Music for Sunday, June 19, 2022 + The Second Sunday after Pentecost

Vocal Music 

• Litany to the Holy Spirit – Peter Hurford (1930-2019)
• Bruce Bailey, baritone

Instrumental Music

• Fanfare-Improvisation on "Azmon" – Alec Wyton (1921-2007)
• How Can I Keep from Singing? – arr. Lani Smith (1931-2015)
• Trumpet Tune in D – Sam Batt Owens (1928-1978)

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

• Hymn 388 O worship the King (HANOVER)
• Hymn R37 Father, we love you (GLORIFY YOUR NAME)
• Hymn 658 As longs the deer for cooling stream (MARTYRDOM)
• Hymn 529 In Christ there is no East or West (MCKEE)
• Hymn From North and South (LASST UNS ERFREUEN)
• Hymn R9 As the deer pants for the water (Martin Nystrom)
• Hymn 493 O For a thousand tongues to sing (AZMON)

Litany to the Holy Spirit

Peter Hurford

English organist Peter Hurford was one of the leading organists of his day, concertizing in places such as Royal Festival Hall, the Sydney Opera House, and St. Albans Cathedral, just north of London, where he started the St. Albans International Organ Festival in 1963. He was known for for his incisive, buoyant recordings of Bach’s complete organ works for Decca in the late 1970s and early ’80s.

But he was also the director of music at St. Alban's, where he was credited with raising the standard of the abbey choir to that of the best cathedral and collegiate choirs in the country. He also initiated a choir camp at Luccombe, Somerset, and in 1958 brought together parish choirs from Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire for the first biennial diocesan choirs’ festival. He also published choral music for the Anglican liturgy, notably the Litany to the Holy Spirit, to a text by Robert Herrick, which Bruce Bailey will be singing for us today.

The Litany is a lovely, simple hymn which was originally written for the treble choir at St. Alban's, but since then has become so popular that an arrangement for full choir has been produced.

Fanfare-Improvisation on "Azmon"

AZMON is the tune name for our closing hymn this morning. Alec Wyton has taken this tune and used it for this extended prelude on that tune. Upon hearing it, you won't immediately hear the melody you connect with the words "O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing." Instead, the first thing you hear is a fanfare, followed by a leaping melodic line ("...and leap, ye lame, for joy." Pretty clever, huh?) that repeats over and over again. This is a compositional technique called ostinato (a continually repeated musical phrase or rhythm). Then comes a slowly moving melodic line that is reminiscent of the tune for "O for a thousand tongues," but not quite. In fact, in won't be until the third time that the melody is played that it begins to follow the familiar tune, and then it comes in with several iterations. At one point, the manuals are playing the tune in one key while the feet are playing it in another!

Alec Wyton

Alec Wyton was a ground breaking Anglican musician who for twenty years was Organist and Master of the Choristers at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City and Headmaster of the Cathedral Choir School. Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians described him by saying, "Wyton has brought together and caused to flourish three separate traditions: English church music, American church music and music from outside the churches." In his obituary, The New York Times called him the "Organist who updated church music."

Wyton was born in London, England. He was educated at the Royal Academy of Music, London and Oxford University. In 1950 he moved to America to take a position as Organist Choirmaster at Christ Church Cathedral, St. Louis, MO. Four years later he to St. John the Divine, where he remained for the next twenty years. He served as President of the American Guild of Organists and was a part of the editorial team that produced the influential ECUMENCIAL PRAISE hymnal in 1977. From that collection came the tune SHORNEY which is tune is #369 in THE HYMNAL 1982 set to Isaac Watts Holy Trinity text "How Wondrous Great, How Glorious Bright." 

During his time at St. John the Divine, Wyton tried to incorporate a variety of musical traditions into the music of the church. He provided a performing platform for emerging artists as well as collaborated with such performers as Eubie Blake, Duke Ellington, Leopold Stokowski, and the cast of “Hair.”

Trumpet Tune in D

The closing voluntary was written by another great Anglican musician, Sam Batt Owens, and like the opening voluntary, it is based on another great hymn tune, LOBE DEN HERREN ("Praise to the Lord, the Almighty").

Music for October 4, 2020 + The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Vocal Music

• Lord, for thy Tender Mercy’s Sake – Richard Farrant (c. 1525 –1580) or John Hilton (the elder) (1565 – 1609(?))

Instrumental Music

• All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name – Lani Smith (1934 - 2015)
• How Firm a Foundation – Lani Smith

Congregational Music (all hymns from the Hymnal 1982.)

• Hymn 495 - Hail, thou once despised Jesus (IN BABILONE)
• Song of Praise S-280 - Canticle 20: Glory to God – Robert Powell

Pardon Me, Your Roots are Showing

I have a confession to make.

Well, actually, two confessions.

(1) From where I sit in the choir gallery, I have a clear view of the tops of people's heads. And from that perch, it is easy to see who dyes their hair, and who needs to have their roots touched up. I'm just saying...

Your roots don't lie. They tell you just who (or what color) you (or your hairs) really are.

(2) Back where I come from (both geographically and generationally), the epitome of classy church music was a well played piano and organ duet. I grew up in rural West Tennessee, in what was considered a "high-church" Methodist. Our congregation had a really beautiful building built in 1924, with the only pipe organ in our town. We were justifiably proud of our 13-rank Möller pipe organ. I was enamored with it from a young age. 

Yours truly at the console of the 1924 Moller

Back in 1927 or '28, the organist, Mrs. Mae Peacock started subscribing to a bi-monthly organ magazine published by The Lorenz Publishing Company. Lorenz was to church music as Ford or Chevrolet was to the automobile. (The same could be said about Möller.) And, like Möller and Chevrolet, Lorenz was all I knew when it came to published music. So in 1975, when I was just a Junior in high school, I ordered a book of piano and organ duets which I played with my piano teacher in church. And it's that same volume of music that I have pulled out of mothballs for this Sunday's service! Only this time I am playing the organ with my friend (and Good Shepherd's usual substitute organist) Rob Carty on the piano.

Lani Smith

They were arranged by Lani Smith, a man whose musical pedigree belied his position in what most modern day church musicians would label a rather pedestrian publishing house.  Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, he was educated at the College‑Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati (BM and MM), and in 1958 he was a co‑winner of the Joseph H. Bearns Prize in Music from Columbia University, an award that honors America's most promising young composers. At age twenty‑five, Smith published his first piece with Lorenz, thus beginning a long career at the company. From 1967–82, Smith was a member of the editorial and composition staff at Lorenz, where he had responsibility for a number of publications and organ magazines, just like the one Mrs Mae subscribed to in the 20s and 30s.

So now you know my true colors. I'm just a rural church organist at heart, pretending to be one of the big boys!

The choir's anthem is a choral setting of a sixteenth century prayer by Henry Bull, set to music by either Richard Farrant or John Hilton, both English composers of sacred music. Farrant was organist at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, in the middle of the sixteenth century, while Hilton was known as a counter-tenor and organist, most notably at Trinity College, Cambridge. In the beginning, the music is in a simple, a capella, hymn-like style which befits the reflective and restful mood of the text, but at the words "that we may walk in a perfect heart" the choir has a chance to play around with the rhythms of the words and sing much more independently of each other, finally ending with a contrapuntal "amen." This was a challenge for the choir to sing as a virtual group, but they rose to the occasion!

Music for September 6, 2015 + The Fifthteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Vocal Music

• O Christ, the Healer, We have Come – Richard Gieseke (b 1952)

Instrumental Music

• To God All Praise and Glory - John M. Rasley (1913-1998) (Tune "Mit Freuden Zart")
• The Desert Shall Rejoice - Lani Smith (1934-2015)
• To God Be the Glory - William H. Doane

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

• Hymn 493 O for a thousand tongues to sing (AZMON)
• Hymn 602 Jesu, Jesu, fill us with your love (CHEREPONI)
• Hymn 610 Lord, whose love through humble service (BLAENHAFREN)
• Hymn 325 Let us break bread together (LET US BREAK BREAD)

This Sunday we hear the Gospel passage that tells the story of two healings. First, Jesus casts a demon out of the daughter of a Gentile woman, then he causes a deaf and dumb man to hear and speak. In response to that reading, the choir will sing a setting of Fred Pratt Green's hymn, O Christ, the healer, we have come.

O Christ, the healer, we have come

to pray for health, to plead for friends.

How can we fail to be restored,

when reached by love that never ends?

From every ailment flesh endures

our bodies clamor to be freed;

yet in our hearts we would confess

that wholeness is our deepest need.

In conflicts that destroy our health,

we diagnose the world's disease;

our common life declares our ills:

is there no cure, O Christ, for these?

Grant that we all, made one in faith,

in your community may find

the wholeness that, enriching us,

shall reach the whole of humankind.

The subject of health and healing is one that has changed over the last century. Earlier hymns, more holistic in approach, were reticent to mention mental health. Fred Pratt Green (1903-2000), a British Methodist minister and poet, produced a new hymn on the topic which the Rev. Carlton R. Young, editor of the United Methodist Hymnal, calls a “prayer for wholeness of body, mind, and spirit.”

Stanza one asks the question, “How can we fail to be restored / when reached by love that never ends?” Restoration should not be confused with physical healing. For the Christian, restoration may not take place in this life.

Stanza two places the emphasis upon “wholeness” rather than “every ailment flesh endures.” According to a member of the committee, stanza three suggests a Freudian awareness of the unconscious: “Release in us those healing truths / unconscious pride resists or shelves.”

Stanza three places our individual ailments in the broader context of the “world’s disease . . . [of] our common life.” The stanza ends with the rhetorical question: “Is there no cure, O Christ, for [our ills]?”

The hymn concludes with a petition that we should all be “made one in faith.” True healing and wholeness happens ultimately communally—in the restoration of “the whole of humankind.”

(from History of Hymns: “O Christ, the Healer” by C. Michael Hawn.  http://www.umcdiscipleship.org)

As I will be out of town this weekend, I am delighted to have Jill Kirkonis play the organ in my stead. She has recently retired from playing at The First Baptist Church in Porter, Texas, and has joined her husband Dennis in the congregation of Good Shepherd. She was confirmed by Bishop Doyle this past June, and is graciously playing for us this Sunday. 

Our opening hymn was chosen to support the Gospel Reading today. “If I had a thousand tongues, I would praise Christ with them all.” So said Peter Böhler to Charles Wesley, inspiring the first line of the classic hymn, “Oh, for a thousand tongues to sing, my great Redeemer’s praise” 

Written to celebrate the one year anniversary of Charles’ conversion to Christianity, this declaration of Christ’s power and victory in his own life, rich in Biblical imagery of the Kingdom of God, becomes our own hymn of praise. We stand with the angels before the throne of God, lifting our voices as one church to glorify the one who “bids our sorrows cease.”

And yet, we also sing in the knowledge that the Kingdom of God is not yet fully realized. We proclaim Christ’s victory as a declaration of hope that we will see Christ reign over all. We stand with the voiceless, the lame, the prisoner, and the sorrowing, and lift our song of expectation.