Music for Sunday, September 13, 2020 + The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost

 Vocal Music

• Go Down, Moses – Negro Spiritual, Richard Murray, baritone

Instrumental Music

• Vater Unser in Himmelreich, BWV 737 – J. S. Bach (1685-1750)
• Toccata in E Minor – Johann Pachelbel (1653-1706)

Congregational Music (all hymns from the Hymnal 1982.)

• Hymn 674 – “Forgive our sins as we forgive” (DETROIT)
• Hymn 421 – All glory be to God on high (ALLEIN GOTT IN DER HÖH)

The Old Testament lesson this Sunday is the account of the children of Israel being led out of Egypt and crossing the Red Sea. The first song I thought of was the old Negro Spiritual, Go Down, Moses. 

Many of the Negro Spirituals, which were sung in the field as well as in church meetings, were "code songs," songs that sounded like Bible stories, but with double meanings which were most often covert. Therefore, only Christian slaves understood them, and even when ordinary words were used, they reflected personal relationship between the slave singer and God.

The codes of the first negro spirituals are often related with an escape to a free country. For example, a "home" is a safe place where everyone can live free. So, a "home" can mean Heaven, but it covertly means a sweet and free country, a haven for slaves. 

"Go Down, Moses" does not employ the hidden symbolism of the code songs. 

Only a very obtuse listener can miss its point. It says flatly that Moses freed these Egyptian slaves boldly and justly because slavery is wrong. It clearly projects the principles of this experience to all the world: wherever men are held in bondage, they must and shall be freed. The "Let my people go!" refrain is thunderous. It does not argue economic, sociological, historical, and racial points. . . . It wastes no words and moves relentlessly toward its goal of filling every listener with a pervasive contempt for oppression and a resounding enthusiasm for freedom. -from Black Song, 1972, pp. 326-327

Vater unser im Himmelreich is Martin Luther’s interpretation of  the Our Father: the only prayer that came directly from Jesus himself and which has thus always had a special place in Christianity.

Of the various organ arrangements Bach made of this chorale, this is the most subdued and timeless. The piece is written in stile antico – the ‘ancient’, vocal, polyphonic composition style of the sixteenth century. Bach may have used the ‘ancient style’ here to emphasise the fact that Vater unser im Himmelreich is a prayer, implying words and thoughts, either spoken or sung. In fact, this arrangement is a four-part motet in the ancient style and you could easily perform the whole piece in song. Occasionally, there is a slightly more daring harmony, which is all that betrays the fact that this piece is not really a motet from the 1500s.

This tune is found in our hymnal at hymn 575, though to a different text. (Before thy throne, O God.)