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:
Pomp and Circumstance No. 1 - Edward Elgar
Sir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet (1857- 1934) was an English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and international classical concert repertoire. Among his best-known compositions are orchestral works including the Enigma Variations, the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, concertos for violin and cello, and two symphonies. He also composed choral works, including The Dream of Gerontius, chamber music and songs. He was appointed Master of the King's Musick in 1924.
Although Elgar is often regarded as a typically English composer, most of his musical influences were not from England but from continental Europe. He felt himself to be an outsider, not only musically, but socially. In musical circles dominated by academics, he was a self-taught composer; in Protestant Britain, his Roman Catholicism was regarded with suspicion in some quarters; and in the class-conscious society of Victorian and Edwardian Britain, he was acutely sensitive about his humble origins even after he achieved recognition. He nevertheless married the daughter of a senior British army officer. She inspired him both musically and socially, but he struggled to achieve success until his forties, when after a series of moderately successful works his Enigma Variations (1899) became immediately popular in Britain and overseas. He followed the Variations with a choral work, The Dream of Gerontius (1900), based on a Roman Catholic text that caused some disquiet in the Anglican establishment in Britain, but it became, and has remained, a core repertory work in Britain and elsewhere. His later full-length religious choral works were well received but have not entered the regular repertory.
In his fifties, Elgar composed a symphony and a violin concerto that were immensely successful. His second symphony and his cello concerto did not gain immediate public popularity and took many years to achieve a regular place in the concert repertory of British orchestras. Elgar's music came, in his later years, to be seen as appealing chiefly to British audiences. His stock remained low for a generation after his death. It began to revive significantly in the 1960s, helped by new recordings of his works. Some of his works have, in recent years, been taken up again internationally, but the music remains more played in Britain than elsewhere.
Elgar has been described as the first composer to take the gramophone seriously. Between 1914 and 1925, he conducted a series of acoustic recordings of his works. The introduction of the microphone in 1925 made far more accurate sound reproduction possible, and Elgar made new recordings of most of his major orchestral works and excerpts from The Dream of Gerontius.
The Pomp and Circumstance Marches (full title Pomp and Circumstance Military Marches), Op. 39, are a series of marches for orchestra composed by Sir Edward Elgar. March No. 1 was composed in 1901 and dedicated "to my friend Alfred E. Rodewald and the members of the Liverpool Orchestral Society". The best known of the set, it had its premiere, along with the more reserved second March, in Liverpool on 19 October 1901, with Elgar conducting the Liverpool Orchestral Society.[4] Both marches were played two days later at a London Promenade Concert in the Queen's Hall London, conducted by Henry Wood, with March No. 1 played second, and the audience "...rose and yelled... the one and only time in the history of the Promenade concerts that an orchestral item was accorded a double encore."
The Trio contains the tune known as "Land of Hope and Glory". In 1902 the tune was re-used, in modified form, for the Land of hope and glory section of his Coronation Ode for King Edward VII. The words were further modified to fit the original tune, and the result has since become a fixture at the Last Night of the Proms, and an English sporting anthem.
In the United States, the Trio section "Land of Hope and Glory" of March No. 1 is often known simply as "Pomp and Circumstance" or as "The Graduation March" and is played as the processional tune at virtually all high school and some college graduation ceremonies. It was first played at such a ceremony on 28 June 1905, at Yale University, where the Professor of Music Samuel Sanford had invited his friend Elgar to attend commencement and receive an honorary doctorate of music. Elgar accepted, and Sanford made certain he was the star of the proceedings, engaging the New Haven Symphony Orchestra, the College Choir, the Glee Club, the music faculty members, and New York musicians to perform two parts from Elgar's oratorio The Light of Life and, as the graduates and officials marched out, "Pomp and Circumstance" March No. 1. Elgar repaid the compliment by dedicating his Introduction and Allegro to Sanford later that year. The tune soon became de rigueur at American graduations, used primarily as a processional at the opening of the ceremony.
About the Piano Music:
On Eagle’s Wings - Laura Wasson
Michael Joncas (b. 1951) was ordained in 1980 to the Roman Catholic priesthood, and has served since 1991 on the faculty of the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota. He has written three books, more than a hundred published articles, and has compiled more than 20 collections of liturgical music. Father Joncas was visiting a friend at the major seminary in Washington. One evening, Father Joncas’ friend got word that his father had suffered a fatal heart attack. Father Joncas wrote “On Eagle’s Wings” in the days that followed and it was was sung for the first time publicly at the friend’s father’s wake service. The song is based on Psalm 91 and Isaiah 4031:, its lyrics drawing from the Scripture’s descriptions of God’s protection and providence.
You who dwell in the shelter of the Lord, who abide in His shadow for life,
say to the Lord: "My refuge, my rock in whom I trust!"
The snare of the fowler will never capture you, and famine will bring you no fear:
under His wings your refuge, His faithfulness your shield.
You need not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day;
though thousands fall about you, near you it shall not come.
For to His angels He's given a command to guard you in all of your ways;
upon their hands they will bear you up, lest you dash your foot against a stone.
And God will raise you up on eagles’ wings, bear you on the breath of dawn
make you to shine like the sun, and hold you in the palm of His hand.
No biographical information is available on Laura E. Wasson.
About the Choral Music:
With Heart and Hands – John Rutter
Martin Rinkart (1586-1649) was the Bishop of Eilenberg, Germany during the Thirty Years’ War. Since Eilenberg was a walled city, it became a place of refuge for fugitives of the war, and also a place of famine and disease due to overcrowding. In 1637, at the height of their misery, Rinkart was the only clergyman left in the city who could perform the 40 or 50 daily burial services, one of which was for his wife. The city was sacked three times by invaders. During this time, Rinkart managed to write 7 dramas and 66 hymns. The hymn “Nun danket alle Gott” was originally titled “Tisch-Gebetlein” (a little prayer before the meal). This humble prayer of thanksgiving is laid out simply and beautifully in the first verse. This verse of thanks is followed by a verse asking for strength in time of trial and a doxology. The tune, “Nun Danket” is named for Rinkart's text, has been associated with it ever since they were published together by Johann Crüger (1598-1662) in his Praxis Pietatis Melica (1647).
John Rutter (b. 1945) studied at Cambridge, where he wrote his first published compositions and conducted his first recording while still a student. His compositional career has included both large and small scale choral works, orchestral and instrumental pieces, a piano concerto, two children’s operas, and music for television. In 1979, he formed the Cambridge Singers, a professional chamber choir primarily dedicated to recording sacred choral works, and he now divides his time between composition and conducting. In 1980, he was made an honorary Fellow of Westminster Choir College, Princeton, and in 1988 a Fellow of the Guild of Church Musicians. In 1996, the Archbishop of Canterbury conferred a Lambeth Doctorate of Music upon him in recognition of his contributions to church music.
For all the blessings you have granted us, Lord, give us thankful hearts we pray;
For life and health and happiness, and for the gift of each new day;
For all our families and loved ones, the friends we meet along our way,
We thank you, Lord, they are your gifts: Lord, we praise you,
Lord we bless you, In your service let us all your love repay.
Look all around you: behold a world forever new;
Every valley, hill and mountain is calling to you.
For all the wonders of creation, A world whose marvels we behold;
Where winter turns to spring again; the changing scenes of life unfold,
But there is One who never changes: through all eternity the same:
Be with us, Lord, forevermore: Alleluia, Lord, we praise your Holy Name.
Now thank we all our God, with heart and hands and voices,
Who wondrous things hath done, in whom his world rejoices;
Who from our mother’s arms hath blessed us on our way
With countless gifts of love, and still is ours today.
Amen.
About the Hymns:
This is a Day of New Beginnings
Brian Arthur Wren (b. 1936) is Emeritus Professor of Worship, Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, Georgia. He is a writer, preacher, worship and workshop leader, and internationally published hymn-poet, with entries in most recent denominational hymnals in North America, Britain and Australia. Some of his hymn-poems have been translated into Finnish, French, Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish and Korean. Brian holds undergraduate and doctoral degrees from Oxford University. He is a Minister of the United Reformed Church (UK). Wren provides an account of the composition of this text in notes provided in one of the collection of his texts, Faith Looking Forward (1983). The hymn was “written for a New Year’s Day service [1978] at Holy Family Church, Blackbird Leys, Oxford. In itself, the new year is an arbitrary convention, its newness a mere mark on the calendar. The recurrent awakening of life in nature is not a strong enough foundation for hope of real change. Yet by faith in the really new events of the Christian story, a day, or a month, or an hour can become charged with promise, and be a springboard to a changed life.”
As one of the leading hymnwriters of our time, Dr. Wren has contributed more hymns to the UM Hymnal (1989) than any other hymnwriter currently living. This text is supported by a melody composed by Dr. Young (b. 1926), one of the leading tune writers of this day.
I’m Gonna Live So God Can Use Me
The name of the first person who first sang the words “I’m gonna live so God can use me, anywhere, Lord, anytime” is lost to history. This African-American spiritual is one of many that have been passed down through generations. It has been included in printed collections of hymns and spirituals for over 100 years. It was one of the songs that inspired and motivated the Civil Rights movement.
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