Music for October 7, 2018

Vocal Music

• For the Beauty of the Earth – John Rutter (b. 1945)

Instrumental Music

• Benediction – Sigfrid Karg-Elert (1877-1933)
• Suite Liturgique: III. Communion– Denis Bédard (b. 1950)
• Now Thank We All Our God – Sigfrid Karg-Elert

Congregational Music (all hymns from the Hymnal 1982 with the exception of those marked “R” which are from Renew and "L" which is from Lift Every Voice and Sing II.)

• Hymn 376 - Joyful, joyful, we adore thee (HYMN TO JOY)
• Hymn R250 - O Lord, my God (O STOR GUD)
• Hymn 480 - When Jesus left his Father’s throne (KINGSFOLD)
• Hymn L218 - Jesus loves me, this I know (JESUS LOVES ME)
• Hymn R173 - O Lord, hear my prayer (Jacques Berthier)
• Hymn 397 - Now thank we all our God (NUN DANKET ALLE GOTT)
• Psalm 8 – Tone VII

John Rutter (right), looking startled to be caught
standing next to your organist in 2017. We have
same haircut.

That John Rutter became one of the world’s most well-known composers of church music should surprise no one. He sang as a boy chorister at London’s prestigious Highgate School, and proceeded to study at Clare College, Cambridge, where he later became director of music. Rutter leapt to prominence in 1970, as co-editor of the second volume in Oxford University Press’s Carols for Choirs series. Since then, his name has become synonymous with English church music, especially for the Christmas season. He now lives near Cambridge, and conducts a professional choir, the Cambridge Singers.

This Sunday the choir sings one of his anthems with a Texas connection. Rutter wrote his setting of the nineteenth-century hymn, For the beauty of the earth, for Rosemary Heffley and the Texas Choral Directors Association in 1980. Foregoing the tune found in most hymnals (though not the Hymnal 1980!), Rutter crafted a lyrical, rising melody that joyfully concludes with an off-kilter rhythm and flamboyant turn. It has since become a standard in choir libraries, sung by choirs the world over. It's been  arranged for women's voices and men's voices in addition to the regular mixed voice choir, in addition to arrangements for concert band!

The author of the text is the otherwise neglected nineteenth-century English poet Folliott Pierpoint, who taught classics at Somersetshire College in southwest England. Much of Pierpoint’s poems deals with nature, and For the beauty of the earth is believed to have been a rhapsodic response to a springtime vista in the Somerset countryside when he was 29.

Two pieces by Sigfrid Karg-Elert open and close our 10:15 service. Karg-Elert was a German composer of considerable fame in the early twentieth century, best known for his compositions for organ and harmonium (reed organ). He was born as Sigfried Karg, but his concert-agent suggested early in his career that he add  a variant of his mother's maiden name (Ehlert) to his surname, and adopt the Swedish spelling of his first name.

Karg-Elert regarded himself as a musical outsider. Notable influences in his work include composers Johann Sebastian Bach (Germany), Edvard Grieg (Norway), Claude Debussy (France), Alexander Scriabin (Russia), and early Arnold Schoenberg (Austria). In general terms, his musical style can be characterized as being late-romantic with impressionistic and expressionistic tendencies.

I was interested to discover that, though Karg-Elert was well received and appreciated outside of Germany (especially in the US and the UK, where the Organ Music Society of London held a ten-day festival in his honor in 1930), the cultural climate in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s was very hostile to the internationally oriented, French-influenced Karg-Elert. This is during the time that Adolph Hitler was on the rise, promoting his "Mach Deutschland wieder groß" (Make Germany Great Again) campaign.

Karg-Elert died in Liepzig in 1933 of complications from diabetes, at age 55.