Music for February 5, 2023 + The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany

Vocal Music

• The Mind of Christ – K. Lee Scott (b. 1950)

Instrumental Music

• Dialogue en trio du Cornet et de la Tierce – François Couperin (1668-1733)
• Sonata 51: Cantabile – Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757)
• Dialogue sur les Grands jeux – François Couperin

Congregational Music (all hymns from The Hymnal 1982 with the exception of "This Little Light" which is from Lift Every Voice and Sing II.)

• Hymn 7 Christ, whose glory fills the skies (RATISBON)
• Hymn 488 Be thou my vision (SLANE)
• Hymn 380 From all that dwell below the skies (OLD HUNDREDTH)
• Hymn This little light of mine (African-American Spiritual)
• Hymn 381 Thy strong word did cleave the darkness (TONY-Y-BOTEL)
• Psalm 112 Beatus vir - (simplified Anglican chant by Jerome Meachan)

The Mind of Christ

Birmingham, Alabama composer Lee Scott has taken the hymn "May the mind of Christ, my Savior" and set it to the tune BATTY for a lovely anthem.  The text is called a "catalog" hymn, which list different things the believer asks: "May the mind of Christ," the "word of God," the "peace of God," and the "love of Jesus." The hymn was first published in the London children's hymnbook Golden Bells (1925) and has gained popularity in recent hymnals.

This text is attributed to Kate Barclay Wilkinson, an English woman from the turn of the 20th century. Little is known about Wilkinson's life: a member of the Church of England, she was involved in a ministry to girls in London and a participant in the Keswick Convention Movement. She was married to Frederick Barclay Wilkinson.

The tune is a Moravian melody by the German composer Johann Christoph Kühnau

Organ Voluntaries

All the organ music for the morning comes from Messe pour les paroisses by the French Baroque composer François Couperin. This music was written to be performed during the Mass, alternating with the choir. In this so-called alternatim practice,  the organist plays when texts would otherwise have been sung. a term which indicates a type of liturgy where alternate sections of the Mass were performed by different forces. 

Today's movements all come from the second part of the mass, the Gloria. The titles have nothing to do with text, but with musical form; the Dialogue en trio du Cornet et de la Tierce is a three-part piece with the Cornet (Kor-nay) playing against the tierce, a mutation stop of 1-3/5' on the manuals, supporting the fifth harmonic, sounding approximately an E when played from a C key, seventeen scale steps higher. It is always played with a flute of the 8' pitch. The Dialogue sur les Grands jeux features each division of the organ (each different keyboard) in their full glory playing in dialogue with each other.

François Couperin, the most important member of the renowned Couperin dynasty, is the foremost composer of the French Baroque. A prodigiously talented keyboard player, he inherited the post of organist at the church of St Gervais in Paris when he was just eleven years old, subsequently dividing his time between the capital and Versailles upon becoming organiste du Roi in 1693.