Music for October 11, 2015 + The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost

Vocal Music

• Hear the Voice and Prayer – Thomas Tallis (1505-1585)

Instrumental Music

• Partita on “St. Anne” – Paul Manz (1919-2009)
• I. Theme
• II. Adagio
• VI. Fugue/Finale
• Saraband and Interlude – Herbert Sumsion (1899-1995)

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

• Hymn 680 - O God, our help in ages past (ST. ANNE)
• Hymn R127 - Blest are they, the poor in spirit (BLEST ARE THEY)
• Hymn 707 - Take my life and let it be (HOLLINGSIDE)
• Hymn - I have decided to follow Jesus (I HAVE DECIDED)
• Hymn 408 - Sing praise to God who reigns above (MIT FREUDEN ZART)

The organ voluntaries at the beginning and ending of worship are from a Partita (or Variations) by Paul Manz. During his lifetime, he was one of the premier organists in the Lutheran Church, a denomination with a tradition of fine music and hymnody. Manz was well known for his improvisations on the hymns of the church, publishing volumes of his organ improvisations. As a performer, Manz was famous for his celebrated hymn festivals. Instead of playing traditional organ recitals, Manz would generally lead a "festival" of hymns from the organ, in which he introduced each hymn with one of his famously creative organ improvisations based on the hymn tune in
question. The congregation would then sing the hymn with his accompaniment. Sometimes he would play an improvisation between each sung stanza, as with these well-known variations on the tune, ST. ANNE, sung to the Isaac Watts text "Oh God, Our Help in Ages Past" with which he would traditionally end each festival. It is from this partita that I've selected the opening and closing voluntaries.
At the prelude we hear the tune in it's entirety, presented with no embellishments. It is followed by the first variation, which, like a chorale prelude of Bach or Buxtehude, presents the melody in a highly ornamented fashion, often flirting with the actual notes of the melody to give us an impression of the tune.
The closing voluntary is the finale from the partita, starting with a fugue with its original subject. It is not until we depart from the fugue that we hear the melody in the pedal with the hands playing a flashy accompaniment.

The hymn, O God, our help in ages past, is one of the biggies.  It is a standard that appears in most major hymnals and is often sung at funerals. The words are a paraphrase of Psalm 90:1-5.  (Today's Psalm is also from Psalm 90, but using the last five verses.) They were written by Isaac Watts in 1714, shortly before the death of Queen Anne of England. This was a time of great crises and turmoil, as the successor of Queen Anne was as yet undetermined, and the fear of a monarch who would reinstate the persecution of Protestants was great. King George I prevented such persecution, but the fear before Anne’s death was great. This was the context in which Watts wrote his powerful text, now lauded as “one of the grandest in the whole realm of English Hymnody” (Bailey, The Gospel in Hymns, 54).
The music was composed by William Croft in in 1708 when he was organist at St. Anne’s in Soho. The tune appears in many compositions by other composers, but the fact that the opening phrase sounds like the fugue subject in J. S. Bach’s Fugue in E-flat Major, (“St. Anne” Fugue) is probably a coincidence. I am using Bach's music as in introdution to the hymn, in an arrangement by George Thalben-Ball (which Thalben-Ball transposed to C Major just for this purpose.)