Music for Sunday, November 14, 2021 + The Twenty-fifth Sunday after Pentecost

Vocal Music

• Dear Lord and Father of Mankind – C. H. H. Parry (1848-1918)

Instrumental Music

• Mensch, Willst Du Leben Seliglich – Dieterich Buxtehude (c. 1637 – 1707)
• Prelude on Michael – Charles Callahan (b. 1951)
• “Little” Prelude and Fugue in G Minor – attr. J. S. Bach (1685-1750)

Congregational Music (all hymns from The Hymnal 1982.)

Hymn 51- We the Lord’s People (DECATUR PLACE)
Hymn 686 - Come, thou font of every blessing (NETTLETON)
Hymn 301 - Bread of the world in mercy broken (RENDEZ À DIEU)
Hymn 307 - Lord, enthroned in heavenly splendor (BRYN CALFARIA)
Psalm 16 Tone II, refrain by James E. Barrett

The choir sings one of the beautiful hymn anthems arranged from the British composer Charles H. H. Parry. We are singing it this afternoon as part of the Diocese of Texas' Choral Festival, which I am directing. You can learn more about this anthem by reading this post from January 2020 when we last sang it.

Buxtehude

The opening voluntary is one of the lesser known chorale preludes of  Dietrich Buxtehude, but a very fine one. The melody and text of this hymn, Mensch, willst du leben seliglich, are probably from Martin Luther. The text is referring to the ten commandments. Buxtehude puts the beautiful melody in the center and creates a fine, lyrical piece from it. The English translation is roughly, "Man, do you want to live happily?" That just doesn't sound very poetic, so I left it in German.

The communion voluntary is an organ arrangement of Herbert Howell's hymn tune, MICHAEL. It was originally called 'A Hymn Tune for Charterhouse' but when Howells' son Michael died of polio at the age of nine in 1935, Howells re-named it after him. 

The text, "All My Hope on God is Founded" is an English translation, by the poet Robert Bridges, of a German hymn,  "Meine Hoffnung stehet feste" written around 1680 by Joachim Neander. Here is the text. It is a beautiful marriage of text and tune, and one that deserves to be better known.

1 All my hope on God is founded;
he doth still my trust renew,
me through change and chance he guideth,
only good and only true.
God unknown, he alone
calls my heart to be his own.

2 Mortal pride and earthly glory,
sword and crown betray our trust;
though with care and toil we build them,
tower and temple fall to dust.
But God's power, hour by hour,
is my temple and my tower.

And I am continuing my (almost) montly series of playing the so-called "8 Little Preludes and Fugues" by (supposedly) J. S. Bach. Though they are included in the Bach catalogue (BW 553-560), it is presumed today that Johann Sebastian Bach did not compose the "eight." Composition of the eight have been attributed to one or more of Bach's students, including both JohannTobias Krebs or his son Ludwig [Krebs], or Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer. 

Today you will hear the sixth installment, the Prelude and Fugue in G Minor. The conventional formulaic cadences and simple one-bar sequences over a basso continuo seem like a composer "consciously creating a series of samples". The subject of the fugue is composed of three separate motifs, all of which can be found in canzonas and ricercars. The 19th-century Bach scholar Philipp Spitta praised the fugue, particularly its modulations. Contemporary Bach scholar Peter Williams has suggested that "perhaps the imaginative penultimate bar was inspired by J. S. Bach"