Belmont Tower and Carillon 1850 to be used as a water tower for the Belmont Mansion and gardens. In 1864 during the Battle of Nashville union troops led by General T.J. Wood used the structure as a signal tower. When a carillon of twenty-three bronze bells was installed at Ward-Belmont College in 1928, it became the first carillon in Tennessee and one of the first twenty-five carillons in North America. The original carillon bells were exchanged for an electronic carillon in 1951, shortly after the property became Belmont College. In 1986, a second carillon of twenty-three bells was installed. A gift of nineteen more
A Sermon, a Narrative and a Prayer It was published later in the same year, and the work's first performance was given by the Basler Kammerorchester, conducted by the dedicatee, on 23 February 1962 in Basel . According to a note sent by the composer to Paul Sacher on 7 August 1961, Stravinsky regarded this cantata as a New-Testament counterpart to "Threni", composed three years earlier to an Old-Testament text, the Lamentations of Jeremiah. For his text, Stravinsky chose passages from the Pauline epistles and the Acts of the Apostles, as well as a prayer by the Elizabethan poet Thomas Dekker, written in a style of English