Music for November 9, 2014 + The 22nd Sunday after Pentecost

Vocal Music

• Keep Your Lamps – Spiritual, arr. André J. Thomas
• Missa Brevis No. X in C – Healey Willan

Instrumental Music

• Prelude on the hymn tune “Bevan” – Healey Willan
• (Jesus, My Great High Priest)
• Postlude in D Major – Healey Willan
• Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence -  improvisation 

Congregational Music (all hymns from the Hymnal 1982 with the exception of those marked “R” which are from Renew.)

• Hymn 690 - Guide me, O thou great Jehovah (CWM RHONDDA)
• Hymn 57 - Lo! he comes with clouds descending (HELMSLEY)
• Hymn 324 - Let all mortal flesh keep silence (PICARDY)
• Hymn 436 - Lift up your heads, ye mighty gates (TRURO)
• Psalm 70 – Tone VIIIg
• Alleuia     Tone VIIIg

To me, there is no purer form of music making than unaccompanied singing. Music that is made
without benefit of any musical instrument is the purest expression of musical art. Don’t get me wrong, I love the piano and the organ, and the cello is one of my favorite instruments, but given a choice between hearing a choir sing with accompaniment or without, and I will take the unaccompanied choir every time. And this Sunday, we feature the Good Shepherd choir in two varied expressions of a capella singing.

André Thomas

The anthem is a setting of the African-American Spiritual Keep Your Lamps by André J. Thomas, the Director of Choral Activities and Professor of Choral Music Education at The Florida State University. He has made it his mission to educate the public about spirituals, arranging the sorts of spirituals and gospel music he had heard as a child. His first such arrangement was Keep Your Lamps, a spiritual based on today’s Gospel reading. Except for a conga drum beat, it is sung completely unaccompanied.

Healey Willan

The service music (Kyrie, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei) is the Missa Brevis No. X by Canadian composer Healey Willan. Willan was well versed in plainsong and became an authority on plainchant in the vernacular (ie, English rather than Latin). He also loved the sound of choral music of the Renaissance period (roughly 1400-1600). A typical choral piece has four, five, or six voice parts of nearly equal melodic interest. Imitation among the voices is common: each presents the same melodic idea in turn, as in a round. This is music with a gentle flow rather than a sharply defined beat, because each melodic line has great rhythmic independence: when one singer is at the beginning of his or her melodic phrase, the others may already be in the middle of theirs.

Inside the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Toronto

The Missa Brevis No. X was written for the dedication of Willan's church, the Church of St. Mary Magdalene, Toronto, in 1948. It reflects the needs of the church’s Anglo-catholic liturgy and exploits its suggestions of a more mystical approach. Willan’s deep interest in plainsong and polyphonic music is clearly evident in this short mass. The melismatic vocal line, rhythmic freedom based on verbal accentuation, and a strong preoccupation with linear shape rather than vertical congruence combine to form a thoroughly personal idiom. It is this that separates this music from his organ and choral music based on hymns and makes it possibly his most important.

Willan's work as a practical, publishing church musician gave rise to a variety of lesser pieces, including anthems and organ works based on hymn-tunes, collections for junior choirs, and many carols and carol arrangements. Our organ voluntaries are indicative of those kinds of pieces. The opening voluntary is based on a Lutheran chorale, and the closing voluntary is from an anthology of organ music for the church organist.

Hymn 690 Guide me, O thou great Jehovah (CWM RHONDDA) At the urging of a Welsh evangelist, under whom he was converted, William Williams (and not the one in our congregation) began writing hymns as a Welsh Calvinist-Methodist minister. The tune is another one of those great, rollicking Welsh tunes that practically sing themselves!
Hymn 57  Lo! he comes with clouds descending (HELMSLEY) Charles Wesley used the first line but completely recast the rest of a crude hymn by John Cennick six years after Cennick's death. The ideas and language are borrowed from the book of Revelation, and the whole is based on Rev. 1:7, "Behold, he comes with clouds, and every eye shall see him, and they also which pierced him: and all kindred of the earth shall wail because of him. Even so, Amen." The language is apocalyptic and should be interpreted symbolically, not literally.
Hymn 324 Let all mortal flesh keep silence (PICARDY) This hymn comes from the opening of the Eucharist in one of the oldest liturgies of the Christian Church, traditionally ascribed to and named after St. James, the brother of Jesus. Its first written form exists in the mid fourth century in bot Greek and Syriac, and is still sung in Jerusalem on the Sunday after Christmas.
Hymn 436 Lift up your heads, ye mighty gates (TRURO) This hymn by Georg Weissel (1590-1635) is probably the most famous paraphrase of Psalm 24 (Lift up your heads, Oh ye gates), and reveals a spirit of praise and hope unexpected from the depths of the dreadful years of the Thirty Years' War. Its theme is the preparation for the Messiah's coming, and goes well with these pre-Advent readings today.