January 3, 2016

Each week, you may find information here about the music in the traditional worship services at First United Methodist Church in Lewisville, Texas.  Some of this information is original; much of it is "borrowed" from other sources such as Wikipedia, GBOD, and hymnary.org.  It is my hope that this information will enhance your understanding and enrich your worship experience.  

About the Organ Music:

A Carol for the New Year – Alfred Fedak

The original text of this anonymous Slovak hymn ("Rok novy zase k nam prisel") was found in Tobias Zavorka's Czech hymnal Kancional (1602). A revision of that text was published in 1636 in Juraj Tranovsky's Pisne Duchovni Stare I Move, a Slovak Lutheran hymnal usually known as the Cithara Sanctorum. Jaroslav J. Vajda (b. 1919) prepared the English translation in 1968 for the Worship Supplement to The Lutheran Hymnal. This hymn remains very popular for New Year's Day celebrations in every Slovak home and church.

Born of Czechoslovakian parents, Vajda was educated at Concordia College in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Concordia Theological Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri. Ordain as a Lutheran pastor in 1944, he served congregations in Pennsylvania and Indiana until 1963. He was editor of the periodicals The Lutheran Beacon (1959-1963) and This Day (1963-1971) and book editor and developer for Concordia Publishing House in St. Louis from 1971 until his retirement in 1986. Working mainly with hymn texts, Vajda served on several Lutheran commissions of worship. A writer of original poetry since his teens, he is the author of They Followed the King (1965) and Follow the King (1977). A collection of his hymn texts, carols, and hymn translations was issued as Now the Joyful Celebration (1987); its sequel is So Much to Sing About (1991). Vajda's hymns are included in many modern hymnals, and he was honored as a Fellow of the Hymn Society in the United States and Canada in 1988.

“Rok Novy” is an anonymous Slovak tune that was first published in Tobias Zavorka's Kancional of 1602, though it may date back into the fifteenth century. The tune title means "new year" and is the incipit of the Slovak Old/New Year text "Rok novy zase k nam prisel," traditionally associated with this music. Zavorka served as a pastor and dean in the Bohemian city of Dubrava. Kancional was an important Bohemian Brethren hymnal containing 770 tunes.  The tune is often referred to as “Sixth Night”.

Greet now the swiftly changing year with joy and penitence sincere.
Rejoice! Rejoice! With thanks embrace another year of grace.

For Jesus came to wage sin's war; this Name of names for us he bore;
rejoice, rejoice, with thanks embrace another year of grace.

His love abundant for exceeds the volume of a whole year's needs;
rejoice, rejoice, with thanks embrace another year of grace.

With such a Lord to lead our way in hazard and prosperity,
what need we fear in earth or space in this new year of grace?

"All glory be to God on high and peace on earth," the angels cry;
rejoice, rejoice, with thanks embrace another year of grace.

Alfred V. Fedak (b. 1953) holds degrees from Hope Colege and Montclair State College.  A Fellow of the American Guild of Organists, he is Minister of Music at United Reformed Church, Somerville, New Jersey.

Variations on “Adoro Te, Devote” – Dale Wood

Adoro te devote is one of five beautiful hymns St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) composed in honor of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament at Pope Urban IV's (1261-1264) request when the Pope first established the Feast of Corpus Christi in 1264. The hymn is found in the Roman Missal as a prayer of thanksgiving after Mass. 

The paraphrase of the Latin text found in our hymnal is:

            Here, O my Lord, I see thee face to face;

            Here would I touch and handle things unseen,

            Here grasp with firmer hand eternal grace,

            And all my weariness upon thee lean.

Dale Wood (1934-2003) was a prominent composer, organist, choral director, and clinician.  He was honored many times by the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) for his “very important contribution towards the creation and development of contemporary American church music”.  He wrote many collections of organ works, most of which are based on both old and new hymn tunes.  Over eight million copies of his publications have been purchased in over 50 countries.

Trumpet Tune on “Wachet Auf” – Martha Sobaje

"Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme" (Awake, the voice is calling) is a Lutheran hymn written in German by Philipp Nicolai, first published in 1599 together with "Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern". It appears in German hymnals and in several English hymnals in translations such as "Wake, Awake, for Night Is Flying".  Philipp Nicolai wrote the hymn in 1598, a time when the plague had hit Unna where he lived as a preacher after studies in theology at the University of Wittenberg, for six months. The text is based on the Parable of the Ten Virgins (Matthew 25:1–13). Nicolai refers to other biblical ideas, such as from the Revelation the mentioning of marriage (Revelation 19:6–9) and the twelve gates, every one of pearl (Revelation 21:21), and from the First Letter to the Corinthians the phrase "eye hath not seen, nor ear heard" (1 Corinthians 2:9).  The author wrote in his preface, dated 10 August 1598: "Day by day I wrote out my meditations, found myself, thank God, wonderfully well, comforted in heart, joyful in spirit, and truly content; gave to my manuscript the name and title of a Mirror of Joy... to leave behind me (if God should call me from this world) as a token of my peaceful, joyful, Christian departure, or (if God should spare me in health) to comfort other sufferers whom He should also visit with the pestilence."

"Wake, awake, for night is flying," the watchmen on the heights are crying;
"Awake, Jerusalem, arise!"
Midnight hears the welcome voices and at the thrilling cry rejoices:
"Where are the virgins pure and wise?
The Bridegroom comes: Awake!  Your lamps with gladness take! Alleluia!
With bridal care and faith's bold prayer, to meet the Bridegroom, come, prepare!"

Lamb of God, the heavens adore you, the saints and angels sing before you
with harp and cymbals' clearest tone.
Of one pearl each shining portal, where, joining with the choir immortal,
we gather round your radiant throne.
No eye has seen that light, no ear the echoed might of your glory;
yet there shall we in victory sing shouts of joy eternally!

Martha Sobaje (b. 1948) has degrees from the University of the Pacific, Eastman School of Music, and the Graduate Theological Foundation in Donaldson, Indiana.  She is minister of music and education at Phillips Memorial Baptist Church in Cranston, Rhode Island.

About the Vocal Solo Music:

Go Tell it on the Mountain

The Fisk Jubilee Singers (drawing their name from Leviticus 25—the year of jubilee) were founded as a ten-member touring ensemble to raise funds for debt-ridden Fisk University. Taking the entire contents of the University treasury with them for travel expenses, they departed on October 6, 1871, from Nashville on their difficult, but ultimately successful eighteen-month tour, a triumph that is still celebrated annually as Jubilee Day on the campus. Though not the original repertoire of the group, by the time they reached New York in December of that year, their concerts grew to include more and more spirituals, until their program consisted primarily of choral arrangements of spirituals or, according to African American scholars C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence Mamiya, “anthemized spirituals.”

They have been credited with keeping the Negro spiritual alive. Spirituals scholar Sandra Jean Graham places this development in context: “The students were at first reluctant ambassadors for the songs of their ancestors. As [Jubilee] singer Ella Sheppard recalled, ‘The slave songs were never used by us then in public. They were associated with slavery and the dark past and represented the things to be forgotten. Then, too, they were sacred to our parents, who used them in their religious worship . . . It was only through persuasion that the students sang their spirituals privately for [the University’s treasurer, George L.] White [who was a white man], and through White’s coercion that they sang them in concert.”

Taking the spiritual to white and black audiences in the United States and Europe earned the school and the spiritual an international reputation. The small ensemble of two quartets and a pianist grew to a full choral ensemble. Other historically black colleges eventually followed the same pattern, including Howard University (Washington, D.C.) and Tuskegee Institute (now University, Tuskegee, Alabama).

The earliest version of the spiritual appeared in in Religious Folk Songs of The Negro, as Sung on The Plantations, new edition (1909) with the heading “Christmas Plantation Song” with different stanzas and in slave dialect:

When I was a seeker
I sought both night and day.
I ask de Lord to help me,
An’ He show me de way.

He made me a watchman
Upon the city wall, [a reference to Isaiah 21:11-12]
An’ if I am a Christian
I am the least of all.

Chorus:

Go tell it on de mountain,
Over de hills and everywhere.
Go tell it on de mountain,
Dat Jesus Christ is born.

A few smaller and less broadly circulated versions use these stanzas or a variation, for example, “When I was a sinner . . ..”

African Canadian composer R. Nathaniel Dett (1882-1943) added another harmonization and stanza in the volume he edited, Religious Folk-Songs of the Negro As Sung At Hampton Institute (1927). His stanza follows:

If you cannot sing like Angels,
If you cannot pray like Paul,
You can tell the love of Jesus,
You can say he died for all.

Dett’s stanza, or some version of it, is now most commonly associated with the spiritual, “There is a balm in Gilead.”

John Wesley Work, Jr. (1872?-1925), along with his brother Frederick Jerome Work (1878?-1942), led the Fisk Jubilee Singers from 1898-1904. Baptist hymnologist William J. Reynolds cites recollections by John Wesley Work, Jr.’s son about the role of “Go, tell it” on the campus: “[John Wesley Work, III] took pleasure in recalling his early days as a child on the campus of Fisk University where his father was a teacher. Very early on Christmas morning, long before sunrise, it was then the custom for students to gather and walk together from building to building singing [“Go, tell it on the mountain].”

Concert arrangements of spirituals were published in Frederick Work’s New Jubilee Songs, as Sung by the Fisk Jubilee Singers (1902), a collection that may have been co-edited by John Wesley Work, though his name does not appear in this collection. “Go, tell it” appears in another collection for solo voice and four-part choir edited by John Wesley Work, III (Work, Jr.’s son) in American Negro Songs and Spirituals: a Comprehensive Collection of 230 Folk Songs, Religious and Secular (1940).

Drawing on an adaptation of the Work brothers’ setting, The Pilgrim Hymnal (1958), edited by Hugh Porter (1897-1960), professor in the Sacred Music Department at Union Seminary (New York), was the first mainline hymnal to include the spiritual. John Wesley Work’s stanzas based on Luke 2:8-20 have become the standard versions in hymnals:

1. While shepherds kept their watching . . .
2. The shepherds feared and trembled . . .
3. Down in a lowly manger . . .

From this hymnal, versions of “Go, tell it” have spread to the point that it has become one of a “canon” of spirituals found in virtually every hymnal today.

John Wesley Work, Jr. (sometimes designated John Wesley Work II to distinguish him from his son) received his master’s degree from Fisk University, and after further study at Harvard, began teaching Latin and Greek at the University in 1898. He trained the Jubilee Singers and was a leader in preserving and performing African American spirituals. He taught at Fisk University until 1923 when he was relieved of his duties due to changing attitudes toward the spiritual. He then went on to be President of Roger Williams University in Nashville until his death in 1925.

The spiritual has inspired works in other media. Author James Baldwin’s (1924-1987) first major work and semi-autobiographical novel was titled Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953). The novel discusses the role of the paradoxical church as experienced by African Americans, both as the incubator for repression and hypocrisy and as a foundation for hope, identity, and community. The ABC network produced a movie using this title in 1984.

In 1963, the musical team “Peter, Paul and Mary”, along with their musical director, Milt Okun, adapted and rewrote "Go Tell It on the Mountain" as "Tell It on the Mountain", their lyrics referring specifically to Exodus and using the phrase "Let my people go," but referring implicitly to the Civil Rights struggle of the early 1960s. According to Religious Studies professor and Civil Rights historian Charles Marsh, it was African American Civil Rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer who combined this song with the spiritual "Go Down Moses," taking the last line of the chorus, "Let my people go" and substituting it in the chorus of "Go Tell it on the Mountain". Marsh does not document this claim, but given that Hamer was highly active in Civil Rights work beginning in the 1950s, and that the use of the Exodus story and the singing of spirituals played a central role in her activities, this claim is compelling. The song was recorded by Yarrow, Stookey and Travers on their “Peter, Paul and Mary” album In the Wind and was also a moderately successful single for them.

Regardless of which version that is sung, “Go, tell it on the mountain” has become a truly American contribution to the telling of the Christmas story that is now sung around the world.

About the Hymns:

We’ve a Story to Tell to the Nations

H. Ernest Nichol (1862-1926) had begun a study program in civil engineering when he decided to study music instead. In 1888 he received a bachelor's degree in music from Oxford University. Nichol wrote some 130 hymn tunes and texts, many under the pseudonym “Colin Sterne” (derived from his middle and last name); many were first sung at church school programs.  “We’ve a Story to Tell to the Nations was written in 1896 and published in Sunday School Hymnary, 1905.  A song which encourages us to “go therefore and teach all nations” (Matthew 28:19) was a very popular "missionary hymn" among denominational churches in past years, typical of the hundreds that were penned to express the determined, dynamic, energetic, and expansive attributes of late nineteenth-century "Christian missions."

Bread of the World

Written by Reginald Heber, "Bread of the World" was first published posthumously in his Hymns written and adapted to the Weekly Church Service of the Year (1827); it was subtitled "Before the Sacrament."  Heber indicated it was to be sung as part of the service of confession and forgiveness or during the communion liturgy as a substitute for the traditional singing of the Agnus Dei. The text is a prayer asking Christ to look on us with mercy and to feed us with his grace. Though written in two stanzas, it is one continuous thought. A devotional text with strong poetic images–"bread of the world" and "wine of the soul"–this hymn invites confession of sin and the acceptance of divine grace.
Reginald Heber (1783-1826) was a bright youth, translating a Latin classic into English verse by the time he was seven, entering Oxford at 17, and winning two awards for his poetry during his time there. After his graduation he became rector of his father's church in where he remained for 16 years. He was appointed Bishop of Calcutta in 1823.  Most of his 57 hymns, which include "Holy, Holy, Holy," are still in use today.

Now Let Us From This Table Rise

The author of this hymn, the Rev Fred Kaan, was born in the Netherlands in 1929. As a young boy, his evening prayer had a three-fold thrust: 1) that their house will not burn down, 2) that his parents will not die early, and 3) that there will be no war.  The first two petitions were “granted” but the third one was not. Kaan spent five years under the Nazi Occupation where he saw his father become the leader of the resistance movement in their neighborhood and his mother a gunrunner who sheltered a Jew and one political prisoner for two-and-a-half years. He saw this as an added risk to their daily living. His experience of the war marked in him a profound and deep concern over peace and justice. 

After the war, he moved to the UK and it was there that he eventually joined the ordained ministry. During his first pastorate, a young postman, a church member, approached him and said: “I am leaving church!” Kaan asked why, and the postman replied “because the hymns don’t send me any longer!” This reply struck Kaan and he thought “if the hymns we sang in church paralysed my postman friend … then the mission of the church is seriously impaired”. This was when Kaan started to look at hymns with a critical ear.  As a minister at the Pilgrim Church in Plymouth, England he became seriously involved in exploring new ways of worship and service. He searched for hymns that “proclaimed the Gospel in the modern city in a language that can be understood”. Because he found very few he began to write hymns that spoke about justice, peace, social action and healing in broken relationships, communities and in the world.

The first hymn that he wrote was “Now Let Us From This Table Rise,” a post-communion hymn. He wrote this with the following questions in mind: “What happens after we have shared the bread and wine at the Lord’s Table? How do we make that vital transition from worship to service, from celebration to action?”