PREPARE THE WAY! Music for December 4, 2022 + Advent II

Vocal Music

• By All Your Saints – arr. Joel Martinson (b. 1960)

Instrumental Music

• The Lion and the Lamb – David Nevue (b. 1965)
• Comfort, Comfort Ye My People – Johann Gottfried Walther (1684 –1748)
• Comfort, Comfort Ye My People – Johann Christoph Oley (1738–1789)

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

• Hymn 616 Hail to the Lord’s Anointed (ES FLOG EIN KLEINS WALDVŐGELEIN)
• Hymn 67 Comfort, comfort ye my people (PSALM 42)
• Hymn 59 Hark! A thrilling voice is sounding (MERTON)
• Hymn R 92 Prepare the way of the Lord (Taizé)
• Hymn 65 Prepare the way, O Zion (BEREDEN VAG FOR HERRAN)
• Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19 – Tone Ib

By All Your Saints

Did you know there is one hymn in our hymn with 25 different stanzas? Yeah, and you people thought last Sunday's opening hymn was too long! (It wasn't.)  The hymn, By all your saints still striving, is found in the section Holy Days and Various Occasions, and is meant to cover 22 individual saints in addition to All Saints Day. The disclaimer here is that 23 of those stanzas are meant as options for verse two out of three. We are using the stanza for St. John the Baptist, since the Gospel lesson introduces John to us as  "the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, 'The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.'" 

The Lion and the Lamb

The Old Testament reading is the familiar passage from Isaiah, prophesying a time of peace when "The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them." I was looking for a piano piece to play this Sunday, and came upon this piece by the New Age composer David Nevue. Nevue is an internationally known pianist and composer from Oregon who majored in Communication Arts, but discovered along the way that he had a love for music and the piano. 

After college, Nevue got a job in the desktop publishing business and composed music on the side. Though largely self-taught, he worked diligently and recorded his first "album" - a cassette, actually, in 1992. He has recorded 17 albums since then, and has become one of the top artists in both the Amazon.com and iTunes music sales charts for his New Age. 

Comfort, Comfort Ye My People

Comfort, Comfort Ye My People is the perfect hymn for Advent II. It is a paraphrase of Isaiah 40:1-5, in which the prophet looks forward to the coming of Christ. More specifically, the coming of the forerunner of Christ – John the Baptist – is foretold. Though Isaiah's voice crying in the desert is anonymous, the third stanza ties this prophecy and one from Malachi (Malachi 4:5) to a New Testament fulfillment. “For Elijah's voice is crying In the desert far and near” brings to mind Jesus' statement, “'But I tell you that Elijah has already come, ….' Then the disciples understood that he was speaking to them of John the Baptist.” (Matthew 17:12, 13 ESV)

In addition to singing the hymn, I am also playing two settings of the chorale tune. Organists find preludes to this tune under GENEVAN 42 in Dutch works or under FREU DICH SEHR in German works. Our hymnal calls it PSALM 42. Louis Bourgeois composed or adapted this tune for Psalm 42 for the Genevan psalter in 1551. 

In the communion setting, the tune is soloed out in the right hand on the oboe, but J. G. Walther,  the composer, ornaments the chorale tune so highly that it is difficult to recognize it at first. 

The closing voluntary presents the tune much more clearly, though in a different meter than we use in our hymnal. (It is 4/4 time rather than 3/2 time.) It is also in a triple Canon, meaning you hear the melody first in the soprano (top) line, then in the pedal (bottom line) one measure later, then again in the tenor (middle) line 4 beats later. This keeps up through the entire song. This was written by another German composer, Johann Christoph Oley.

Oley
lived and worked just after the death of J. S. Bach, whose music Oley revered and often emulated. Oley had hand-copied many of the works of Bach, and he owned one of the four extant copies of the Schübler chorales with J.S. Bach’s corrections. His own works include a set of 14 keyboard variations and the four-volume Variirte Choräle which contains 77 settings for organ solo, two for solo oboe and organ, and six for organ and instrumental ensemble of flute, oboe, bassoon, horn, two violins, viola and cello.