Kathy Eddy's Two Vocations Woven from the Same Cloth
By Chris Costanzo

Kathy Wonson Eddy has served Bethany Church, U.C.C. as pastor since 1976, and was conferred the title, "Composer in Residence," last year. (Herald / Bob Eddy)

For more than 30 years, Rev. Kathy Wonson Eddy has provided dozens of original compositions for her choir and soloists at Randolph's Bethany Church.

Her latest choral work, however, will premier this coming Saturday, not in church but in Randolph's Chandler Music Hall- and it will be performed by one of the most famous choral groups in the world, the Hilliard Ensemble of England.

Eddy's five-part work is called "Veni Creator Spiritus" and was written over a three-year period. Commissioned by the Chandler Center for the Arts specifically for this forthcoming concert, it is one of three new music commissions that are part of Chandler's centennial season this year. Concert Saturday

The world-famous Hilliard Ensemble of England performs works from the 15th through 21st century at Chandler Music Hall this Saturday, Nov. 3 at 7:30 p.m. The concert includes "Veni Creator Spiritus" commissioned by the Chandler Center for the Arts and composed by Kathy Wonson Eddy of Braintree.

This will not be the first time that Eddy's music has received important recognition.

A symphony of hers, also commissioned by Chandler, was performed here in 2003. Another of her compositions premiered at a United Church of Christ national conference in Chicago in 1996, with a choir of 200, with brass, strings, flutes and timpani, and with Eddy herself at the conductor's podium.

Eddy has also composed for jazz saxophonist Paul Winter, and over the years has produced a stready stream of music for choirs and churches in the United States and abroad, including the chorus Sounding Joy! based in Randolph.

Two Vocations?

To many people, Eddy may seem to pursue two separate vocations- one as the pastor of Bethany Church, and the other as a nationally-recognized composer. To Eddy herself, however, the two vocations are inseparable.

We wanted to learn more about the interplay of vocations in the composer's creative process, so we interviewed her recently in her early-American home in Braintree where she enjoys a majestic view of Vermont's hills and valleys, as well as a certain isolation from the movement and noise of town life.

"Being a pastor is fulfilling and at times also stressful," she told us, "but music provides an emotional outlet." As an example she cited one of her early works, "Frankie with Wind in His Hair," in which she expressed her feelings about a local child who had died.

"As a pastor I can balance out the sad with the joyful in my ministerial duties, but receiving inspiration and creating music makes it so much easier," she said.

Musical inspiration comes to her in many ways. At a recent church service, she told a group of children how sad she was when her younger child first went off to school.

She was going to have a "good cry," she told them, but suddenly she was comforted when a complete song popped into her head. It was inspired, she believes, by the Holy Spirit. She eventually published it as "Holy Spirit, Truth Divine."

"The process is not always that sudden and complete," she later said. "When I get an inspiration for a piece, I usually work at it for some time until it's ready."

Disciplined Work

Over the years, Eddy has published a long list of compositions that range from a symphony to chamber pieces, choral works with instruments, a cappella music, and solo vocal works.

To maintain such an output, she tries to approach composing systematically. Up at 5:30 a.m., Eddy devotes an early hour every day to composing, sometimes longer.

How, we asked, does she make inspiration come to her on such a regular schedule?

"I pray, meditate, relax, separate myself from extraneous thoughts, and let the spirit come into me," she replied. Eddy strongly believes that inspiration must be asked for and invoked, but also that one must be open, "like a bowl," to receive it.

She says that musical inspiration can hit her at any moment, day or night, triggered by an emotion, the sight of a beautiful object, or a human contact. Once she came up with a theme for an oboe composition during a dream.

"Inspiration is something ineffable but I use my musical training to render it in final concrete form," she said. That "rendering," Eddy noted, is how she spends much of her daily composing period, bringing into play her knowledge of musical theory and her ample fund of musical experience.

A native of Beverly, Mass., she fell in love with church music as a small child and decided to become a church organist, leading to 10 years of piano studies. She went on to Middlebury College where she majored in music and got to play the magnificent organ at Mead Chapel, studying with the college organist and choirmaster, Emory Fanning.

It was as a junior at Middlebury that Eddy composed her first piece, and she has been composing ever since, with over 200 works to her credit.

After graduating from Middlebury at the head of her class in 1973, she married Bob Eddy, a student at Yale Divinity School. Although she had not originally planned on a religious calling, she also enrolled in the Divinity School. She took to it immediately and decided to become a minister. While at Yale she continued to study organ music and choral conducting.

Over her 30-plus years as pastor at Bethany, she has gone on several sabbaticals where she furthered her training both as a minister and composer.

But for Kathy Eddy it's not all about ministering and composing. She and her husband have found time to raise two sons who are now grown up with families of their own. Blessed with boundless energy, she also partakes in such recreations as sewing, gardening, cross-country skiing, and dancing.

The important commission that the Hilliard Ensemble will perform this Saturday at Chandler is the latest expression of Kathy Eddy's full life of spiritual devotion, leavened by artistic creativity.