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; most of it is copied from other websites 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:
Go Tell It on the Mountain - Wilbur Held
(c.1991, Birnamwood Publications)
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. 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.
Go, tell it on the mountain Over the hills and everywhere
Go, tell it on the mountain That Jesus Christ is born!
While shepherds kept their watching O'er silent flocks by night
Behold throughout the heavens There shone a holy light
The shepherds feared and trembled When lo! Above the Earth
Rang out the angel chorus That hailed our Savior's birth
Down in a lowly manger Our humble Christ was born
And God sent us salvation That blessed Christmas morn
Wilbur C. Held (1914-2015) was born in Des Plaines, Illinois, and received his B.M. and M.M. degrees at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago. He then attended Union Theological Seminary in New York City where he earned his S.M.D. A member of the Episcopal Church, for many years Dr. Held was Professor of Organ and Church Music at The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. He remained in this position for over 30 years, and for most of that time was also organist-choirmaster at Trinity Episcopal Church in Columbus, Ohio. Dr. Held started composing little pieces for the organ because he felt there was a lack of teaching material aimed at developing style and registration, especially for the romantic use of the instrument. Having written several suites primarily for pedagogical use, he turned his attention to broadening the repertoire for church use, continuing to stress modest technical requirements and flexibility of registration. He published 325 organ works. He has served on the national councils of both the AGO and the Hymn Society of America, and has appeared as recitalist at their national conventions.
About the Piano Music:
Joy to the World! - Jim Brickman
(c.2005, BMG Music Publishing)
Our Christmas season would hardly seem complete without Joy to the World, the most joyous of the carols. Yet Isaac Watts, its author, never intended it to be a Christmas carol at all. Rather, it was a part of his Psalms of David Imitated, published in 1719, which contained paraphrases of many of the Psalms in New Testament language.
The story of the hymn, Joy to the World, is the story of the author, Isaac Watts (1675-1748), who is universally acknowledged as "The Father of English Hymnody". He has earned the title, not because he was first to write English hymns, but because he gave impetus to hymnody and established its place in the worship of the English church. For over one hundred years, congregational singing had been strictly limited to the Psalms of the Old Testament in poetic form. Many of these rhymed Psalms were so unnatural that Samuel Wesley, father of the famous brothers Charles and John, called them "scandalous doggerel," and his opinion was shared by many.
The birth of Isaac Watts to a dissenting deacon and the daughter of a Huguenot refugee was followed by fourteen years of persecution and hardships for the entire family. Perhaps this suffering was responsible for Isaac Watts’ ill health, for he grew only to a height of just over five feet and was weak and sickly all his life. Though weak in body, the boy was strong in mind and spirit and early in life showed promise of poetic capability. After one Sunday morning service, Isaac, then fifteen years old, complained of the atrocious worship in song. One of the deacons challenged him: "Give us something better, young man." His answer was to write hundreds of hymns that are still sung today.
Joy to the World is the "imitation" of the last half of Psalm 98. The author transformed the old Jewish psalm of praise for some historic deliverance into a Christian song of rejoicing for the salvation of God that began to be manifested when the Babe of Bethlehem came "to make his blessing flow far as the curse is found." This is one of the most joyous hymns in all Christendom because it makes so real what Christ’s birth means to all mankind.
The tune most widely associated with Watts’ text is ANTIOCH, often poorly attributed in hymnals to either George Frideric Handel or Lowell Mason, neither of which is the proper author. This tune appeared at least four times in short succession around the same date, 1832–1833. Since three of the collections were published without dates, the exact succession is difficult to determine. Possibly the earliest is Charles Rider’s Psalmodia Britannica, vol. 4,, where the tune was called COMFORT (c.1831) with the curious ascription, “Partly from J. Leach.” Another of these early appearances was in Thomas Hawkes’ Collection of Tunes (Watchet: Thomas Whitehorn, 1833, where it was also called COMFORT. The attribution to “Author unknown” suggests that the tune had appeared earlier in another collection or through some other resource yet to be determined. Hawkes’ collection was keyed to A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists, with a Supplement (London: John Mason, 1831), where the tune appears with Charles Wesley’s “O joyful sound of gospel grace” and Wesley’s “How large the promise, how divine.” Around the same time Hawkes’ collection was published, this tune appeared in Thomas Clark’s Congregational Harmonist, vol. 3 (London: W. Blackman, n.d.), also dubbed COMFORT and paired with Wesley’s “O joyful sound,” without attribution. In this printing, the tunes are associated with the same Methodist collection published by John Mason that Hawkes’ had used for his tunebook.
In William Holford’s Voce di Melodia, ca. 1833–1834, 3rd ed., like the others, this tune was called COMFORT. Here the associated text was “O the delights, the heav’nly joys” by Isaac Watts. Holford seems to be the first to connect this tune with Handel. This tune has never been found among the works of Handel, but it does bear a resemblance to various strains from Messiah. The opening phrase, especially in these early British versions, recalls “Glory to God” and/or “Lift up your heads”, while the third phrase recalls the opening strains of “Comfort ye”. This latter association may very well be why the tune was called COMFORT, but the tune as a whole should not be credited to Handel, except perhaps as the tune’s inspiration.
Shortly thereafter, the tune crossed the Atlantic and was adapted by Lowell Mason (1792–1872) for his collection Occasional Psalm and Hymn Tunes, No. 3 (Boston, 1836). Mason credited the tune as “arranged from Handel” and he initiated its famed pairing with “Joy to the world.”
Joy to the world, the Lord is come! Let earth receive her King;
let ev’ry heart prepare him room and heav’n and nature sing,
and heav’n and nature sing, and heav’n, and heav’n and nature sing.
Joy to the earth, the Savior reigns! Let men their songs employ,
while fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains, repeat the sounding joy,
repeat the sounding joy, repeat, repeat the sounding joy.
No more let sins and sorrows grow nor thorns infest the ground;
he comes to make his blessings flow far as the curse is found,
far as the curse is found, far as, far as the curse is found.
He rules the world with truth and grace and makes the nations prove
the glories of his righteousness and wonders of his love,
and wonders of his love, and wonders, wonders of his love.
James Merrill Brickman (b. 1961) is an American pop songwriter, pianist and radio host. Brickman has earned two Grammy nominations for his albums Peace (2003) for Best Instrumental, and Faith (2009) for Best New Age Album. He won a Canadian Country Music Award, a Dove Award presented by the Gospel Music Association, and was twice named Songwriter of the Year by SESAC. Billboard lists 22 of his albums reaching No. 1 on the New Age chart, and 16 of his songs reaching Top 10 on the Adult Contemporary chart. Four of his albums were certified Gold by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
Brickman was born and raised in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and began playing piano at the age of five. His Jewish parents took him to services at Suburban Temple-Kol Ami in nearby Beachwood, where Brickman was confirmed in his teens. He attended Shaker Heights High School, and he performed on piano with the high school orchestra. He heard fellow student Anne Cochran sing in a musical, and introduced himself, asking her to join him in performing piano-vocal material. Together, they won a talent competition hosted by the WGCL "G98" radio station. Another high school friend named Meg Tippett convinced Brickman to join the Heights Youth Theatre as accompanist, which grew into four years as musical director.
Brickman studied composition and performance at the Cleveland Institute of Music while taking business classes at Case Western Reserve University. In 1980, Brickman founded his own advertising music company called The Brickman Arrangement,[ writing commercial jingles for many companies across the country such as McDonald's, Pontiac, City of Cleveland, Ohio Lottery, and Isuzu. Since 1997, he has hosted his own radio show, "The Jim Brickman Show", which is carried on radio stations throughout the United States.
About the Choral Music:
Still, Still, Still - Norman Luboff
(c. 1960, Walton Music Corp.)
"Still, still, still" is an Austrian Christmas carol and lullaby. In German its first line is "Still, still, still, weil's Kindlein schlafen will!" ("Hush, hush, hush, for the little child wants to sleep!") The melody is a folk tune (authorship unknown) from the State of Salzburg. The tune appeared for the first time in 1865 in a folksong collection of Maria Vinzenz Süß (1802–1868), founder of the Salzburg Museum. The words, which run to six verses in German, describe the peace of the infant Jesus and his mother as the baby is sung to sleep. They have changed slightly over the years but the modern Standard German version remains attributed to Georg Götsch (1895–1956).
Still, still, still, One can hear the falling snow.
For all is hushed, The world is sleeping,
Holy Star its vigil keeping.
Still, still, still, One can hear the falling snow.
Sleep, sleep, sleep, 'Tis the eve of our Saviour's birth.
The night is peaceful all around you, Close your eyes,
Let sleep surround you.
Sleep, sleep, sleep, 'Tis the eve of our Saviour's birth.
Dream, dream, dream, Of the joyous day to come.
While guardian angels without number,
Watch you as you sweetly slumber.
Dream, dream, dream, Of the joyous day to come
Norman Luboff (1917-1987) was born in Chicago, Illinois . He studied piano as a child and participated in his high school chorus. Luboff studied at the University of Chicago and Central College in Chicago. Following this, he did graduate work with the composer Leo Sowerby while singing and writing for radio programs in Chicago. Luboff served in the U.S. Army's Signal Corps. With a call from Hollywood to be choral director of The Railroad Hour, a radio weekly starring Gordon MacRae, Luboff began a successful career scoring many television programs and more than 80 motion pictures. In 1950, he established Walton Music Corporation, to publish his music. Luboff provided a vehicle for composers in Sweden to have their works available in the United States, including Waldemar Åhlén, and Egil Hovland from Norway. Walton Music exists today as a major choral music publisher under the guidance of Luboff's widow, Gunilla Marcus-Luboff, a former Swedish television producer.
Luboff was the founder and conductor of the Norman Luboff Choir, one of the leading choral groups of the 1950s, 60s and 70s. They came to prominence through their participation in the very successful Christmas broadcasts with Bing Crosby which ran from 1955 to 1962. History was made in 1956 when Luboff and his choir recorded with Harry Belafonte on "Calypso", the first album to sell one million copies. The choral group toured yearly from 1963 to 1987, and recorded more than 75 albums. The holiday albums Songs of Christmas (1956) and Christmas with the Norman Luboff Choir (1964) were bestsellers for years. Luboff and his choir won the 1961 Grammy Award for Best Performance by a Chorus.
About the Hymns:
Good Christian Friends, Rejoice
In dulci jubilo ("In sweet rejoicing") is a traditional Christmas carol. In its original setting, the carol is a macaronic text of German and Latin dating from the Middle Ages. Subsequent translations into English, such as J.M. Neale's arrangement "Good Christian Men, Rejoice" have increased its popularity, and Robert Pearsall's 1837 macaronic translation is a mainstay of the Christmas Nine Lessons and Carols repertoire. The original song text is thought to have been written by the German mystic Heinrich Seuse circa 1328. According to folklore, Seuse heard angels sing these words and joined them in a dance of worship. In his biography (or perhaps autobiography), it was written: “Now this same angel came up to the Servant (Suso) brightly, and said that God had sent him down to him, to bring him heavenly joys amid his sufferings; adding that he must cast off all his sorrows from his mind and bear them company, and that he must also dance with them in heavenly fashion. Then they drew the Servant by the hand into the dance, and the youth began a joyous song about the infant Jesus ...”
The tune first appears in Codex 1305, a manuscript in Leipzig University Library dating from c.1400, although it has been suggested that the melody may have existed in Europe prior to this date. In print, the tune was included in Geistliche Lieder, a 1533 Lutheran hymnal by Joseph Klug. It also appears in Michael Vehe's Gesangbuch of 1537. In 1545, another verse was added, possibly by Martin Luther. This was included in Valentin Babst's Geistliche Lieder, printed in Leipzig. The melody was also popular elsewhere in Europe, and appears in a Swedish/Latin version in the 1582 Finnish songbook Piae Cantiones, a collection of sacred and secular medieval songs. The tune appears in Michael Praetorius's Polyhymnia Caduceatrix & Panegyrica collection of 1619.
The Oxford Movement of 19th-century England resurrected many ancient Greek and Latin hymns and translated them for modern use. The chief proponent of this movement was John Mason Neale (1818-1866). “Good Christian friends, rejoice” is rather unusual compared to other translations rendered by Neale in that the original song was in two languages—Latin and German. The technical term for this is macaronic, meaning Latin plus the vernacular language, thus this song is classified as a macaronic carol. Macaronic carols were most certainly not sung as a part of the medieval Roman Catholic liturgy for at least three reasons: only Latin would have been sung in the Mass at this time; macaronic carols used dance-like rhythms in contrast to unmetered flow of plainsong chant; and folk instruments including percussion were often used to accompany these songs, instruments usually not permitted in the Mass. Folk carols were music the people used in more civic and domestic festival celebrations outside of the liturgical structure of the Mass.
Good Christian friends, rejoice with heart and soul and voice;
give ye heed to what we say: Jesus Christ was born today.
Ox and ass before him bow, and he is in the manger now.
Christ is born today! Christ is born today!
Good Christian friends, rejoice with heart and soul and voice;
now ye hear of endless bliss: Jesus Christ was born for this!
He has opened heaven's door, and we are blest forevermore.
Christ was born for this! Christ was born for this!
Good Christian friends, rejoice with heart and soul and voice;
now ye need not fear the grave: Jesus Christ was born to save!
Calls you one and calls you all to gain his everlasting hall.
Christ was born to save! Christ was born to save!
Angels We Have Heard on High
"Angels We Have Heard on High" is a Christmas carol of French origin in the public domain. The song commemorates the story of the birth of Jesus Christ found in the Gospel of Luke, in which shepherds outside Bethlehem encounter a multitude of angels singing and praising the newborn child. People began to chant the phrase "Gloria in excelsis Deo" in Christmas Eve worship services as early as 130 A.D. In medieval times, French shepherds had a Christmas Eve tradition of shouting "Gloria in excelsis Deo" to each other as they watched over their sheep flocks on their respective hills in southern France. A Latin chorale version may have inspired the traditional French Christmas carol 'Les Anges dans nos Campagnes,' which Edward Shippen Barnes used in the 1800s to arrange the first version of 'Angels We Have Heard on High'. The most common English version that was translated in 1862 by James Chadwick, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Hexham and Newcastle, northeast England. 'Angels We Have Heard on High' was first published in English as part of an 1862 book called Crown of Jesus Music. But the version that has become popular worldwide was published later, in 1916, in the book Carols Old and Carols New.
GLORIA is the French noel tune traditionally associated with this text. The popularity of this carol stems from its refrain–all those cascading phrases in which human beings imitate the angels' chorus. The tune is also known as IRIS because of its association with James Montgomery's "Angels from the Realms of Glory", which was first printed in the Sheffield Iris (Montgomery, ed.). The harmonization is by Edward S. Barnes (1887-1958) and was first published in The New Church Hymnal (1937). Barnes studied at the Lawrenceville School, Yale University, and the Schola Cantorum in Paris. He was organist and choirmaster at two New York City churches – Church of the Incarnation and Rutgers Presbyterian – and in Philadelphia at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church. From 1938 to 1954 he served as organist at the First Presbyterian Church in Santa Monica, California. Barnes contributed to the Presbyterian Handbook to the Hymnal (1935) and wrote piano and vocal works as well as anthems and liturgical music.
Angels we have heard on high sweetly singing o’er the plains,
And the mountains in reply echoing their joyous strains,
Gloria, in excelsis Deo! Gloria, in excelsis Deo!
Shepherds, why this jubilee? Why your joyous strains prolong?
What the gladsome tidings be which inspire your heavenly song?
Gloria, in excelsis Deo! Gloria, in excelsis Deo!
Come to Bethlehem and see Christ whose birth the angels sing;
Come adore on bended knee, Christ the Lord, the newborn King.
Gloria, in excelsis Deo! Gloria, in excelsis Deo!
See him in a manger laid, whom the choirs of angels praise;
Mary, Joseph, lend your aid, while our hearts in love we raise.
Gloria, in excelsis Deo! Gloria, in excelsis Deo!
First United Methodist Church, Lewisville, Texas
A Community of Everyday People Learning to Love Like Jesus
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