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:
Consolator - Bert Carlson
(c.2000, Augsburg Fortress)
CONSOLATION was originally set for solo voice to "Alma redemptoris mater" by Samuel Webbe, Sr., in his Collection of Motetts and Antiphons (1792). Thomas Hastings adapted the tune for use with Thomas Moore's text “Come, Ye Disconsolate“ in Spiritual Songs for Social Worship (1831). CONSOLATION is also known as ALMA and CONSOLATOR. With lyric sweetness and urgent rhythms, this tune has the character to support the solace offered in this text.
Samuel Webbe, the elder’s (1740-1816) father died soon after Samuel was born without providing financial security for the family; thus, Webbe received little education and was apprenticed to a cabinetmaker at the age of eleven. However, he was determined to study and taught himself Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, German, and Italian while working on his apprenticeship. He also worked as a music copyist and received musical training from Carl Barbant, organist at the Bavarian Embassy. Restricted at this time in England, Roman Catholic worship was freely permitted in the foreign embassies. Because Webbe was Roman Catholic, he became organist at the Portuguese Chapel and later at the Sardinian and Spanish chapels in their respective embassies. He wrote much music for Roman Catholic services and composed hymn tunes, motets, and madrigals. Webbe is considered an outstanding composer of glees and catches, as is evident in his nine published collections of these smaller choral works. He also published A Collection of Sacred Music (c. 1790), A Collection of Masses for Small Choirs (1792), and, with his son Samuel (the younger), Antiphons in Six Books of Anthems (1818).
J. Bert Carlson (b. 1937), retired pastor, holds a master of music from Duquesne University School of Music and has served as pastor of Christ Lutheran Church, Whiting, NJ since 1997. Carlson wears many diverse hats as a piano teacher, organ recitalist, tenor soloist, musical director, and conductor as well as cofounder of the Chicago Oratorio Society and clinician for numerous workshops with an emphasis on choral methods, organ and hymn composition. His prodigious list of publications includes anthems, vocal songs, organ works, and piano works.
Prelude on "Olivet" - John Barr
(c.1994, H. W. Gray, c/o Warner Bros. Publications)
Ray Palmer (1808-1887) wrote “My Faith Looks Up to Thee” upon receiving a vision of Christ shortly after his graduation from Yale University, while working as a tutor at a New York school. The author says concerning its composition, "I gave form to what I felt, by writing, with little effort, the stanzas. I recollect I wrote them with very tender emotion, and ended the last line with tears." However, he kept them to himself until meeting Lowell Mason on a street in Boston, Massachusetts. When Mason asked him to write something for a new hymnal, Palmer dug out his old notes and produced these lyrics, written two years earlier. After taking the lyrics home and reading them, Mason composed this tune. Several days later he saw Palmer again and said: “You may live many years and do many good things, but I think you will be best known to posterity as the author of My Faith Looks Up to Thee”. In 1831, it was published in Spiritual Songs for Social Worship: adapted to the use of Families, &c. Words and Music arranged by Thomas Hastings, of New York, and Lowell Mason of Boston.
The tune OLIVET was written by Dr. Lowell Mason (1792-1872), justly called the father of American church music; for by his labors were founded the germinating principles of national musical intelligence and knowledge, which afforded a soil upon which all higher musical culture has been founded. To him we owe some of our best ideas in religious church music, elementary musical education, music in the schools, the popularization of classical chorus singing, and the art of teaching music upon the Inductive or Pestalozzian plan. More than that, we owe him no small share of the respect which the profession of music enjoys at the present time as contrasted with the contempt in which it was held a century or more ago. In fact, the entire art of music, as now understood and practiced in America, has derived advantage from the work of this great man.
As a child, Mason he had an intense love for music and devoted all his spare time and effort to improving himself. He acquired a proficiency in composition, and his first work of this kind was a collection of church music, which contained many of his own compositions. The manuscript was published by the Boston Handel and Haydn Society in 1822, but Mason's name was omitted from the publication at his own request, because "I was then a bank officer in Savannah, and did not wish to be known as a musical man, as I had not the least thought of ever making music a profession." The book soon sprang into universal popularity, being at once adopted by the singing schools of New England and church choirs. It ran through some seventeen editions. Mason accepted an invitation to move to Boston and was also appointed director of music at the Hanover, Green, and Park Street churches, to alternate six months with each congregation. In 1827, Lowell Mason became president and conductor of the Handel and Haydn Society. It was the beginning of a career that earned him the title of "The Father of American Church Music." Charles C. Perkins stated, "First and foremost, he was not so very much superior to the members as to be unreasonably impatient at their shortcomings. Second, he was a born teacher, who, by hard work, had fitted himself to give instruction in singing. Third, he was one of themselves, a plain, self-made man, who could understand them and be understood of them." Prof. Horace Mann, one of the great educators of that day, said he would walk fifty miles to see and hear Mr. Mason teach if he could not otherwise have that advantage. Mason founded the Boston Academy of Music. The aim of this institution was to reach the masses and introduce music into the public schools. Before 1810, he had developed his idea of "Teachers' Conventions," and, as in these he had representatives from different states, he made musical missionaries for almost the entire country. He left behind him no less than fifty volumes of musical collections, instruction books, and manuals. He is also rightly called the “Father of Music in the Public Schools.”
As a composer church music. Dr. Mason was one of the most successful in this country. He was a deeply pious man. His sons, Lowell and Henry were the founders of the great organ and piano manufacturer of Mason & Hamlin.
My faith looks up to thee, thou Lamb of Calvary, Savior divine!
Now hear me while I pray, take all my guilt away;
O let me from this day be wholly thine.
May Thy rich grace impart Strength to my fainting heart, My zeal inspire!
As Thou hast died for me, Oh, may my love to Thee
Pure, warm, and changeless be, A living fire!
While life’s dark maze I tread, And griefs around me spread, Be Thou my guide;
Bid darkness turn to day, Wipe sorrow’s tears away,
Nor let me ever stray From Thee aside.
When ends life’s transient dream, When death’s cold, sullen stream Shall o’er me roll;
Blest Savior, then in love, Fear and distrust remove;
Oh, bear me safe above, A ransomed soul!
John Barr (b. 1938) studied organ and composition at Manchester College and Union Theological Seminary. Dr. Barr was music teacher at Hillcrest School for Missionary Children in Jos, Nigeria, 1962-65. He later became Professor of Organ and Piano at Bridgewater College, Bridgewater, VA, until his retirement. He is organist at Bridgewater Church of the Brethren.
O Love, How Deep - Kristina Langlois
(c.1998, Birnamwood Pub., div of MorningStar)
The hymn “O Love, How Deep” presents the story of salvation from the birth through the ascension of Christ—a rare scope for a hymn. The incipit (the opening line of a poem) appears to be drawn from Ephesians 3:17-18: “How wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.”
The original anonymous poem consists of 23 stanzas in 92 lines with rhymed couplets of aabb. Most hymnals include only six stanzas. The United Methodist Hymnal includes a translation of stanzas 2 and 9-12, plus an unidentified concluding doxological stanza. The translator from a fifteenth-century Latin creedal and devotional poem began with the second stanza “O amor quam exstaticus.” A striking feature is the text's emphasis on the fact that Jesus accomplished all of this "for us"; "for us" occurs at least a dozen times! The redemptive work of Christ is very personally, very corporately applied.
The Latin was found in a fifteenth-century Karlsruhe (Germany) manuscript and printed in a volume in 1853. Some have attributed the text to Thomas à Kempis (c.1380-1471), the fifteenth-century German monk who is generally said to have authored the important devotional work, The Imitation of Christ (c. 1427), because of the similarity in tone and theme of the two sources and the similarity between the handwriting of the Latin poem and that of à Kempis.
The English translation comes to us through the efforts of Benjamin Webb (1819-1885), an Anglican clergyman who served as a curate in several parishes in England. Webb was the editor of two journals, The Ecclesiologist (1842-1868) and the Church Quarterly Review (1881-1885). His connections with the Oxford Movement’s John Mason Neale (1818-1866), a movement that provided English translations of Greek, Latin, and German texts, led to a collaboration with Neale on two volumes, An Essay on Symbolism and A Translation of Durandus. These scholarly publications influenced his contributions to two important English hymnals, The Hymnal Noted (1854) and The Hymnary (1872). He was also a member of the Cambridge Camden Society which advocated a return to medieval styles of church architecture, believing that what they saw as the corruption and ugliness of their century could be countered by the recapturing of the piety and beauty of the Middle Ages.
The tune DEO GRACIAS is also from the fifteenth century. It was originally a victory song, “Our King went forth to Normandy,” in celebration of Henry V’s conquest over the French at Agincourt in 1415. In some hymnals, the melody is called AGINCOURT.
O love, how deep, how broad, how high, how passing thought and fantasy,
that God, the Son of God, should take our mortal form for mortals’ sake!
He sent no angel to our race, of higher or of lower place,
but wore the robe of human frame, and He Himself to this world came.
Nor willed he only to appear; His pleasure was to tarry here;
And God and Man with man would be The space of thirty years and three.
For us baptized, for us He bore His holy fast, and hungered sore;
for us temptations sharp He knew, for us the tempter overthrew.
For us he prayed; for us he taught; for us his daily works he wrought;
by words and signs and actions thus still seeking not himself, but us.
For us to wicked men betrayed, scourged, mocked, in crown of thorns arrayed,
He bore the shameful cross and death for us at length gave up His breath.
For us He rose from death again, for us He went on high to reign,
for us He sent His Spirit here to guide, to strengthen, and to cheer.
To Him Whose boundless love has won Salvation for us through His Son,
To God the Father, glory be Both now and through eternity.
All honor, laud, and glory be, O Jesus, virgin-born to Thee!
All glory, as is ever meet To Father and to Paraclete.
All glory to our Lord and God for love so deep, so high, so broad—
the Trinity whom we adore forever and forevermore.
Dr. Kristina Langlois has been the Director of Music and Worship at Westwood Lutheran Church in St. Louis Park, MN, since 2000, and Organist there since 1993. She administers an extensive choral and instrumental music program within the context of liturgical worship. Kristina earned a Bachelor’s degree in Education and a Master of Church Music degree from Concordia University in River Forest, Illinois; and she completed her Doctor of Music degree from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. She is a former Dean of the Twin Cities Chapter of the AGO and has served as adjudicator in numerous AGO/Schubert Club sponsored organ competitions. She has performed organ concerts in Chicago, the Twin Cities, and in Germany.
About the Choral Music:
Come Find Forgiveness and Love - Don Besig
(c.2010, Lorenz Publishing)
This gently flowing anthem features the nineteenth-century hymn “Softly and Tenderly Jesus Is Calling” along with an evocative new text that presents images of Jesus welcoming His followers to the table. Don Besig was a public school music teacher for over thirty years in western New York. He taught at all levels and since his retirement has continued to serve as a guest conductor, clinician and adjudicator. Recognizing a need for choral music written especially for student singers and volunteer church choirs, he began composing for his own choral groups in 1960. He is also the recipient of several ASCAP Plus Awards Don is a graduate of Ithaca College and a member of Phi Mu Alpha and ASCAP. He and Nancy Price collaborate to write music and lyrics.
Rebuffed in an early attempt to sell his songs to a commercial publisher, Will Lamartine Thompson (1847-1909) started his own publishing company. He later expanded, opening a store to sell pianos, organs and sheet music. Both a lyricist and composer, he ensured he would always remember words or melodies that came to him at odd times: "No matter where I am, at home or hotel, at the store or traveling, if an idea or theme comes to me that I deem worthy of a song, I jot it down in verse. In this way I never lose it." When the world-renowned lay preacher, Dwight Lyman Moody, lay on his death bed in his Northfield, Massachusetts, home, Will Thompson made a special visit to inquire as to his condition. The attending physician refused to admit him to the sickroom, and Moody heard them talking just outside the bedroom door. Recognizing Thompson’s voice, he called for him to come to his bedside. Taking the Ohio poet-composer by the hand, the dying evangelist said, “Will, I would rather have written “Softly and Tenderly Jesus is Calling” than anything I have been able to do in my whole life.”
Come to the table, Jesus is there.
Come to the banquet the Lord has prepared.
Bring all your troubles, each worry and care.
Come find forgiveness and love.
Come to the table, Jesus is near.
Come feel His presence surrounding you here.
Lay down your burdens, your sorrow and fear.
Come find forgiveness and love.
The bread has been broken, the cup has been poured,
and now they are offered to you.
The promise is spoken and hope is restored.
You are redeemed. All is made new.
Come to the table, all who believe.
Come and remember, His grace makes you free.
Cherish this moment, this gift you receive.
Come find forgiveness and love.
Softly and tenderly Jesus invites us,
touching each heart and each soul.
Now, in communion, our Savior unites us,
cleansing and making us whole.
Come take the bread, come share the cup.
Come find forgiveness and love.
Sovereign Most Holy
(c.2013, Lawrence A Wik)
Rev. Lawrence Wik wrote this hymn for Lent in 2013 and gave it to the General Board of Discipleship of the United Methodist Church to publish on their website for free use by churches. Rev. Wik is a United Methodist pastor currently serving Lake Orion UMC in Michigan.
Partially based on earlier melodies (including the Genevan tune for Psalm 23), the tune HERZLIEBSTER JESU was composed by Johann Crüger (1598-1662) and published in his Neues vollkömliches Gesangbuch (1640). Johann S. Bach used the tune in both his St. Matthew Passion and St. John Passion, and various other composers have written preludes on the chorale. The name translates and the tune was originally written for the text “Ah, Holy Jesus”.
Sovereign most holy, Lord of might and splendor,
angels revere you, we our praises render.
Loudest hosannas we in love are bringing:
joy in us singing!
Jesus Messiah, gift of God’s own favor,
suffered at Calvary, and became our savior,
rose Easter morning to return victorious:
Christ ever glorious!
Spirit of mercy, and of love unswerving,
enter our hearts though we are undeserving.
“Amen,” we cry, in faith and hope believing:
new life receiving!
Praise to the Father, God of all creation!
Praise to Christ Jesus, hope of our salvation!
Praise to the Spirit, God within us yearning:
love in us burning!
About the Hymns:
Beneath the Cross of Jesus
Elizabeth Cecilia Douglas Clephane (1830-1869) was born in Scotland, the daughter of a county sheriff; she lived most of her brief life near Edinburgh. Though in frail health most of her life, Elizabeth found the strength to help the poor and sick in her town. She and her sister gave all that they could spare to charity including, it is said, selling their horse and carriage for the benefit of the needy. The townspeople of Melrose referred to Elizabeth as “the Sunbeam.”
“Beneath the cross of Jesus,” focusing on the shelter of the cross, was first published three years after the author’s death in 1872 under the title “Breathings on the Border,” perhaps a double entendre referring to a geographical location near Melrose, the Scottish Borders, and a reference to the border between life and death. This poem and others of hers appeared in the Scottish Presbyterian magazine The Family Treasury, submitted by an anonymous source, perhaps a family member or friend. One source suggests that this hymn was written within one year of her death in 1868. British hymnologist. J.R. Watson mentions that an editorial emendation attached to the poem by the anonymous source submitting the poems said, these lines “express the experiences, the hopes and the longings of a young Christian lately released.”
Contained in the same collection was her famous narrative poem, “There were ninety and nine that safely lay.” Both of these hymns were promoted by the well-known American musical evangelist and songwriter Ira D. Sankey (1840-1908), who published them in his Sacred Songs and Solos (1873). Though Sankey composed a tune for the song entitled CLEPHANE, the almost universal pairing is with ST. CHRISTOPHER, composed by Bristol, England, musician, Frederick C. Maker (1844-1927).
The hymn is full of comforting, and perhaps paradoxical language, about the cross, after all, an instrument of the cruelest torture. These include in stanza two “the shadow of a mighty rock,” “a home within the wilderness,” “a rest upon the way.” The original third stanza provides additional images of consolation: a “happy shelter,” “refuge tried and sweet,” a “trysting place,” and “a ladder up to heaven,” a reference to Jacob’s ladder.
Originally five stanzas, the original last stanza, perhaps autobiographical, provides further insight into the comfort that the writer found in the shadow of the cross and the inspiration that the cross gave her as she anticipated her own death. Such explicit anticipation of and longing for death may seem somewhat morbid today, but echoes the Romantic literary sentiment of her time. Though appropriately sung during Lent and Holy Week today, this hymn is more of a personal meditation on the cross and one’s own mortality than a hymn written for a specific time of the Christian Year.
Beneath the cross of Jesus I fain would take my stand,
the shadow of a mighty Rock within a weary land;
a home within the wilderness, a rest upon the way,
from the burning of the noontide heat and the burden of the day.
Upon the cross of Jesus mine eye at times can see
the very dying form of One who suffered there for me:
and from my stricken heart with tears two wonders I confess,
the wonders of redeeming love and my unworthiness.
O safe and happy shelter, O refuge tried and sweet,
O trysting place where heaven’s love and heaven’s justice meet!
As to the exiled patriarch that wondrous dream was given,
so seems my Savior’s Cross to me - a ladder up to heaven.
There lies beneath its shadow, but on the further side,
the darkness of an open grave that gapes both deep and wide;
and there between us stands the cross, two arms outstretched to save,
like watchman set to guard the way from that eternal grave.
I take, O cross, thy shadow for my abiding place:
I ask no other sunshine than the sunshine of his face;
content to let the world go by, to know no gain nor loss;
my sinful self my only shame, my glory all the cross.
Come, Ye Disconsolate
Thomas Moore (1779-1852) was an Irish writer, poet and lyricist. Son of John Moore, a Dublin tradesman, he received his education at a private school, and at Trinity College, Dublin. He studied law and held a post in the Bermuda government for a time. Politically, Moore was an Irish nationalist. He was recognized in England as a press, or "squib", writer for the aristocratic Whigs; in Ireland, he was considered a Catholic patriot. In the controversies that surrounded Catholic Emancipation Moore was seen to defend the tradition of the Church in Ireland against both evangelising Protestants and uncompromising lay Catholics. His longer prose works reveal his radical sympathies. The Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald depicts the United Irish leader as a martyr in the cause of democratic reform. Memoirs of Captain Rock is a saga, not of Anglo-Irish landowners, but of their exhausted tenants driven to the semi-insurrection of "Whiteboyism". Today, Moore is best remembered for his Irish Melodies. Their setting of English-language verse to old Irish tunes marked the transition in popular Irish culture from Irish to English. He wrote 32 hymns, including “Come, Ye Disconsolate” was published in 1816 with the title “Relief in Prayer”. The word “disconsolate” speaks of an unhappy person who has been unable to find any consolation or comfort. Moore’s poem expresses the assurance that God provides comfort for all ills.
The third verse was added by Thomas Hastins, MUS. DOC. (1784-1872). In 1786, his family moved to Clinton, Oneida Co., N. Y. There, amid rough frontier life, his opportunities for education were small; but at an early age he developed a taste for music, and began teaching it in 1806. Seeking a wider field, he went, in 1817, to Troy, then to Albany, and in 1823 to Utica, where he conducted a religious journal, in which he advocated his special views on church music. In 1832 he was called to New York to assume the charge of several Church Choirs, and there his last forty years were spent in great and increasing usefulness and repute. His aim was the greater glory of God through better musical worship; and to this end he was always training choirs, compiling works, and composing music. His hymn-work was a corollary to the proposition of his music-work; he wrote hymns for certain tunes; the one activity seemed to imply and necessitate the other. Although not a great poet, he yet attained considerable success. In addition to editing many books of tunes, Hastings also published the following hymnbooks: (1) Spiritual Songs for Social Worship: Adapted to the Use of Families and Private Circles in Seasons of Revival, to Missionary Meetings, &c, Utica, 1831-2, in which he was assisted by Lowell Mason; (2) The Mother's Hymn-book, 1834; (3) The Christian Psalmist; or, Watts's Psalms and Hymns, with copious Selections from other Sources, &c, N. Y., 1836, in connection with William Patton; (4) Church Melodies, N. Y., 1858, assisted by his son, the Rev. T. S. Hastings; (5) Devotional Hymns and Poems, N. Y., 1850. The last contained many, but not all, of his original hymns. (6) Mother's Hymn-book, enlarged 1850.
Come, ye disconsolate, where’er ye languish,
Come to the mercy seat, fervently kneel.
Here bring your wounded hearts, here tell your anguish;
Earth has no sorrow that heav’n cannot heal.
Joy of the desolate, light of the straying,
Hope of the penitent, fadeless and pure!
Here speaks the Comforter, tenderly saying,
“Earth has no sorrow that heav’n cannot cure.”
Here see the bread of life, see waters flowing
Forth from the throne of God, pure from above.
Come to the feast of love; come, ever knowing
Earth has no sorrow but heav’n can remove.
First United Methodist Church, Lewisville, Texas
A Community of Everyday People Learning to Love Like Jesus
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