Music for September 20, 2015 + The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

Vocal Music

• Cantique de Jean Racine – Gabriel  Fauré (1845-1924)
• Lord, I Trust Thee – George Frederick Handel (1685-1759)

Instrumental Music

• Voluntary on “Engleberg”– Robert A Hobby (b. 1962)
• Violin Sonata in F major, HWV 370: I. Adagio – George Frederic Handel (trns. John M. Klein)
• Fanfare and Chorale on “Abbott’s Leigh” – Robert A. Hobby

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

• Hymn 379 God is Love, let heaven adore him (ABBOT’S LEIGH)
• Hymn 660 O Master, let me walk with thee (MARYTON)
• Hymn 390 Praise to the Lord (LOBE DEN HERREN)
• Hymn 711 Seek ye first the kingdom of God (SEEK YE FIRST)
• Hymn 477 All praise to thee, for thou, O King divine (ENGELBERG)

Gabriel Faure,
when he was young.

Two staples of choral music are included in our worship this Sunday. The first is an anthem by the French composer Gabriel Fauré. Best known for his art songs, chamber music, orchestral music, and his Requiem, this choral work was one of his first compositions, written in his final year at the Ecole Niedermeyer in1865. (He was 19 years old!) It used a religious poem by the playwright Jean Racine as its text, and it immediately made him famous as a composer. Its harmonic language is as rich and satisfying as a gateau au chocolat, and as complex as a fine cabernet sauvignon.

Great. Now I am Hungry.

By comparison, the communion anthem, Handel's setting of the 4th stanza of the hymn Deck, Thyself, my Soul, With Gladness (Hymn 339 in our hymnal), is a straight-forward chorale with a more elaborate (but still very reserved) accompaniment. It is taken from Handel's full scale setting of a libretto by Barthold Heinrich Brockes, an influential German poet who wrote Der für die Sünde der Welt gemarterte und sterbende Jesus (The Story of Jesus, Suffering and Dying for the Sins of the World). It was Brockes re-working of the traditional form of a Passion oratorio, in whichhe added reflective and descriptive poetry. Brockes Passion was well admired among musicians, and Handel's setting, though the best known, was not the only one. Handel's setting featured soloists more than choir, and for the most part, the choral parts were simple settings of hymns such as this.

The closing hymn is F. Bland Tucker's metrical setting of one of the great biblical hymns, Philippians 2:5-11. This is one of the several New Testament creedal statements found throughout the Epistles.

Francis Bland Tucker (1895-1984), was the son of a bishop and brother of a Presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. He himself became a priest after studying at Virginia Theological Seminary. He served parishes in Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Christ Church in Savannah, Ga., where the missionary John Wesley was a priest.

Having a keen interest in hymnody, Tucker served on the joint commission that produced the Protestant Episcopal Hymnal 1940 and was a language consultant to this hymnal’s successor, The Hymnal 1982.

It is set to the tune ENGELBERG which Charles V. Stanford  composed as a setting for William W. How's "For All the Saints". The tune was published in the 1904 edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern with no less than six different musical settings. It is clearly a fine congregational hymn with an attractive, energetic melody with many ascending motives, designed for unison singing with no pauses between stanzas.