Music for November 28, 2021 + The First Sunday of Advent

Vocal Music

• Never Weather-beaten Sail – Thomas Campion (1567-1620)

Instrumental Music

• Sleepers, Wake! A Voice is Crying – Johann Gottfried Walther (1684-1748)
• Sleepers, Wake! A Voice is Crying – Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
• Sleepers, Wake! A Voice is Crying – Paul Manz (1919-2009)

Congregational Music (all hymns from The Hymnal 1982.)

• Hymn 73 - The King shall come when morning dawns (ST. STEPHEN)
• Hymn 57 - Lo! He comes, with clouds descending (HELMSLEY)
• Hymn 436 - Lift up your heads, ye mighty gates (TRURO)
• Psalm25:1-9 – Tone VIIIa

Today marks the first Sunday of Advent, and the theme of the Day can be discovered by reading the collect for the day:

Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, now and for ever. Amen. (BCP p. 159)

Thomas Campion

With that in mind, I have chosen the anthem a song by the English Renaissance composer, poet, and physician Thomas Campion. While other poets and musicians talked about the union of poetry and music, only Campion produced complete songs wholly of his own composition, and only he wrote lyric poetry of enduring literary value whose very construction is deeply etched with the poet’s care for its ultimate fusion with music.

The song "Never Weather-beaten Sail," from his first Booke of Ayres, is a prayer that Jesus come and take the poet away to heaven, for no tired pilgrim nor worn out boat is as ready to leave this mortal coil as is the author. The second stanza describes the joys of heaven, the "life immortal."

    Never weather-beaten sail more willing bent to shore,
    Never tired pilgrim’s limbs affected slumber more,
    Than my wearied sprite* now longs to fly out of my troubled breast.
    O come quickly, sweetest Lord, and take my soul to rest!

    Ever blooming are the joys of heaven’s high Paradise,
    Cold age deafs not there our ears nor vapour dims our eyes:
    Glory there the sun outshines; whose beams the blessed only see.
    O come quickly, glorious Lord, and raise my sprite to Thee!
      
    *sprite = spirit

All the organ music is based on the Advent Chorale, Wachet Auf! Ruft uns die stimme! Two of the works are by J.G. Walther and J.S Bach. Not only were they almost exact cotemporaries, they were also cousins. In 1707, Walther was made organist at the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, Weimar. Bach became the Capellemeister at the court of the Duke of Weimar. The two became friends, and on September 27, 1712 Bach stood godfather to Walther’s son. A story is told of how J.G. Walther played a trick on Bach, to cure him of boasting that there was nothing he could not read at sight.