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:
Aus dem Wege nach Damaskus - Otto Malling
(c.1903, Wilhelm Hansen, Leipzig)
Otto Valdemar Malling (1848-1915) was a Danish composer, from 1900 the cathedral organist in Copenhagen and from 1889 professor, then from 1899 Director of the Royal Danish Academy of Music, Copenhagen. Otto Malling was born in Copenhagen. In his later career he mainly composed organ works and vocal music, but he also wrote a Fantasia for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 20, an appealing Schumannesque piano trio (in A minor, opus 36, 1889), piano quartet (in C minor, opus 80), and a Brahmsian piano concerto in C minor (opus 43, 1890), all of which are recorded and infrequently heard in concert. His output also contains among other substantial works a cantata Det hellige Land, opus 46, (published in 1897), a symphony in D minor, opus 17 (published in 1884), and an octet for strings, opus 50 (published in or before 1907). Malling wrote the first Danish textbook in orchestration, along French conservatory lines.
He taught musical theory and was a music editor for the publisher Samfundet til udgivelse af dansk Musik. He was a co-founder and vice-conductor of The Concert Society, Copenhagen (1874), supporting himself as organist at various Copenhagen churches. His scores of organ music brought Malling some reputation abroad, but after his death he was soon forgotten in his native country as musical tastes changed. In the late 20th century, several of his concert works were recorded.
Malling's substantial output of organ music was cast in the form of eleven suites of 'mood pictures' inspired by the Bible. “Aus dem Wege nach Damaskus” is a movement from the suite Paulus, Op. 78.
On the way to Damascus
About the Choral Music:
Lord, I Know I Been Changed – Larry Shackley
(c.2009, Lorenz Publications)
The Spiritual was a creation of plantation life, born as a desperate cry for freedom and of laments on the loss of family, culture, history, and home. The texts, finding inspiration from the Bible, contained double and triple layers of meaning, speaking of trial and triumph, suffering and salvation. A brave and ingenious oral tradition, clues and instructions for escape are interwoven with encouragement to hold on to hope for a better future. This music comes from a righteous people who looked within and carried the light of God as they worked to overcome sin and slavery.
Major themes include escape, daily work life, reaching heaven, and missing loved ones, often told through biblical references. In Hebrew scriptures, a symbol of freedom and overcoming adversity, so too the Negro slaves looked to gain vindication from their foes and escape from hardship.
One theme was field work and serving, we hear of the tribulations of slave labor and the struggle to escape, be it literally or spiritually, by ship, train, or a chariot of angels. For many, that relief and healing came in the form of prayer, echoed through the melodies and harmonies of songs that proclaim there is nothing to fear so long as you cast away your sins, have faith, and follow the word of God and your good brothers and sisters. These ancestors of America built the country with their hands, and, seeing beyond their weariness and strife, hoped to inhabit that house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. Yet another theme is the bittersweet reminder of our mortality, an inevitable truth; but for many, the real truth is that with the passing from this life comes the beginning of a greater journey of life. This music sings of that joy and sorrow and spreads the message of hope and continued effort to follow in God’s footsteps toward the ultimate freedom.
Larry Shackley (b. 1956) is a full-time composer and editor from Columbia, SC. He studied composition at the Eastman School of Music and his Master in Music and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees in composition from the University of South Carolina. From 1995-2007, he taught and directed the music program at Columbia International University in Columbia, SC. Prior to that, he worked for several years at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, creating original music and producing radio programs for the Moody Broadcasting Network. He has been active in church music since his teens, and served as staff keyboardist for ten years at Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, IL. Currently, Shackley is on the staff of Gateway Baptist Church in Irmo, SC. He has produced over twenty books of keyboard arrangements and more than one hundred choral anthems. He has won ASCAP standard panel awards every year since 1998, and has received commissions from churches, schools, and community choirs across America.
Lord, I know I been changed. Angels in heaven done signed my name
If you don’t believe that I have been redeemed,
The angels in heaven done signed my name.
Just follow me down to that ol’ Jordan stream.
The angels in heaven done signed my name.
I’m singin’ Lord, I know I been changed. Angels in heaven done signed my name.
I went to the river and the water was cold.
The angels in heaven done signed my name.
It chilled my body but not my soul.
The angels in heaven done signed my name.
Lord, O Lord, I know I been changed. The angels in heaven done signed my name.
Abide With Us - Greg Scheer
(c.2021, Greg Scheer)
Greg Scheer has composed over a thousand pieces of music in a variety of styles. Jeremy Begbie calls it “music that will disturb your imagination and delight your heart–a rare combination. Scheer’s sacred music appears in numerous hymnals and choral catalogs: over 300 Psalm settings, global worship song translations, choral anthems, and hymn arrangements. Scheer has received commissions from the Holland Symphony Orchestra, Baylor University, the Chagall String Quartet, the St. Cecilia Music Society, and others. Scheer’s symphonic rock group, The St. Sinner Orchestra, has released three albums; he also performs his original jazz with Outside Pocket.
This Gospel chorus attempts to distill some key elements of the story of Jesus appearing to his disciples on the road to Emmaus. Abide with us. Something about the stranger makes them want to spend more time with him. The disciples, recalling their conversation with Jesus say, “Didn’t our hearts burn within us?”
Abide with us. Abide with us.
Our eyes are opened, our hearts awoken, abide with us.
Our eyes are opened, our hearts awoken, abide with us.
About the Hymns:
Amazing Grace
"Amazing Grace" was written by the English poet and clergyman John Newton (1725–1807). With the message that forgiveness and redemption are possible regardless of sins committed and that the soul can be delivered from despair through the mercy of God, "Amazing Grace" is one of the most recognizable songs in the English-speaking world.
Newton wrote the words from personal experience. He grew up without any particular religious conviction, but his life's path was formed by a variety of twists and coincidences that were often put into motion by his recalcitrant insubordination. He was drafted into the Royal Navy, and after leaving the service became involved in the Atlantic slave trade. In 1748, a violent storm battered his vessel so severely that he called out to God for mercy, a moment that marked his spiritual conversion. However, he continued his slave trading career until 1754 or 1755, when he ended his seafaring altogether and began studying Christian theology.
Ordained in the Church of England in 1764, Newton became curate of Olney, Buckinghamshire, where he began to write hymns with poet William Cowper. "Amazing Grace" was written to illustrate a sermon on New Year's Day of 1773. It was first printed in 1779 in Newton and Cowper's Olney Hymns, but settled into relative obscurity in England. In the United States however, "Amazing Grace" was used extensively during the Second Great Awakening in the early 19th century. It has been associated with more than 20 melodies, but in 1835 it was joined to a tune named "New Britain" to which it is most frequently sung today.
The melody sung to John Newton’s 1779 hymn “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound” is, without a doubt, America’s best-loved hymn tune. Unlike Lowell Mason’s “Nearer, my God, to thee,” the “Amazing grace” tune is of unknown origin. It first appeared in print in 1829 without any composer attribution, and there were thought to be no earlier surviving instances of the tune. However, an 1828 manuscript by Lucius Chapin (1760-1842), who was famous in his day as a hymn tune writer, raises the possibility that Lucius was its composer.
Lucius and his brother Amzi (1768-1835) were among the first and most influential composers to harmonize American folk hymns, using principles they had absorbed from New England and English church music, and perhaps from the oral tradition as well. They also composed hymns in a similar style. The brothers came from a large, musical Massachusetts family. Their mother was an exceptional singer, though she did not read music, and two of their brothers also became singing masters. Lucius and Amzi moved south and west as young men and taught singing schools throughout their lives. In 1828, Lucius was living in central Kentucky and Amzi in western Pennsylvania. The 1828 manuscript was mentioned in passing in James Scholten’s 1972 dissertation on Lucius and Amzi Chapin. On July 25, 1828, Lusius’ son Cephas died from typhus in Oxford, Ohio en route home to visit his parents. There are three tender expressions of paternal love and grief on the back of Cephas’ last letter penned there by Lucius, the tunes AMAZING GRACE and BRAINARD and a brief poem.
The familiar melody had a number of titles in its early publications: ST. MARY’S, GALLAHER, HARMONY GROVE (Shenandoah Harmony), NEW BRITAIN (Sacred Harp), and more. The one title it did not have was AMAZING GRACE, though that title was used for at least two other melodies. The tune wasn’t paired with Newton’s text until 1835. The great nineteenth-century scholar W.E. Chute (1832-1900) attributed the melody to the Chapins.
It is possible that NEW BRITAIN was added to the manuscript after 1828, or copied from a source that does not survive. However, the version here doesn’t exactly match any tune found, either published or in manuscript, in Nikos Pappas’ exhaustive index of over 60,000 early American hymn tunes (1700-1870). It is closest to the tune ST. MARY’S found in Shaw and Spilman’s Columbian Harmony (1829) [4]. Like Lucius, Shaw and Spilman lived in central Kentucky.
Even if Lucius were the first to notate the tune, the concept of “authorship” in this repertoire is difficult. Composers felt free to write arrangements of popular sacred or secular melodies in oral tradition and publish them, either as unattributed tunes or with their own names attached. They also made their own versions of tunes in books or manuscripts, appropriated and rearranged European classical music, and composed music from scratch in a folk idiom.
If Lucius didn’t compose NEW BRITAIN, then who did? The basic structure of the tune is ancient. NEW BRITAIN is a folk hymn—a sacred melody that existed, in some form, in oral tradition prior to being notated. It belongs to a recognized “tune family,” or group of tunes, sacred or secular, that share enough structure and melodic phrases that they seem to be descended from a common root. Other related tunes include Amzi Chapin’s TWENTY-FOURTH (written in the 1790s) and, more distantly, the African-American spiritual “Swing low, sweet chariot” (published in 1873, but definitely older). The folk hymn CONSOLATION (attributed to the Chapins when first published in 1812) has the same contour, but is in the minor mode. However, just because a tune is a folk hymn doesn’t mean that there wasn’t an originator for a particular variant of the tune family. There were at least ten slightly different versions of NEW BRITAIN written down from 1828 to 1840 in Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina. Three of these were from central Kentucky. This argues for oral transmission, but the fact that each version differs from the others only in the amount of ornamentation notated suggests that one person, perhaps an itinerant preacher or singing master, was the “vector” that spread the tune through this area in the late 1820s to 1830s.
Another interesting story, though tangential, is the Chapin family’s connection to the antislavery movement. If you’ve read the story of John Newton (the author of the words to “Amazing Grace”), you know that he was the captain of a slave ship who later rejected his past and advocated against slavery. The Chapin family lived in central Kentucky and some of their neighbors owned slaves, though there weren’t large plantations in the area. However, the diary of Cephas’ sister Harriet survives, and she was profoundly antislavery, though as a woman she didn’t have power to make decisions about her household. She thanks God that her father is “an Emancipator.” I don’t know if that means that he had slaves and set them free or if he didn’t believe in slavery and never owned slaves. Harriet considered it her duty to educate the two young African-Americans who worked for the family, an act that would have been illegal in many states. Harriet died in 1827, just a year before Cephas.
In general, the early revivals in Kentucky were far more democratic than were churches later in the 19th century. Both white women and African-Americans—even slaves—were called on to testify and even preach, and everyone participated in group singing, which was one of the hallmarks of these revivals. So the fact that this particular tune, whoever wrote it, is often associated with black spirituals and related to “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” is not surprising, as it was first popular in a mixed environment.
Amazing grace! How sweet the sound That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now am found, Was blind but now I see.
Shout, shout for glory, Shout, shout aloud for glory;
Brother, sister, mourner, All shout glory hallelujah.
'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved;
how precious did that grace appear the hour I first believed!
Through many dangers, toils and snares I have already come:
'tis grace has brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.
The Lord has promised good to me, his word my hope secures;
he will my shield and portion be as long as life endures.
Yes, when this flesh and heart shall fail, and mortal life shall cease:
I shall possess, within the veil, a life of joy and peace.
The earth shall soon dissolve like snow, the sun forbear to shine;
but God, who called me here below, will be forever mine.
When we’ve been there ten thousand years, Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise Than when we’d first begun.
The Summons
(c.1987, The Iona Community, admin by GIA Pub.)
One of the most important intentional communities of the 20th and 21st centuries is Scotland’s Iona Community. Founded on the remote Island of Iona in far western Scotland, the community traces its inspiration back to the 6th century, when St. Columba found his way from Ireland and established an outpost from which he evangelized all of Scotland. Eventually, he spread a Celtic form of Christianity that still resonates strongly today. George MacLeod (1895-1991), an iconoclastic spirit, left a popular parish in Glasgow and established the Community in the 1930s to train ministers in engaging the poor working-class people of Glasgow and also in working alongside artisans to rebuild the abandoned Benedictine Abbey on the Island of Iona.
John Bell (b. 1949) grew up in Kilmarnock, a rural town south of Glasgow. He received degrees in arts and theology from the University in Glasgow. He was ordained by the Church of Scotland in 1978 and appointed youth coordinator for the Presbytery of Glasgow. In 1980, he was admitted to membership of the Iona Community, having applied not primarily because it was a place of liturgical innovation, but because it was “a place where the potentials of the socially marginalized as well as the socially successful would be attested.” Since then he has become the international troubadour of the Community, guiding its publications in worship and music, preaching at conferences around the world and composing many songs that enumerate the themes of the Community.
“Will you come and follow me” (called “The Summons” in The Faith We Sing) is perhaps the most famous of Mr. Bell’s hymns. The hymn appeared initially in the first collection of music produced by the Wild Goose Worship Group, Heaven Shall Not Wait: Songs of Creation, the Incarnation, and the Life of Jesus (1987). Characteristic of Mr. Bell’s style, the text is prophetic, using many words not usually found in traditional hymns. “The Summons” of Christ is to a radical Christianity. We are challenged to “leave yourself behind” and to “risk the hostile stare”, “set the prisoner free” and “kiss the leper clean”, and “use the faith you’ve found to reshape the world around”.
The tune is a traditional Scottish ballad entitled KELVINGROVE, named after a section of Glasgow. Mr. Bell often uses traditional melodies from Ireland, Scotland and England for his hymns. These tried and true tunes provide a Celtic flavor. For Mr. Bell, the purpose of congregational singing is to engage people in a fuller participation, to stretch their faith, and to encourage them to live in a manner that reflects justice.
Will you come and follow me If I but call your name?
Will you go where you don't know And never be the same?
Will you let my love be shown, Will you let my name be known,
Will you let my life be grown In you and you in me?
Will you leave yourself behind If I but call your name?
Will you care for cruel and kind And never be the same?
Will you risk the hostile stare Should your life attract or scare?
Will you let me answer prayer In you and you in me?
Will you let the blinded see If I but call your name?
Will you set the prisoners free And never be the same?
Will you kiss the leper clean, And do such as this unseen,
And admit to what I mean In you and you in me?
Will you love the 'you' you hide If I but call your name?
Will you quell the fear inside And never be the same?
Will you use the faith you've found To reshape the world around,
Through my sight and touch and sound In you and you in me?
Lord, your summons echoes true When you but call my name.
Let me turn and follow you And never be the same.
In your company I'll go Where your love and footsteps show.
Thus I'll move and live and grow In you and you in me.
First United Methodist Church, Lewisville, Texas
A Community of Everyday People Learning to Love Like Jesus
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