May 29, 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:

He Leadeth Me – Dale Wood

Although Joseph Gilmore (1834-1918) became a distinguished university and seminary professor, an author of several textbooks in Hebrew and English literature, and a respected Baptist minister, he is best remembered today for this one hymn, hurriedly written when he was just twenty-eight. Gilmore scribbled down these lines in 1862, while visiting with friends after preaching about the truths of the 23^rd Psalm at the Wednesday evening service of the First Baptist Church in Philadelphia. He left this account:

At the close of the service we adjourned to Deacon Watson’s pleasant home, where we were being entertained. During our conversation the blessedness of God’s leading so grew upon me that I took out my pencil, wrote the text just as it stands today, handed it to my wife, and thought no more of it.

Without telling her husband, Mrs. Gilmore sent the verses to the “Watchman and Reflector Magazine”, where it first appeared the following year. Three years later Joseph Gilmore went to Rochester, New York, as a candidate to become the pastor of Second Baptist Church. He recalls:

Upon entering the chapel I took up a hymnal, thinking—I wonder what they sing here. To my amazement the book opened up at “He Leadeth Me,” and that was the first time I knew that my hurriedly written lines had found a place among the songs of the church.

William Bradbury, an important American contributor to early gospel hymnody, added two additional lines to the chorus: “His faithful foll’wer I would be, for by His hand He leadeth me.”

He leadeth me, O blessed thought! O words with heav’nly comfort fraught!
Whate’er I do, where’er I be Still ’tis God’s hand that leadeth me.

Sometimes ’mid scenes of deepest gloom, Sometimes where Eden’s bowers bloom,
By waters still, o’er troubled sea, Still ’tis His hand that leadeth me.

Lord, I would place my hand in Thine, Nor ever murmur nor repine;
Content, whatever lot I see, Since ’tis my God that leadeth me.

And when my task on earth is done, When by Thy grace the vict’ry’s won,
E’en death’s cold wave I will not flee, Since God through Jordan leadeth me.

He leadeth me, He leadeth me, By His own hand He leadeth me;
His faithful foll’wer I would be, For by His hand He leadeth me.

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.

Triumphant March – Edvard Grieg

Edvard Hagerup Grieg (1843-1907) was a Norwegian composer and pianist. He is widely considered one of the leading Romantic era composers, and his music is part of the standard classical repertoire worldwide. His use and development of Norwegian folk music in his own compositions put the music of Norway in the international spectrum, as well as helping to develop a national identity, much as Jean Sibelius and Antonín Dvořák did in Finland and Bohemia, respectively.

Edvard Grieg’s mother was his first piano teacher and taught him to play at the age of six. In the summer of 1858, Grieg met the eminent Norwegian violinist Ole Bull, who recognized the 15-year-old boy's talent and persuaded his parents to send him to the Leipzig Conservatory. In the spring of 1860, he survived a life-threatening lung disease, pleurisy and tuberculosis. Throughout his life, Grieg's health was impaired by a destroyed left lung and considerable deformity of his thoracic spine. He suffered from numerous respiratory infections, and ultimately died of combined lung and heart failure. His final words were "Well, if it must be so." 

About the Choral Music:

The Lord Bless You and Keep You – Peter Lutkin

Peter Christian Lutkin (1858-1931) was born in Wisconsin to Danish immigrant parents.  He was a chorister and organist at St. Peter and St. Paul's Episcopal Church. At age twenty-one, he became a piano instructor in the Conservatory of Music at Northwestern University. He travelled to Berlin and studied at the Royal Academy of Arts in Berlin. He returned to Chicago to serve as organist and choirmaster at St. Clement's Protestant Episcopal Church and St. James Episcopal Church. He also served on the faculty of the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago. He was a widely respected organist and helped found the American Guild of Organists in 1896.

In 1891, he returned to Northwestern University, where he founded the Women's Cecilian Choir, the Men's Glee Club, and the A Cappella Choir (1906), the first a cappella choir in the U.S. Lutkin became a national spokesperson for a cappella singing. As a composer, Lutkin specialized in writing unaccompanied choral music. He wrote at least thirty hymn tunes, numerous songs for children, and sixty-five choral anthems, some of which remain in print today. He co-edited a Methodist hymnal and was musical editor of the Methodist Sunday-School Hymnal. Generations of choristers likely were first introduced to his choral music through his benediction setting, The Lord Bless You and Keep You, with its famous concluding sevenfold amen.

            The Lord bless you and keep you,

The Lord lift His countenance upon you; And give you peace.

The Lord make His face to shine upon you, and be gracious unto you.

               Amen.

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.”

Blest Be the Tie That Binds

John Fawcett (1740-1817) was born into a poor family in Yorkshire, England, and was orphaned at age 12.  To survive, he accepted a lengthy apprenticeship to a tailor.  While still in his teens, he heard the great George Whitfield preach and became a Christian.  Fawcett became active in a Baptist church and was often asked to speak.  At age 25 (and newly married), he was invited to serve as pastor of a small church at Wainsgate.  The poor people of that little village were able to pay very little, and much of Fawcett's pay came as potatoes and other produce.  Once his wife, Mary, began having children, they found it difficult to survive.

Fawcett learned that the pastor of a large Baptist church in London was retiring, and he let the church know that he would be interested in serving them.  They called him to be their pastor at a much larger salary, so John and Mary packed their household and prepared to move.  But, as the story is told, Mary told John that she didn't think she could leave these people whom they had both learned to love, and John admitted that he shared her sentiment; so, the two of them unpacked the wagon and told the London church know they wouldn't be coming.

Fawcett, who wrote a number of hymns during his lifetime, wrote the hymn, "Blest Be the Tie," to convey his sentiments and those of his wife to the poor people among whom they had chosen to live.  Fawcett served that little church for the rest of his life –– 54 years in all.

Go Forth for God

"Go Forth for God" exhorts believers to "go forth for God" to the world in peace”, "in love", "in strength", and "in joy", using phrases from Romans 12:9-21 and 1 Thessalonians 5:13b¬22-.   John R. Peacey (1896-1971) wrote the original text to this hymn in 1968. The 1987 Psalter Hymnal version of the text, however, is a result of revisions made by Peacey in 1970 and by the editors of the English Hymnal supplement, English Praise (1975). Educated in theology at Selwyn College, Cambridge, Peacey was ordained in the Church of England in 1923. In addition to serving several churches in England, he was also headmaster and principal of the Bishop Cotton School in Simla, India (1927-1945), and principal of Bishop's College in Calcutta, India (1935-1945). Peacey concluded his career at Bristol Cathedral (1945-1966). Written mainly during his retirement years, his hymn texts were published posthumously in Go Forth for God (1981).