SOUL FOOD:

Playing 600 hymns in one sitting may not set a new Guinness World Record, but it nonetheless promises to be a marathon effort. The Rt. Rev. Daren K. Williams plans to pull it off Saturday at All Saints’ Cathedral in Fountain Valley, where he is rector.

Williams told me last week that each hymn in the Episcopal Hymnal 1940 from which he will be playing takes three minutes on the average to sing. That’s with all the stanzas, some having as few as two and some as many as eight.

Three minutes times 600 hymns, divided by 60 adds up to 30 hours, which makes my fingers throb just thinking about it.

Williams won’t be singing as he plays this slew of songs, so he plans to play the equivalent of a stanza or two each.

By his estimate, he’ll wrap up his hymnathon at roughly 4 p.m. Sunday after starting at 9 a.m. Saturday.

But he also plans to take requests from those who drop in. And should they wish to sing a hymn from beginning to end he means to oblige. So, we’ll see.

I Googled “hymnathon” and found a gent named Richard Morse last year who played the 571 hymns from “Hymns Old and New” starting one Friday afternoon at St. Stephen’s, a parish in rural Sparsholt, Hampshire, England. It took him 15 minutes short of 27 hours and, he shares, “some very kind medical attention.”

The cause of Morse’s fundraiser is not clear, though the parish’s website mentions its 1887 Walker organ has been “taken away for renovation.” In any case, Morse raised a tidy sum.

The All Saints’ Cathedral hymnathon is a fundraiser, too, with the goal of raising revenue to replace its present organ. There will be no charge, however, to come to hear the music.

“I would never charge anybody to come in the church,” Williams said. Any and all money taken in will be donations.

Williams sees it as a chance for “folks to come in [to] enjoy some hymns…[to] request their favorites and sing along if they want.” The day of music will be casual and easygoing.

“There is nothing required,” Williams said. “It’s strictly to try to reacquaint people with the hymns of the hymnal and hopefully to encourage them to help us in our process toward obtaining a better instrument.”

The hymns are those of the Anglican Church in the United States. According to Williams, the Anglican Church — the Church of England, in England and abroad — has provided “the finest music and the finest musicians to the Christian experience for centuries,” with many other denominations borrowing from its vast musical treasury.

Among its composers are Henry Purcell, John Blow, William Byrd, Orlando Gibbons, Edward Elgar, Charles Stanford, Charles Hubert Hastings Parry, Ralph Vaughn Williams and Benjamin Britten, who in 1913 was fittingly born on Nov. 22, the Festival of St. Cecilia, the patroness of music. Their works span the 16th through the 20th centuries.

“The English church took the basic concept of chant singing [and] harmonized it. The early writers of music in more than one part were English,” Williams said. Byrd, he said, is considered the father of modern-day hymnody because he developed hymns to be sung in two-, three- or four-part harmony.

In the 1500s, the music of the church was a uniquely Anglican monophonic, non-metrical plainsong. Its roots, though, ran deep into the Gregorian Roman Mass, introduced to England after St. Gregory the Great, in 597, sent Augustine to Canterbury to be the first bishop in England appointed by the pope.

Music is a central aspect of Anglican worship and the organ has long been its foundation. Organ literature from all periods is performed for the church’s liturgy; the organ leads the congregational singing.

The better instrument of which Williams speaks is an Allen state-of-the-art digital organ. It will benefit the parish on two counts, he explains.

It will replace the present organ, which no longer works as well as it ought. And it will solve the problem of the parish being unable to find an organist.

Many denominations and congregations have replaced organs with “electronic keyboards and trap sets,” Williams said. So few now choose to study organ.

“It’s a very sad day,” he said. “There’s nobody around that plays capably [for] a liturgical service.” Williams must be both bishop and organist on Sunday mornings.

He plays a processional hymn before going to the altar then leaves the congregation to sing the service’s liturgical music a cappella. Following his blessing and church announcements, he returns to the organ play a recessional hymn before greeting parishioners and visitors at the door.

“To have this crazy person wandering back and forth,” Williams said referring to himself, “kind of interrupts the flow of things.” He finds it draws attention to him when it should be on God. The Allen digital organ the church hopes to buy would end that.

Williams, who has played the organ in churches since he was 11, is capable of playing the church’s hymns and its liturgical music. He earned a bachelor’s in organ and church music at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Before being ordained a deacon and later a priest, he was organist and choirmaster at several churches. As a seminary senior at Nashotah House in Wisconsin, he became its first full-time director of music and in the ’80s he was assistant rector and director of music at St. Thomas’ Church in his hometown of Battle Creek, Mich.

The new Allen organ would allow him to record hymns and liturgical music in advance to be played during services by remote control.

It provides sounds digitally recorded from the 61-pipe ranks of actual fine pipe organs. It captures the appropriate attack and release as well as the sound of a pipe organ played in large, resonant room.

“It is truly remarkable,” Williams said. “The most discriminating ear will find it difficult to distinguish [its] digitally recorded sounds from [those of] real organ pipes.”

All Saints’ Cathedral is at 18082 Bushard St., Fountain Valley. The hymnathon is free and open to the public.

MICHÈLE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at michele@soulfoodfiles.com.