Music for November 30, 2014 + The First Sunday of Advent

Vocal Music

• Sleepers, Wake! (from St. Paul) - Felix Mendelssohn 

Instrumental Music
Three settings of the chorale "Sleepers, wake!" A voice astounds us 

• Opening voluntary - Johann Gottfried Walther (1684-1748)
• Communion voluntary - J. S. Bach (1685-1750)
• Closing Voluntary - Paul Manz (1919-2009)

Congregational Music (all hymns from the Hymnal 1982.)

• Hymn 57 -  Lo! he comes with clouds descending (HELMSLEY)
• Hymn 686 - How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord (FOUNDATION)
• Hymn 73 - The King shall come when morning dawns (ST. STEPHEN)
• Psalm 80 - tone VIIIa

Sometimes I get an idea in my head and I can't let it go. Case in point: In choosing the music for service this week's service, I was studying the lectionary readings, as is my custom. The Gospel reading from Mark 13 has this passage in it:

Therefore, keep awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.” (vv 35-37)

Those words reminded me of the great Lutheran chorale, Wachet Auf! Ruft uns die Stimme, or, as our hymnal puts it, Sleepers, Wake! A voice astounds us. It is such a great hymn that composers from across the centuries have used the text and/or melody in their own works. This was the case with Felix Mendelssohn who included a stanza in his first oratorio , St. Paul. The effect of a voice calling out ("astounds us") is heightened by trumpet notes between the lines. The Good Shepherd Choir will be singing this during the offering today.

Walther

Manz

Bach

I am also using three different settings of the chorale Wachet Auf for organ music this week. The opening voluntary is a setting by the German organist Johann Gottfried Walther. Look at his birth and death years in comparison to Bach's. Not only did  his life span almost the same exact years  of Johann Sebastian Bach, but he was the famous composer's cousin.

Walther was most well known as the compiler of the Musicalisches Lexicon (Leipzig, 1732), an enormous dictionary of music and musicians. Not only was it the first dictionary of musical terms written in the German language, it was the first to contain both terms and biographical information about composers and performers up to the early 18th century. In all, the Musicalisches Lexicon defines more than 3,000 musical terms. 

Walther's setting of Wachet Auf is pretty straight forward. The melody is in the upper voice of the harmonization, and there is no pedal part in the piece. The opening line of music is used repeatedly in the lower three voices as part of the accompaniment.

The setting of Wachet Auf that I am playing for communion is one of the loveliest melodies of Bach. Originally a tenor solo from Bach's cantata 140, it was arranged for solo organ by the composer himself and included in his Six Chorales for Organ which became known as the Schubler Chorales. Here bach does what he does so well, by writing an obbligato melody that appears to have virtually no connection with the choral, and yet they fit together perfectly. Julian Mincham, on the website The Cantatas of J. S. Bach says this about the composition

It is possible that Bach saw this as a symbol of the earthly and the spiritual, seemingly apart, dissimilar and diverse and yet, by reason of the Ordained Natural Order, ultimately fitting together and perfectly complementing each other. Thus we might consider the chorale as representing matters spiritual, with the foursquare, almost stolid string melody as earthly life and environment. Each may be depicted perfectly well independently but the fundamental message is that they have been conceived, by the Almighty, as the two parts of the same reality.

The final voluntary based on this hymn is by the late composer Paul Manz, another in a long line of Lutheran organist who lived in Minnesota. 

Hymn 57 -  Lo! he comes with clouds descending (HELMSLEY) Yes, I know we just sang this hymn two weeks ago, but it's imagery of Christ's coming, which was pertinent to the readings about the Second coming, is again relative to today's readings on the first Sunday of Advent. Some of you complain the the tune is challenging. It's the tune that John Wesley used in his 1765 hymnal Sacred Melodies with his brother's text of "Lo! He Comes with Clouds Descending." Wesley attributed the tune HELMSLEY to Thomas Olivers, but Olivers is said to have heard the tune on the street somewhere. Since the first line resembles a tune by violinist and composer Thomas Augustine Arne composed for Thomas and Sally, or The Sailor's Return in 1761, it is speculated the tune was composed by Arne. Arne is the same guy who wrote "Rule, Britannia."