Music for February 28, 2021 + The Second Sunday in Lent

Vocal Music

• Take Up Your Cross – Ronald Corp (b. 1951)
• Lord, For Thy Tender Mercy’s Sake – Richard Farrant (c. 1525 – 1580)
• Hymn 401: The God of Abraham praise (LEONI)

Instrumental Music

• Variations on the hymn tune BOURBON – Don Michael Dicie (b. 1941)
• Hymn 675: Take up your cross, the Savior said
• Joshua Fit de Battle ob Jericho – arr. Fela Sowande (1905-1987)

The last day of February also brings us to the last Sunday of our series highlighting Black musicians who just happen to be/have been Anglicans. Today we focus on Fela Sowande.

Fela Sowande was a Nigerian organist and composer who was raised in the church. His father was Emmanuel Sowande, an Anglican priest and champion of Nigerian Church Music. 

Fela Sowande

His father, as well as the organist Thomas King Ekundayo Phillips (dubbed the “Father of Nigerian church music”), were a big influence on Sowande’s early music education. Sowande studied organ with Phillips, and performed as a chorister at his father’s church. As a youth he traveled to London to study Civil Engineering, but along the way, he obtained a Bachelor of Music from City University in London and became a Fellow of Trinity College. 

Sowande was not confined to one style of music. He was a theatre organist for the BBC at the same time as being part of a piano duo with Fats Waller; he was a choirmaster at the prestigious Kingsway Hall at the same time as recording tracks for the likes of Vera Lynn and Adelaide Hall ; he was a band leader, and an in-demand keyboardist.

But his compositions showed a more serious side. He wrote extensively for choir and organ, combining the classical training he received at school with the rhythmic patterns and melodies of West Africa. In the 50s, he began to use the spirituals and gospel songs of African-Americans, and a grant from the U. S. Government allowed enabled Sowande to travel to the United States in 1957 and give organ recitals in Boston, Chicago and New York.  

The organ piece I chose for today is Sowande's setting of the spiritual, Joshua Fit de Battle ob Jericho. (The dialect is original to Sowande's publication.) While the tune is strictly that of the spiritual, you can also hear the classical influence in musical form (there is a fugal section in the middle at the return of the refrain), and in the use of tone painting (at the end, where the harmonies descend, getting lower and lower, at the point in the song where "the walls came a-tumblin' down." )

I have resisted playing any of the typical spirituals this year, as I did not want to reduce the Black musical contributions to just spirituals, as significant as they are to the history of American music. But this collection of African-American spirituals by a classically-trained Nigerian organist was too great to pass by. (And it's so much fun to play!) So, to give you a taste of a more traditional but still fresh musical composition by Fela Sowande, please listen to this recording of his best-known work, the African Suite for string orchestra. Listen here (but not while in church!)