An open opus. Begun 2026. Ongoing.
Most opus numbers close. This one does not.

Opus 16 is the standing receptacle for this composer’s hymn-based writing — additive across years, across ensembles, across worship contexts. A hymn setting for string quartet and a hymn setting for solo hammered dulcimer belong to the same catalog here, not because they resemble one another, but because they draw from the same well. The number stays fixed while the collection grows. There is precedent for this: Mendelssohn’s Lieder ohne Worte, Brahms’s late piano pieces, Chopin’s preludes. A composer signals with an open opus that the work is a project rather than a series of one-off occasions.
The four pieces presented to date trace an arc that was not planned in advance and became visible only after the fact: Passion → Vision → Gift → Godhead.

No. 1 — Rumination
Hammered dulcimer and string quartet · Presented May 3, 2026, Wheaton Bible Church

A three-station meditation on the Passion, moving through O Sacred Head, Now Wounded, Go to Dark Gethsemane, and Were You There. The three tunes are not stitched into a medley; they are stations, and the listener is meant to stop at each one. The hammered dulcimer carries the interior voice while the quartet holds the ground beneath it.
Rumination is dual-purposed. It functions as a hymn setting here in Opus 16 and returns, revised for string octet, as instrumental re-entry material in Book of Psalm, Opus 17 — a practice with long precedent in Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi.

No. 2 — Fantasy on Be Thou My Vision
Hammered dulcimer with tape-loop technique · Presented May 3, 2026, Wheaton Bible Church

A postlude built by the Frippertronics method, in which the instrument accumulates against its own delayed return until the texture becomes a slowly turning wheel of sound. The ancient Irish tune surfaces and submerges within it. On the morning it was presented, roughly fifteen people left their seats and gathered around the instrument while it played — an unlooked-for confirmation that a postlude need not be music for an emptying room.

No. 3 — Simple Gifts
Hammered dulcimer with sound-on-sound looping · Presented July 26, 2026, Wheaton Bible Church

Joseph Brackett’s 1848 Shaker tune arrives without ornament: a single line on hammered dulcimer, stated plainly, once. Everything that follows is built from that line in real time. Using sound-on-sound looping, this composer records each layer live in the room and lets it continue underneath while playing the next — so the texture that gathers is not an ensemble but one player answering his own recorded past, seconds behind. Nothing was prepared in advance; every strand you hear was struck in that sanctuary that morning.
The technology serves the opposite of complication. ’Tis the gift to be simple — the tune never hurries and never modulates away from itself. The layers exist only so that it can be heard from more than one place at once.

Simple Gifts also widens the opus. Brackett’s melody is a Shaker dance song rather than a hymn in the strict sense, and its admission here declares that Opus 16 takes in the whole American sacred-song inheritance, not the hymnal alone.

No. 4 — Nicaea
Oboe, Bb clarinet, organ, and hammered dulcimer · Presented July 26, 2026, Wheaton Bible Church

Variations on the tune NICAEA (Dykes), sung to Reginald Heber’s Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty. Written as an introit — brief, and deliberately so, its job being to gather a congregation rather than detain it. The governing orchestral principle is one of alternation: the hammered dulcimer and the organ never run quickly at the same moment. One churns while the other sustains or rests, so that the room never has to choose which to hear.

Presented by Katie Willemssen, oboe; Tom Gross, clarinet; Dr. Tony Payne, organ; and this composer, hammered dulcimer.

The opus will grow. Any future hymn-rooted work, in any ensemble configuration, enters here.