February 7, 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:

With High Delight – Charles Ore

George Vetter (1536-1599) was a Moravian Roman Catholic priest who wrote 6 published hymns.  He wrote this text on the melody of a Huguenot Psalm (probably originally of Guillaume Franc,1543).  It was first published in Kirchengeseng darinnen die Heubtartickel des Christlichen Glaubens gefsset (also called the Bohemian Brethren’s Kirchengeseng), 1566.  The text was translated by Martin H. Franzmann (1907-1976), a theologian and poet of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod.

With high delight Let us unite
In songs of sweet jubilation.
You pure in heart, Each take your part,
Sing Jesus Christ, our salvation.

Let praises ring; Give thanks, and bring
To Christ our Lord adoration.
His honor speed by word and deed
To every land, every nation.

In addition to being an accomplished organ recitalist, Dr. Charles Ore (b. 1936) composes organ and choral music, and is a leader in the use and development of improvisation in organ playing. He is organist at First Presbyterian Church in Lincoln, Neb.

Voluntary on “Nyland” – Gordan Young

Rusty Edwards (b. 1955) provides Christians with a hymn that articulates a contemporary vision of the mission of the church. He was born in Dixon, Ill. Following graduation from Interlochen Arts Academy and the University of Nebraska, Dr. Edwards taught school at St. Boniface in Elgin, Neb.  His theological education includes a master of divinity degree from Luther Northwestern Seminary (now Luther Seminary), a doctorate in creative ministry from the Graduate Theological Foundation at Notre Dame, Ind., and a certificate from the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest.  Following his ordination in 1985, he served Trinity Lutheran Church (ELCA) in Moline, Ill., until 1991. He currently serves as senior pastor at Gloria Dei Lutheran Church in Rockford, Ill. He is also the pastoral advisor for Rockford Lutheran High School and is on the board of the Rockford Area Habitat for Humanity. 

“We All Are One in Mission” was written in 1985. The unity of the church, local and universal,

is at the heart of this hymn. It is not the responsibility of only missionaries or ordained clergy to practice mission in all of its forms, but is integral to the service of all in the church who are 

united by Christ and have a sense of his “resurrected Justice.” “We All Are One in Mission” is 

found in Dr. Edwards’ first collection of hymns, The Yes of the Heart: Faith, Hope and Love 

Songs (Hope Publishing Co., 1993), as well as in numerous recent hymnals. It is the most 

published of his hymns, appearing in over two dozen collections and hymnals, and according to

the author is “rather unique, because it has been published with 10 different tunes.” 

               We all are one in mission, We all are one in call,

               Our varied gifts united By Christ, the Lord of all.

               A single, great commission Compels us from above

               To plan and work together That all may know Christ's love.

               We all are called for service To witness in God's name.

               Our ministries are diff'rent, Our purpose is the same:

               To touch the lives of others By God's surprising grace

               So ev'ry folk and nation May feel God's warm embrace.

               We all behold one vision, A stark reality:

               The steward of salvation Was nailed upon a tree.

               Yet resurrected Justice Gives rise that we may share

               Free reconciliation And hope amid despair.

               Now let us be united And let our song be heard.

               Now let us be a vessel For God's redeeming Word.

               We all are one in mission, We all are one in call,

               Our varied gifts united By Christ, the Lord of all.

Gordon Young (1919-1998) was born in McPherson, Kansas, and during his lifetime was

recognized as one of this country's great church organists. He was a prolific and talented

composer for both organ and choir, with nearly 1000 published works.  During the course of his career, he was a radio organist in Tulsa, a music critic and columnist for daily newspapers in

Oklahoma and Pennsylvania, and choirmaster in churches in Philadelphia and Kansas City.

Young taught organ in conjunction with Wayne State University and for 15 years was organist

and choir director at the First Presbyterian Church in Detroit.

Fughetta No. 7 – Joseph Rheinberger

A fugue is a contrapuntal compositional technique in two or more voices, built on a subject

(theme) that is introduced at the beginning in imitation (repetition at different pitches) and recurs frequently in the course of the composition.  The English term fugue originated in the 16th

century and is derived from the French word fugue or the Italian fuga. This in turn comes from

Latin, also fuga, which is itself related to both fugere ("to flee") and fugare ("to chase").  A

“fughetta” is quite literally a short fugue.

Josef Gabriel Rheinberger (1839- 1901) was an organist and composer, born in Liechtenstein but resident for most of his life in Germany.  Rheinberger showed exceptional musical talent at an early age. When only seven years old, he was already serving as organist of the Vaduz parish church, and his first composition was performed the following year.  In 1851, his father, who had initially opposed his son's desire to embark on the life of a professional musician, relented and allowed him to enter the Munich Conservatorium. Not long after graduating, he became professor of piano and of composition at the same institution.

The stylistic influences on Rheinberger ranged from contemporaries such as Brahms to composers from earlier times, such as Mendelssohn, Schumann, Schubert and, above all, Bach. He was also an enthusiast for painting and literature (especially English and German).  Rheinberger was a prolific composer. His religious works include twelve Masses (one for double chorus, three for four voices a cappella, three for women's voices and organ, two for men's voices and one with orchestra), a Requiem and a Stabat Mater. His other works include several operas, symphonies, chamber music, and choral works.  Today Rheinberger is remembered above all for his elaborate and challenging organ compositions; these include two concertos, 20 sonatas in 20 different keys (of a projected set of 24 sonatas in all the keys), 22 trios, and 36 solo pieces.

About the Choral Music:

Panis Angelicus – César Franck

César-Auguste-Jean-Guillaume-Hubert Franck (1822-1890) was a composer, pianist, organist, and music teacher who was born at Liège, in what is now Belgium (though at the time of his birth it was part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands). In that city he gave his first concerts in 1834. He studied privately in Paris from 1835.  After a brief return to Belgium, and a disastrous reception to an early oratorio Ruth, he moved to Paris, where he married and embarked on a career as teacher and organist. He gained a reputation as a formidable improviser, and travelled widely in France to demonstrate new organs built by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll.  In 1858, he became organist at Sainte-Clotilde, a position he retained for the rest of his life. He became professor at the Paris Conservatoire in 1872; he became a French citizen, a requirement of the appointment.

He wrote for organ and piano, as well as orchestral and choral works.  His music is often contrapuntally complex, using a harmonic language that is prototypically late Romantic, showing a great deal of influence from Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner. In his compositions, Franck showed a talent and a penchant for frequent, graceful modulations of key.  Franck had huge hands, capable of spanning twelve white keys on the keyboard. This allowed him unusual flexibility in voice-leading between internal parts in fugal composition, and in the size of the repeated chords which are a feature of much of his keyboard music. Of the Violin Sonata's writing it has been said: "Franck, blissfully apt to forget that not every musician's hands were as enormous as his own, littered the piano part (the last movement in particular) with major-tenth chords... most mere pianistic mortals ever since have been obligated to spread them in order to play them at all."  The key to his music may be found in his personality. His friends record that he was "a man of utmost humility, simplicity, reverence and industry." Louis Vierne, a pupil and later organist titulaire of Notre-Dame, wrote in his memoirs that Franck showed a "constant concern for the dignity of his art, for the nobility of his mission, and for the fervent sincerity of his sermon in sound... Joyous or melancholy, solemn or mystic, powerful or ethereal: Franck was all those at Sainte-Clotilde."

Panis angelicus (Latin for "Bread of Angels") is the penultimate strophe of the hymn "Sacris solemniis" written by Saint Thomas Aquinas for the Feast of Corpus Christi as part of a complete liturgy of the feast, including prayers for the Mass and the Liturgy of the Hours.  The strophe of "Sacris solemniis" that begins with the words "Panis angelicus" (bread of angels) has often been set to music separately from the rest of the hymn. Most famously, in 1872, César Franck set this strophe for tenor voice, harp, cello, and organ, and incorporated it into his Messe à trois voix, Op. 12.

            Panis angelicus                       May the Bread of Angels

            fit panis hominum;                  Become bread for mankind;

            Dat panis coelicus                   The Bread of Heaven puts

            figuris terminum:                     all foreshadowings to an end;

            O res mirabilis!                       Oh, thing miraculous!

            Manducat Dominum               This body of God will nourish

              Pauper, servus et humilis           the poor, the servile, and the humble.

About the Hymns:

O Worship the King

Of Scottish ancestry, Robert Grant (1779-1838) was born in India, where his father was a director of the East India Company. He attended Magdalen College, Cambridge, and was called to the bar in 1807. He had a distinguished public career a Governor of Bombay and as a member of the British Parliament, where he sponsored a bill to remove civil restrictions on Jews. Grant was knighted in 1834. His hymn texts were published in the Christian Observer (1806-1815), in Elliot’s Psalms and Hymns (1835), and posthumously by his brother as Sacred Poems (1839).

Grant’s text was influenced by William Kethe’s paraphrase of Psalm 104 in the Anglo-Genevan Psalter (1561). Grant’s text was first published in Edward Bickersteth’s Christian Psalmody (1833) with several unauthorized alterations. In 1835 his original six-stanza text was published in Henry Elliott’s Psalm and Hymns. Stanza 3 was omitted in the Psalter Hymnal.

Rather than being a paraphrase or versification, the text is a meditation on the creation theme of Psalm 104, focusing on God’s creation as a testimony to his “measureless might.” More personal in tone, stanzas 4 and 5 confess the compassion of God toward his creatures and affirm with apocalyptic vision that the “ransomed creation, with glory ablaze” will join with angels to hymn its praise to God.  In the last verse, Grant points to Christ as the ultimate reconciler of a broken, but still beautiful creation. An original last stanza that we no longer sing reads, “The humbler creation, though feeble their lays, with true adoration shall lisp to Thy praise.”

Fill My Cup, Lord

Richard Eugene Blanchard Sr. (1925-2004) was born in 1925 in Chungking, China, to Methodist missionary parents. When the Blanchard family returned home to the United States, Richard grew up as a child and youth in Indiana and North Carolina.  Blanchard was ordained in 1950, after serving two years as pastor of the Snellville-Grayson circuit of the North Georgia Conference of the United Methodist Church. Transferring to the Florida Conference in 1950, Blanchard completed 40 years in the ministry of the United Methodist Church.

Certainly Blanchard's most famous song was "Fill My Cup, Lord". During the 1970s the song was popularized throughout much of the United States by Blanchard's close friend, musician and evangelist Rev. Ray Vaughn.  Our United Methodist Hymnal only has the chorus.  The verses are as follows:

Like the woman at the well I was seeking
For things that could not satisfy;
And then I heard my Savior speaking:
"Draw from my well that never shall run dry".

There are millions in this world who are craving
The pleasures earthly things afford.
But none can match the wondrous treasure
That I find in Jesus Christ my Lord.

So, my brother, if the things this world gave you
Leave hungers that won't pass away,
My blessed Lord will come and save you,
If you kneel to Him and humbly pray.

Here I Am, Lord

Dan Schutte is a native of Wisconsin, who received his education at St. Louis University with a bachelor’s degree in 1973, a master of divinity degree in 1979 at the Jesuit School of Theology, Berkeley, Calif., and a master’s degree in 1980 at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.  Following graduation, Mr. Schutte joined the Jesuits and served as the director of liturgy at Marquette University (1982-1986). He entered parish ministry in Milwaukee serving as director of music at Immaculate Heart of Mary and then Our Lady of Lourdes parishes.   He is currently director of music at the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit institution, and tours extensively as a Christian concert artist. Of his many hymns, “Here I Am, Lord” is the most commonly sung.

A salient feature of Catholic renewal hymnody since the Second Vatican Council is a stirring and memorable refrain. “Here I Am, Lord” recalls immediately Isaiah 6:8: “Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I; send me!’”

An unusual attribute of this hymn is the change in point of view that the singer makes between the stanzas and the refrain. The stanzas speak from the perspective of God in the first person singular, while the refrain, though remaining in first person, is from the perspective of the singers of the hymn offering their lives to God.   Each stanza reflects a paradox. The powerful God, creator of “sea and sky,” “snow and rain” and “wind and flame” is also the God who hears the “people cry,” bears the “people’s pain” and “tend[s] the poor and lame.”  This is a hymn of transformation. God transforms the darkness into light in stanza one, melts “hearts of stone” with love in stanza two and nourishes the “poor and lame” with the “finest bread”—a clear Eucharistic reference.  Each stanza ends with the question, “Whom shall I send?” Rhetorical questions are very common poetical devices in Christian hymnody, but this is not one of them. The refrain immediately offers the response, “Here I am, Lord.”