Copper Hill 200th Anniversary Concert organized by JoAnne D. Jones

JoAnne has been very busy over the past two months serving as organizer for the 200th Anniversary Concert held at Copper Hill Church this past Sunday afternoon, Sept. 25.  Through contacts with various music friends, and in answer to prayer, she brought together musicians from at least eight or nine churches to perform at this celebration.  Besides our own church, area churches represented included West Granby UMC, Life Church in Granby, 3rd Baptist in Suffield, First Congregational in East Granby, Suffield Congregational and South Church in Granby.  People who attended remarked on the diversity of music.   

The concert focused on American sacred music from 1816 to present.  The oldest tune played was “Simple Gifts” arranged for harp and flute by JoAnne D. Jones and the newest composition was a praise song written in just the previous couple weeks by Joanne Firla of Life Church and debuted at the concert.  JoAnne Jones had also written a narrative of meaningful music history notes to introduce each piece.  These were read well by narrator, Carolyn D’Annolfo and added a great deal of interesting information about the pieces.  

In addition to “Simple Gifts” JoAnne also aranged several other numbers for the concert.   She (on piano) and flute player, Celeste Canon, dueted on an arrangement of “American the Beautiful” that JoAnne wrote in 1987.   JoAnne also wrote new arrangements of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “God of Our Fathers” for the brass quartet which she recruited for the event.  JoAnne also directed the Copper Hill Church choir in singing “My Tribute”  by Andre Crouch.  

Our thanks to Christian Robison who provided our church with this video of the concert and the attached picture of the participants.  Our thanks also to Christian for doing sound at the concert and to Cal Schantz for doing rehearsal sound set-up.