Music for October 4, 2015 + The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Vocal Music

• For the Beauty of the Earth – John Rutter (b. 1945)
• O Kind Jesus - Robert Hunter, arr. (1929-2001)

Instrumental Music

• Air - Gerre Hancock (1934-2012)
• Jesus Loves Me- Charles Callahan (b. 1951)
• Now Thank We All Our God - Sigfrid Karg-Elert (1877-1933)

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

• Hymn 376 - Joyful, joyful, we adore thee (HYMN TO JOY)
• Hymn 480 - When Jesus left his Father’s throne (KINGSFOLD)
• Hymn 495 - Hail, thou once despised Jesus, stanzas 1-3 (IN BABILONE)
• Hymn - Jesus loves me, this I know (JESUS LOVES ME)
• Hymn 397 - Now thank we all our God (NUN DANKET ALLE GOTT)

Of the two choral offerings this Sunday, John Rutter's For the Beauty of the Earth is by far the best known. It's joyous text and infectious melody have made it a favorite among choirs throughout the world since it was first published in 1980, after he wrote it for The Texas Choral Director's Association. It incorporates several of Rutter's distinctive musical trademarks: an interesting, singable melody, several changes in key, and syncopated rhythms used in conjunction with smooth, straight legato lines. The accompaniment, which I will be playing on the piano, stands alone, supporting but not doubling what the choral parts do.


The other anthem, based on a simple Latvian folk tune, is arranged by Ralph Hunter. A choral conductor, educator, and arranger, Hunter was born in East Orange, New Jersey, in 1921. He began his musical career as a church organist at Newark, New Jersey’s First Reformed Church. He served in the Army during World War II and then attended the Juilliard School of Music in New York. In 1955, he became the conductor of New York’s Collegiate Chorale, the second conductor after founder Robert Shaw, and held that position until 1959. In the late 1950s, he was an arranger for Harry Belafonte, conducted the Radio City Music Hall Chorus, and formed his own group, the Ralph Hunter Choir, with whom he recorded five albums. In the 1960’s, he conducted a variety of groups, including a campaign chorus for Richard Nixon, called Voices for Nixon, as well as a chorus that performed on NBC television under the direction of Arturo Toscanini. From 1969-1987, he was a music professor at New York’s Hunter College, where he taught choral literature, conducting, and arranging. He conducted and arranged a wide variety of choral music, including the temperance songs we sing today. He is known for his arrangements and conducting of classical choral works by such early music composers as Thomas Tallis and Nicholas Porpora.

Sunday's Gospel lessons is about Jesus and divorce and and Jesus and the children. I've decided to focus on Jesus and the children. That's why we are singing these two anthems and today's hymns, especially Jesus Loves Me. Preceding the singing of Jesus Loves Me (in a rocking 6/8 setting by Dr. Horace Clarence Boyer as found in Lift Every Voice and Sing II, An African American Hymnal for the Episcopal Church), I will play an very improvisatory piano piece by Charles Callahan which quotes snippets of the tune while never playing the melody outright. \

Just this past week I watched an episode of "Call the Midwife" on Netflix (watch it, if you haven't yet!) where one of the characters dies tragically. His girlfriend laments that she cannot see God in this tragedy, and the head nun responds that God is not in the tragedy, God is in the response. That could be said about Martin Rinkart, the writer of our closing hymn.

Rinkart was a minister in the city of Eilenburg during the Thirty Years War. Apart from battles, lives were lost in great number during this time due to illnesses and disease spreading quickly throughout impoverished cities. In the Epidemic of 1637, Rinkart officiated at over four thousand funerals, sometimes fifty per day. In the midst of these horrors, it’s difficult to imagine maintaining faith and praising God, and yet, that’s exactly what Rinkart did. Sometime in the next twenty years, he wrote the hymn, Now Thank We All Our God, originally meant to be a prayer said before meals. Rinkart could recognize that our God is faithful, and even when the world looks bleak, He is “bounteous” and is full of blessings, if only we look for them. Blessings as seemingly small as a dinner meal, or as large as the end of a brutal war and unnecessary bloodshed are all reasons to lift up our thanks to God, with our hearts, our hands, and our voices.

The closing voluntary is Sigfrid Karg-Elert's setting of that tune, but the melody is hidden even more than in the piano piece of Callahan's on Jesus Loves Me. I've put up a diagram showing how fragment of the opening line is used as a basis for the main theme of this organ masterpiece.