mind by the time the Mount Hermon music conference rolled around. I literally didn’t remember that I’d done the arrangement, let alone what was in the score! But that made it really special, because those few minutes at Mount Hermon were very close to hearing the score for the first time without being able to anticipate anything.
