We share such happy news with you today. The frame drummer who leads our Maritime groups has just been awarded a magnificent prize and encouraged to continue into the MA programme in the Atlantic School of Theology. Here is what the officials had to say about David!!! Be proud!!! Layne would have been! Congratulations to you, David!!! From many -worldwide- frame drummers !!!!!!!!
2017 Citation for the Allan R. Wayte Music and Liturgy Award
Music is at the heart of transformation. It has the capacity to soothe the troubled soul, to stimulate the imagination, to rekindle long held memories while opening the mind’s eye to new insights.
Music possesses the DNA, or character structure, with the Gospels. For music, like the Gospel comes to life when it is shared. Alone it is no more than a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal, but in unison, in the company of other instruments it becomes a symphony. Therein resides its power and its majesty.
This year’s recipient of the Allan R. Wayte Music and Liturgy Award, embodies the very essence of what it is to share music and in so doing imparting the Gospel.
David Atwood has consistently offered his love of drumming with us throughout his time at AST. Not only has he introduced deep and rich rhythms to the community, and in so doing transported us to places deep in our unconscious—as only the drum can do —he has done so with creativity, good humor and integrity.
Whether we like it or not, percussion is always edgy. It has the ability to actually change our physiological experience of the moment. It can speed up and slow down the heart rate. And so to engage the drum is to invite a conversation with the risky. The Gospel too is dangerous . . . it too, can change our physiological experience of the moment. It too makes demands. It can take us to places that we had not imagined. And while both are risky, both are relationally oriented.
As a student placed at Cole Harbour Woodside Pastoral Charge, David introduced hand drumming to the people of the charge as a part of an educational project. Not only did the project prove to be a wonderful community building project, it expanded the sense of the possible and offered new avenues of liturgical dexterity to the people of Cole Harbour Woodside.
In sharing music, be courageous. In offering the drum, do so without apology. And in being people of the Gospel, know that you engaged in a very dangerous enterprise. David Atwood is acutely aware of these realities. And for the time he was with us, in our community at AST, we were better for it. The 2017 recipient of the Allan R. Wayte Music and Liturgy Award: David Atwood.
Cooperman 14" Tar