This New Song
Recent experiences have led my wife and I to discuss how incredibly opinionated people can be when it relates to music. President Alvin F. Meredith, president of BYU-Idaho, said on a recent podcast , “I was actually thrilled that in April general conference of this year, the choir sang Amazing Grace. I’m from Tennessee and I love just that Christian hymn. A couple years ago I was with Elder Renlund when he had responsibility for overseeing the revisions of the new hymn book and I said, ‘Elder Renlund, please tell me Amazing Grace is going to be in the new hymn book.’ And he said, ‘I think it is.’ And he said, ‘I’ll tell you something else. It’s not going to surprise me if when we get to the other side, we find out that the whole war in heaven started over revisions of the hymn book.’ He said, ‘You’d be shocked at how much passion there is.’” There certainly is a lot of passion and differing opinions when it comes to music, and most people will likely be disappointed by some song that d...