June 23, 2019

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:

Speak, Lord, in the Stillness - Don Hustad

"Speak, Lord, in the Stillness" was written by Emily May Grimes Crawford (1864-1927), who was born at Lambeth in Surrey, England. In 1893, she went as a missionary to Pondoland in South Africa, where she married Dr. T. W. W. Crawford, an Anglican minister with the Christian Missionary Society of Kikuyu in British East Africa. While in South Africa, she penned "The Master Comes! He Calls for Thee" in 1896, and these words under the title "The Quiet Hour." They were first published in her 1920 work Unseen Realities. 

The tune (Quietude) was composed by Harold Green (1871-1930).  The son of a minister from Helme near Huddersfield in Yorkshire, England, and also a missionary in Pondoland, Green provided this music for Mrs. Crawford’s words around 1925, about five years before his death on the mission field. The song quickly became a favorite at the Keswick Convention in northern England and appeared in The Keswick Hymnbook of 1936 in England. 

Speak, Lord, in the stillness, While I wait on Thee;
Hushed my heart to listen, In expectancy.

Speak, O blessed Master, In this quiet hour;
Let me see Thy face, Lord, Feel Thy touch of power.

For the words Thou speakest, They are life indeed;
Living bread from heaven, Now my spirit feed!

All to Thee is yielded, I am not my own;
Blissful, glad surrender, I am Thine alone.

Speak, Thy servant heareth, Be not silent, Lord;
Waits my soul upon Thee For the quickening word.

Fill me with the knowledge Of Thy glorious will;
All Thine own good pleasure In Thy child fulfill.

    Like a watered garden, Full of fragrance rare,
    Lingering in Thy presence, Let my life appear.

Don Hustad (1918-2013) was one of the giants of Christian music of the 20th century. Hustad had a distinguished ministry and a life-long profession as a recording artist, composer, arranger, teacher, conductor, hymnal editor, and author.  He began work as staff musician of Chicago's WMBI in the early 1940s, worked with soloist George Beverly Shea on a weekly broadcast called "Club Time," and served for some 20 years as organist for a popular radio broadcast "Songs in the Night." He taught at Olivet Nazarene College in Kankakee, Illinois from 1946 to 1950, at which time Hustad was appointed director of the Sacred Music Department at Moody Bible Institute—a position he held until 1961.  During his 11-year tenure at Moody he developed the Moody Chorale into a superior choral ensemble that achieved fame nationally and internationally.   In 1961 he became Crusade organist for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and directed the Crusader Men Choir in the "Hour of Decision" broadcasts.  His publications include over 100 articles and five books.  Throughout his career, Hustad devoted considerable energy to music arranging and hymnal editing, serving as editorial consultant and musical advisor to Hope Publishing Company. Among his editorial contributions are fourteen hymnals and songbooks, as well as dozens of collections.  In 1989, Hustad was awarded Fellow of the Hymn Society for his outstanding contribution to American hymnody.  In 2008, he was honored by the American Choral Director's Association Southern Division Conference for his contributions to church music. He earned diplomas as an Associate of the American Guild of Organists (AAGO) and a Fellow of the Royal College of Organists (FRCO), London, UK.

Toccata - Johann Krieger

Johann Krieger (1651-1735) was a German composer and organist, younger brother of Johann Philipp Krieger. Born in Nuremberg, he worked at Bayreuth, Zeitz, and Greiz before settling in Zittau. He was one of the most important keyboard composers of his day, highly esteemed by, among others, George Frideric Handel. A prolific composer of church and secular music, he published several dozen of his works, and others survive in manuscript. However, hundreds more were lost when Zittau was destroyed by fire in 1757, during the Seven Years' War.

Krieger's keyboard music places him among the most important German composers of his time. The two published collections, Sechs musicalische Partien (1697) and Anmuthige Clavier-Übung (1698), contain harpsichord suites, organ toccatas, fugues, ricercars, and other works. Krieger's contemporaries praised his contrapuntal skill, evident in the extant fugues and ricercars. Johann Mattheson was particularly impressed with Krieger's double fugues, remarking that he knew nobody who surpassed Krieger in this form, except Handel. Handel himself admired and studied Krieger's work, even taking a copy of Anmuthige Clavier-Übung with him to England.

About the Piano Music:

Great God, Your Love Has Called Us - Nancy Raabe

The “best hymn of the 20th century” is how well-known Methodist hymn writer Andrew Pratt describes this hymn.  Written in 1973 (as “Lord God, your love…”) and revised twice since, Brian Wrenn describes his words as “a revisioning (not a replacement) of the central themes of Charles Wesley’s great hymn, ‘And can it be that I should gain’.”  Wren is an internationally published hymn writer. He was ordained in Britain’s United Reformed Church and holds BA and PhD degrees from Oxford University. In 2000 he was appointed the first John and Miriam Conant Professor of Worship at Columbia Theological Seminary in Atlanta. 

Charles Wesley’s verses take up the biblical stories of St Paul and Silas singing and praying in prison (recounted in Acts 16) and of Peter’s deliverance from prison (Acts 12).  Borrowing a single powerful image from that story (“my chains fell off…”), Wesley expresses his awe at divine love and the personal grace Christians may experience despite themselves.  Brian Wren re-thinks Charles Wesley’s images for contemporary worshippers. He uses Wesley’s ideas to help us look beyond personal experience, reinterpreting St Paul’s chains as “social forces” and “powers and systems”. He is highlighting not just personal sin but the social sin of unfair structures and unjust corporate and community actions.

The tune ABINGDON was written by Erik Reginald Routley (1917-1982), an English Congregational minister, composer and musicologist. He was educated at Lancing College and Magdalen and Mansfield Colleges in Oxford. He was chaplain of Mansfield from 1948 to 1959 and then held appointments as minister in Edinburgh and Newcastle before becoming Professor of Church Music at Westminster Choir College, Princeton, New Jersey in 1975.

Great God, your love has called us here, as we, by love, for love were made.

Your living likeness still we bear, though marred, dishonored, disobeyed.

We come, with all our heart and mind your call to hear, your love to find.

We come with self-inflicted pains of broken trust and chosen wrong, 

Half-free, half-bound by inner chains, by social forces swept along,

By powers and systems close confined, yet seeking hope for humankind.

Great God, in Christ you call our name and then receive us as your own,

Not through some merit, right or claim, but by your gracious love alone.

We strain to glimpse your mercy seat and find you kneeling at our feet.

Then take the towel, and break the bread, and humble us, and call us friends.

Suffer and serve till all are fed, and show how grandly love intends 

To work till all creation sings, to fill all worlds, to crown all things.

Great God, in Christ you set us free, your life to live, your joy to share.

Give us your Spirit’s liberty to turn from guilt and dull despair

And offer all that faith can do while love is making all things new.

Nancy M. Raabe (b. 1954), has been the pastor at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, Marshall WI, since 2018.  Raabe is an energetic and creative leader of Christian worship.  She specializes in incorporating music and the liturgical arts into worship services.  She is known as an empathetic servant leader, an effective preacher, and as a thoughtful teacher for those of all ages.  Pastor Raabe has been successful in developing sound mission-based plans so that her congregations can grow and thrive in a sustainable manner.  Further, Nancy strives to involve her congregation in the activities of the surrounding community.  Pastor Raabe is an author, worship leader, and composer of church music. 

In November 2015, Nancy Raabe received the Award of the Concordia Historical Institute recognizing the importance of her book, Carl Schalk:  A Life in Song, in carrying forward the legacy of the Lutheran Church in this country.  Pastor Raabe's original arrangement of I Dream A World was a finalist for first prize at the 2010 Ithaca College Choral Composition Festival.  Nancy M Raabe was the Communications chair of the Association of Lutheran Church Musicians.  She was the founding editor of the Association's newsletter In Tempo, in which appeared her column Prairie View. 

About the Choral Music:

Your Still, Small Voice - Douglas Wagner

Douglas E. Wagner, a native of Chicago, Illinois, is an international recognized composer and arranger. With thirty years as a high school music educator and administrator behind him, Mr. Wagner now devotes all of his time and energy to writing, editing and their allied activities. He is an A.S.C.A.P. award-winning composer, an editor for a major publishing company, and has served several denominations as a church musician.  2,500 titles by Douglas E. Wagner have been published since 1973, included works for choir (sacred and secular), concert band, orchestra, handbell ensemble, organ, piano, instrumental solo, and voice. Fifteen million copies of his music have been sold to date.

“Your Still, Small Voice” sets a text by Charlotte Lee, based on I Kings 19:11-12.

Your still, small voice, Lord, let me hear it,

Your still, small voice in this frantic world.

Your still, small voice, calm my restless spirit;

Speak to me until I find my rest in you.

Your still, small voice, Lord, let me hear it,

Your still, small voice in this troubled world.

Your still, small voice, call my restless spirit;

Speak to me until I find my rest in you.

Lord, I heard you not in the thunder, nor the fire, nor the whirlwind’s blast;

But perhaps in silent wonder, you will touch my life at last.

In the quiet peace of the morning, when the day is fresh and clear,

Speak to me, Lord, I will listen, call to me and I will hear.

About the Hymns:

How Great Thou Art

"How Great Thou Art" is a based on a Swedish poem written by Carl Gustav Boberg (1859–1940) in Sweden in 1885.  “O Store Gud” (O Great God) is a paraphrase of Psalm 8 and has nine verses.  It was sung in the underground church in Sweden in the late 1800s when the Baptists and Mission Friends were persecuted.  Boberg himself gave the following information about his inspiration for this hymn:

It was that time of year when everything seemed to be in its richest colouring;; the birds were singing in trees and everywhere.  It was very warm; a thunderstorm appeared on the horizon and soon thunder and lightning.  We had to hurry to shelter.  But the storm was soon over and the clear sky appeared.  When I came home I opened my window toward the sea.  There evidently had been a funeral and the bells were playing the tune of “When eternity’s clock calling my saved soul to its Sabbath rest”.  That evening, I wrote the song, “O Store Gud”.

Boberg first published "O Store Gud" in the “Mönsterås Tidningen” (Mönsterås News) on 13 March 1886.The poem became matched to an old Swedish folk tune and sung in public for the first known occasion in a church in the Swedish province of Värmland in 1888.   It was soon published in additional hymn collections and was translated into German and Russian.

British Methodist missionary Stuart Wesley Keene Hine (1899-1989)  heard the Russian translation of the German version of the song while on an evangelistic mission to the Carpathian Mountains in Ukraine, near the Polish border, in 1931. Upon hearing it, Hine was inspired to create his English paraphrase known as “How Great Thou Art".   According to Michael Ireland, "Hine and his wife, Edith, learned the Russian translation, and started using it in their evangelistic services.  Hine also started re-writing some of the verses --- and writing new verses (all in Russian) --- as events inspired him."  Hine finalized his English translation in 1949

When the Billy Graham team went to London in 1954 for the Harringay Crusade, they were given a pamphlet containing Hine's work.  They worked closely with Hine to prepare the song for use in their campaigns. They sang it in the 1955 Toronto campaign, but it didn't really catch on until they took it to the Madison Square Garden in 1957. According to Cliff Barrows (Dr. Graham's longtime associate), they sang it one hundred times during that campaign because the people wouldn't let them stop.   

George Beverly Shea's recording of the beloved hymn ranks number 204 on the top recordings of the 20th century according to the Recording Industry Association of America.  It was voted the United Kingdom's favourite hymn by BBC's Songs of Praise.^[2] "How Great Thou Art" was ranked second (after "Amazing Grace") on a list of the favorite hymns of all time in a survey by Today's Christian magazine in 2001.

Evangelist Billy Graham indicated: “The reason I like 'How Great Thou Art' is because it glorifies God. It turns Christian’s eyes toward God, rather than upon themselves. I use it as often as possible because it is such a God-honoring song.”

God of the Sparrow, God of the Whale

Jaroslav Vajda (1919-2008) was one of the leading hymn writers in the 20th century and arguably the preeminent Lutheran hymn writer of his day.  Vajda (pronounced vaheeduh) was born in Lorain, Ohio, the son of a Lutheran pastor of Slovak descent. Thoroughly Lutheran, he was educated at Concordia College and Concordia Seminary, and he pastored several bilingual parishes (German and English) in Pennsylvania and Indiana. Jary (as his friends call him) served as the editor of several Lutheran magazines and retired as a book editor from Concordia Publishing House.

Vajda began translating classical Slovak poetry at the age of 18, and his work was published in the United States and Europe. He wrote his first hymn at age 49, followed by more than 225 original and translated hymns that now appear worldwide in more than 60 hymnals. He served Lutheran Church Missouri Synod congregations between 1945 and 1976. In 1963, he became the editor of the This Day magazine and later served as book developer/editor for Concordia Publishing House in St. Louis. He served on the Inter-Lutheran Commission on Worship that prepared the Lutheran Book of Worship (1978), one of the most important later twentieth-century hymnals. Elected a Fellow of The Hymn Society in the United States and Canada in 1988, Vajda has received numerous honorary doctorates validating his contributions to hymn singing.

“God of the sparrow God of the whale” was written as a result of a commission from Concordia Lutheran Church in Kirkwood, Mo., “to compose a hymn text that would provide answers from the users of the hymn as to why and how God’s creatures (and children) are to serve him. The Law of God demands perfect love from every creature; the love of God and the Gospel coax a willing response to live as an expression of gratitude.”  A noticeable feature of this hymn is its lack of punctuation and rhyme. To the singer this creates a sense of openness—a text that is not bound by the conventional patterns of poetry. Each of the six stanzas is perfectly balanced: the first two lines of each stanza offer a glimpse into the actions of God in the world and the bond God has with God’s creatures. The last two lines of each stanza ask two rhetorical questions: “How does the creature... ” The lack of a question mark gives one the sense that these questions are not so much expecting an answer as making a statement of profound wonder about the relationship between the Creator and the Creator’s creatures. 

First United Methodist Church, Lewisville, Texas

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