The Federated Church in Edgartown celebrated Peter Boak’s 30 years as music minister on Sunday with the world premiere of a new choral work commissioned in his honor.
Composer Thomas LaVoy traveled from Tennessee to take part in the first performance of his anthem For the Beauty, For the Glory, singing bass with a well-rehearsed choir of some three dozen Islanders who gathered around Mr. Boak at the church piano.
Soprano Pam Butterick was the soloist and Rebecca Laird played violin, before a full house of music-loving worshipers.
The new anthem’s lyrics, by the late preacher, poet and Yale Divinity School professor Thomas Troeger, build a rapturous song of thanksgiving from four stanzas, each one tracing a path to God’s peace through sacred music.
Mr. LaVoy’s piece also bears a dedication to Mr. Boak, Federated Church pastor Rev. Mark Winters told the congregation.
“Any choir who sings this anthem will see this dedication,” Mr. Winters said. “It says, ‘Commissioned by the Federated Church of Martha’s Vineyard for its 30 years of music ministry with Peter Boak.’”
The word “with” honors the collaborative nature of Mr. Boak’s work at the Federated, Mr. Winters continued.
“Music ministry is something we have done with Peter together,” he said.
Mr. Winters continued his theme of musical collaboration in a sermon that riffed on I Corinthians 12, which liturgist Janet Holladay had just read to the congregation.
“The tenor cannot say to the soprano, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the conductor to the accompanist, ‘I have no need of you.’ But God has so arranged the body that if one singer suffers, all of us cover our ears together. If one member is honored, all rejoice together in beautiful harmony,” Mr. Winters said.
The choir also performed an earlier work by Mr. LaVoy, a psalm setting titled Neither the Moon By Night, during the offertory, as well as a piece called The Cloud’s Veil by Irish priest and composer Liam Lawton.
Following Sunday’s service, the church threw a reception at the Edgartown Reading Room for Mr. Boak and Mr. LaVoy, who are both alumni — from different generations — of Westminster Choir College in Princeton, N.J.
The two musicians have introduced three new works since 2019, when the Island Community Chorus — which Mr. Boak founded in 1996 and directed until 2022 — premiered Mr. LaVoy’s cantata In Heaven, Hereafter, a setting of poetry by the Vineyard’s famed “chicken lady” Nancy Luce.
Mr. LaVoy, who had not visited the Vineyard before then despite long-ago family ties in Edgartown, discovered Nancy Luce’s story after seeing a print by Island artist Dan Waters that showed her ascending to heaven with her chickens.
Captivated by the imagery, he sought out Mr. Waters and then Martha’s Vineyard Museum librarian Bow Van Riper to learn more about the poet and her beloved flock, before setting her words to music for In Heaven, Hereafter.
That world premiere was followed in 2022 by a first performance of Mr. LaVoy’s Before the Dawn, composed in honor of the chorus’s 25th anniversary.
On Sunday, at the reception, he said he welcomed the chance to visit the Island again.
“I travel and I speak with people and I work with choirs of all types in so many different places … but coming back to Martha’s Vineyard is always a homecoming for me,” Mr. LaVoy said.
He made a special trip to West Tisbury to visit Nancy Luce’s former home and her gravesite, Mr. LaVoy told the Gazette.
At the Reading Room, Mr. Boak called Mr. LaVoy his number one collaborator and comrade.
“He not only is a wonderful colleague and an exquisite musician and a gentle man in every sense of the word, but he’s also my friend. And it just makes it all the better to work with somebody who just encompasses all those aspects,” he said.
Mr. LaVoy returned the compliment in his remarks.
“The people that I enjoy working with the most, and get the most out of having this really strong artistic relationship with, are people that I now call gatherers,” he said.
“They have this innate ability to gather people to them and to foster relationships and have this beautiful quiet leadership that is not something terribly common in the world that we live in. And Peter is certainly one of those people,” said Mr. LaVoy, who also expressed appreciation for Mr. Winters’s preaching.
“I am not a religious person. I am an agnostic, and I often feel alienated in churches. But I did not feel that today,” he said.
Mr. LaVoy’s commission was funded by donations from 30 church members, Mr. Winters said.