Music for May 31, 2015 + Trinity Sunday

Vocal Music

• Father of Heaven, Whose Love Profound – Healey Willan (1880 -1968)
• Bist du bei mir - Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel (1690-1749)
• A Blessing – Martin Shaw (1875-1958)

Instrumental Music

• Wir Glauben Alle in einem Gott (We all believe in One God) BWV 1098 and 680 – Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

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

• Hymn 362 Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty! (NICEA)
• Hymn 421 All glory be to God on high (ALLEIN GOTT IN DER HOH)
• Hymn S-236 A Song of Praise: Glory to you (John Rutter)
• Hymn 371 Thou, whose almighty Word (MOSCOW)
• Hymn R-264 Abba, Father (Steve Fry)
• Hymn R-149 I, the Lord of sea and sky (HERE I AM, LORD) 
• Hymn 423 Immortal, invisible, God only wise (ST. DENIO)

Many of the special days on the church calendar remember and celebrate events in the life of Christ (Christmas, Easter) or the church (Pentecost) or the Saints of God (All Saints), but this Sunday we'll observe the only day on the church calendar dedicated to a doctrine: the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.

The doctrine of the Trinity means that there is one God who eternally exists as three distinct Persons — the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Stated differently, God is one in essence and three in person. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct Persons, (2) each Person is fully God, (3) there is only one God. For that reason, we sing the great Trinitarian hymn, "Holy, Holy, Holy.... God in three persons, blessed trinity."

The choir will sing Healey Willan's setting of the hymn, Father of heaven, whose love profound, with a text by the Rev. Edward Cooper. It is based on a litany and consists of 4 stanzas of 4 lines, the last stanza being a doxology to the "mysterious Godhead, three in one."

Father of heaven, whose love profound
a ransom for our souls has found,
before thy throne we sinners bend,
to us thy pardoning love extend.

Almighty Son, incarnate Word,
our Prophet, Priest, Redeemer, Lord,
before thy throne we sinners bend,
to us thy saving grace extend.

Eternal Spirit, by whose breath
our souls are raised from sin and death,
before thy throne we sinners bend,
to us thy quickening power extend.

Thrice holy! Father, Spirit, Son,
mysterious Godhead, Three in One,
before thy throne we sinners bend,
grace, pardon, life to us extend.

Martin Shaw, left, and Healey Willan, right, were contemporaries and leading figures in Anglican Church Music in the mid-20th century.

The choir also sings A Blessing by English church musician Martin Shaw, using a prayer found in The Proposed Book of Common Prayer (1928) of the Church of England. No one has ever been credited with the composition of this prayer, but an educated guess would say it's by Walter Frere, who was highly involved in the preparation of the Proposed Prayer Book. Frere composed many prayers, and this charge/blessing, written for a confirmation service and based in scripture, is wholly in line with other works that we do know were written over his name. It did not appear in the final version in 1928, but when the Presbyterians were revising their The Book of Common Worship in 1932 they picked it up and in 1946 The Book of Common Worship provided it as the conclusion to the Confirmation service. Some Presbyterian pastors thought so much of those words that they began to use them at the conclusion of worship.

We think it is the perfect prayer for Senior Sunday.

Speaking of Senior Sunday, one of our seniors, Jade Panares, will sing the lovely aria Bist du bei Mir (Be Thou With Me),  found in Anna Magdelena Bach’s famous notebook. Because of its inclusion by his second wife, it was long assumed to be by J.S. Bach, but it is actually an aria in a now lost opera by Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel, a very prolific composer of the Baroque era who some thought rivaled Bach's own work. Alas, today he is so little known, that not even a picture of him can be found on the internet.

Bach, however, lives on. In 1984 an exciting discovery was made by musicologists studying scores in the library of Yale University. A volume of organ music, copied by hand in the late 1700s by Johann Gottfried Neumeister (1757–1840), was found that contained eighty-two chorales, most of which were previously unknown, including 33 works by a young J. S. Bach.  Two were previously known only from fragments and the other thirty-one were heretofore unknown works (BWV 1090–1120) now identified as the Neumeister Chorales.

These chorales are considered on stylistic grounds to be early works, probably dating from 1703 to 1707, when Bach was active at Arnstadt, and possibly even earlier. They provide a new window on his formative years as a composer. I will be playing a setting of the Martin Luther's hymn We All Believe in One God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost. This chorale is a setting of the Nicene Creed, and is therefore very suitable for occasions such as Trinity Sunday.

I will also play the same hymn as arranged by Bach over 30 years later for his Clavier-Übung III. In this setting Bach writes a trio sonata for two manuals and pedal, which is both exuberant and triumphal. Bach used the first seven notes of the Luther’s melody, to which the words ‘Wir glauben all an einen Gott’ are sung, to form a jubilant theme, in which a buoyant downward leap generates a festive string of semiquavers. The material forms the basis for a dancy fugue that assures the listener that only one thing matters: faith.

Hymns for Sunday

• Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty! (NICEA) In 325 AD, Church leaders convened in the town of Nicaea in Bithynia to formulate a consensus of belief and practice amongst Christians. What resulted was the Nicene Creed, a document passed on through the ages as one of the pillars of church doctrine. The primary function of this creed was to establish a firm belief in the divinity of Christ, countering the heresy of Arius, who believed that Jesus was not fully divine. It was this creed that inspired Reginald Heber to write this great hymn of praise to the Triune God, with the intent that the hymn be sung before or after the creed was recited in a service, and on Trinity Sunday – eight weeks after Easter. The tune, composed by John B. Dykes for Heber’s text, is also titled NICAEA in recognition of Heber’s text. The words evoke a sense of awe at the majesty of God, and call on all of creation – humans, saints and angels, and all living things – to praise the Godhead three-in-one.
• All glory be to God on high (ALLEIN GOTT IN DER HOH) The tune name ALLEIN GOTT derives from the opening words of Nikolas Decius's rhymed text in High German. Decius adapted the tune from a tenth-century Easter chant for his German setting of the Gloria text. Lutheran composers have written various chorale preludes on ALLEIN GOTT for organ. Bach himself used the hymn in four cantatas and composed about ten preludes on the tune. Typical of many Lutheran chorales, ALLEIN GOTT is in bar form (AAB).
• A Song of Praise: Glory to you (John Rutter) On some Sundays the Lectionary suggests certain canticles be sung instead of a Psalm. Canticle 13, Benedictus es, Domine, is especially appropriate for Trinity Sunday. We will sing a setting for Rite II by John Rutter, the leading composer of choral music throughout the world today. Be prepared for a short introduction!!
• Thou, whose almighty Word (MOSCOW) You may know the tune from the hymn Come, thou almighty King or Christ, for the world we sing. It's based on Genesis 1 (let there be light), but it is Trinitarian in its framework. Look for the theme of Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer in the first three stanzas, with a hymn to all three in the last stanza.
• Abba, Father (Steve Fry) Abba Father was written by Steven Fry in the seclusion of a church prayer room at the midnight hour when he was serving as a Youth Minister in the late 70s. He is now Sr. Pastor of The Gate Community Church in Franklin, Tennessee. The text is drawn directly from today's Epistle reading. 
• I, the Lord of sea and sky (HERE I AM, LORD) Another contemporary hymn, it was written in 1981 by Daniel Schutte, a Jesuit priest.  He was one of the founding members of the St. Louis Jesuits who popularized a contemporary style of church music set to sacred texts sung in English as a result of the liturgical reforms initiated by Vatican II. 
• Immortal, invisible, God only wise (ST. DENIO) ST. DENIO is based on "Can mlynedd i nawr" ("A Hundred Years from Now"), a traditional Welsh ballad popular in the early nineteenth century. It was first published as a hymn tune in John Roberts's Caniadau y Cyssegr (Hymns of the Sanctuary, 1839). The tune title refers to St. Denis, the patron saint of France.Walter C. Smith based this text, written in 1867, on 1 Timothy 1: 17: "Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory for ever and ever."