June 28, 2020 + The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

Vocal Music

• All Good Gifts from Godspell – Stephen Schwartz (b. 1948)

Instrumental Music

• The Morning Trumpet – Michael J. James (1947-2019)
• Pisgah – Dale Wood (1934-2003)

Congregational Music (all hymns from the Hymnal 1982)

• Hymn 525 - The Church’s one foundation (AURELIA)

44 years ago this past week, Godspell opened on Broadway after first showing up Off-broadway five years earlier. It was the first big show for song writer Stephen Schwartz, who was 23 years old when he first took on the task of writing the music for a show that had already been in production.

Godspell began as a project by drama students at Carnegie Mellon University and then moved Off-Off-Broadway. Instead of writing a script which the actors memorized, Godspell’s actors, began rehearsing with parables and stories from the Bible that were brought in by the show’s conceiver and director, John-Michael Tebelak. The methods of working with the material essentially emerged by way of an improvisational process. They shaped various spiritual lessons into a stylized piece of musical theater under Tebelak’s guidance. Whether they played charades, came up with a Three Stooges type of response, or found some other way to communicate an idea, it was largely invented during rehearsals.

The songs for Godspell originally came from the Episcopal Hymnal 1940. With Stephen Schwartz, the show was rescored for an Off-Broadway production, which became a long-running success.

This Sunday, Amy Bogan will sing All Good Gifts. In most Godspell productions, during the instrumental break the actor playing Jesus speaks a few lines from Matthew chapter 6 about not storing up treasures on earth.

Composer Stephen Schwartz with publisher Marty Ostrow
and Managing Editor Irv Lichtman
(Photo:Sony Music Photo Archive)

When John-Michael Tebelak was first piecing together the college production of Godspell, he remembered a harvest song in the Episcopal hymnal that is sometimes performed at Thanksgiving services, “We Plow the Fields, and Scatter.” Tebelak asked his friend Duane Bolick to write music to go with the words so the song could be used in Act I of the new musical. Bolick wrote a slow ballad that would be accompanied by a rock band.

In 1971, Stephen Schwartz prepared his version of the music for the final incarnation of Godspell at the Cherry Lane Theatre. He used the same lyrics but wrote his own music. He says he was inspired, in part, by the introductory chords to James Taylor’s song “Fire and Rain.”

The instrumental music on Sunday comes from the tradition of the Sacred Harp, a uniquely American tradition that brings communities together to sing four-part hymns and anthems. Technically, that style of singing is “shape note singing” because the musical notation uses noteheads in 4 distinct shapes to aid in sight-reading, but it is often called “Sacred Harp” singing because the books that most singers use today are called “The Sacred Harp."

The opening voluntary is a piano duet on the tune THE MORNING TRUMPET, written in 1844 by Benjamin F. White, coeditor of the original The Sacred Harp, for the text by John Leland, an American Baptist Minister.

O, when shall I see Jesus and reign with him above,
and shall hear the trumpet sound in that morning,
and from the flowing fountain drink everlasting love,
and shall hear the trumpet sound in that morning?

Both parts of this duet are played by me (Jackson Hearn), thanks to modern technology!

The closing voluntary is an organ piece by Dale Wood from his Organ Book of American Folk Hymns.  The tune is PISGAH, which is usually paired with the hymn "When I can read my title clear." It's an earlier tune than THE MORNING TRUMPET, coming from a song book called Kentucky Harmony (1816).