Music for March 26, 2023 + The Fifth Sunday in Lent

Vocal Music

• Wondrous Love – Steve Pilkington, arr.

Instrumental Music

• Kyrie. Dialogue on the trompette and chromhorne – François Couperin (1668-1733)
• Kyrie. Fugue on the jeux d'Aanches – François Couperin
• Kyrie. Recit de chromhorne – François Couperin

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

• Hymn 411 - O bless the Lord, my soul (ST. THOMAS (WILLIAMS))
• Hymn R90 - Spirit of the living God (IVERSON)
• Hymn 143- The glory of these forty days (ERHALT UNS, HERR)
• Hymn 314 - Humbly I Adore thee (ADORO DEVOTE)
• Hymn 715 - When Jesus wept (WHEN JESUS WEPT)
• Hymn 495 - Hail, thou once despised Jesus! (IN BABILONE)
• Psalm 130 - Tone IIa

Wondrous Love

Sometimes nothing can beat a simple, plaintive melody for its beauty. Such is my opinion of the Southern folk hymn, What wondrous Love Is This? In the version the choir sings this week, you never hear the voices in more than two-part harmony, and that is when they are singing in canon (The men echoing the women four beats later.) Their singing is accompanied on the piano with a flowing, eighth-note piano part.

It is the perfect hymn to sing during the Lenten season. (The congregation gets a chance to sing it on Maundy Thursday.) "What Wondrous Love Is This" captures our attention right from the beginning with its simplicity and persistence – "What wondrous love is this" sung three times. This repetition is not the sign of a weak poet who has a narrow range of expression, but a fellow traveler who has experienced profoundly the sacrificial love of Christ and can only express again and again – "What wondrous love is this." 

The arranger, Steve Pilkington, serves on the faculty of Westminster Choir College in Princeton, N.J. as Associate Professor of Sacred Music. He also oversees all the music ministries at Christ Church United Methodist in  New York City, where he has been Director of Music and Organist since 1994. 

Couplets on the Kyrie

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 (a term which indicates a type of liturgy where alternate sections of the Mass were performed by different forces}, the organist plays when texts would otherwise have been sung. Those sections were call couplets

Today's movements all come from the first part of the mass, the Kyrie, which we normally only use during Lent. The titles have nothing to do with text, but with musical form; the Dialogue sur la trompette et le chromorne is a two-part piece with the trumpet stop playing against the krummhorn, an organ stop which imitates the double-reed wind instrument that flourished between the 15th century and about 1650. The Récit de chromorne features that same stop in an improvisatory solo for the krummhorn, while the Fugue sur les jeux d'anche is simply a fugue using nothing but the reed stops, which on an organ includes the trumpet stops.

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 organist to king Louis XIV in 1693.