Musings: Sunday, August 11, 2024

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:

Voluntary on "Nyland" - Robert Lind

(c.2011, Paraclete Press)

Anna Laetitia Waring was a child prodigy, born in Wales in 1823. She learned Hebrew as a child and read the Old Testament in its original language daily. Although raised a Quaker, she joined the Anglican Church of England as an adult. She published two works that contained dozens of her hymns, Hymns and Meditations in 1850 (in which “In Heavenly Love Abiding” appears) and Additional Hymns in 1858. She was also involved in prison ministry and the Discharged Prisoners’ Aid Society. Her hymn texts, particularly for “In Heavenly Love Abiding”, express strength and faith in times of struggle.

NYLAND, named for a province in Finland, is a folk melody from Kuortane, South Ostrobothnia, Finland. In fact, the tune is also known as KUORTANE. NYLAND was first published with a hymn text in an appendix to the 1909 edition of the Finnish Suomen Evankelis Luterilaisen Kirken Koraalikirja. It gained popularity in the English-speaking world after David Evans's use of it in the British Church Hymnary of 1927 as a setting for Anna 1. Waring's text "In Heavenly Love Abiding." Evans (1874-1948) edited that hymnal, which was the source of a number of his harmonizations, including this one. David Evans was an important leader in Welsh church music. Educated at Arnold College, Swansea, and at University College, Cardiff, he received a doctorate in music from Oxford University. His longest professional post was as professor of music at University College in Cardiff (1903-1939), where he organized a large music department. He was also a well-known and respected judge at Welsh hymn-singing festivals and a composer of many orchestral and choral works, anthems, service music, and hymn tunes.

In Heavenly Love abiding, No change my heart shall fear,
And safe is such confiding, For nothing changes here.
The storm may roar without me, My heart may low be laid,
But God is round about me, How can I be dismayed?

Wherever He may guide me, No want shall turn me back;
My Shepherd is beside me, And nothing can I lack.
His wisdom ever waketh, His sight is never dim, —
He knows the way He taketh, And I will walk with Him.

Green pastures are before me, Which yet I have not seen;
Bright skies will soon be o'er me, Where the dark clouds have been.
My hope I cannot measure, My path to life is free,
My Savior has my treasure, And He will walk with me.

Robert Lind studied at North Park College at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago, majoring in organ, composition, and music theory. At the age of 20, he worked with Leo Sowerby and became his assistant at the Cathedral of St. James, Chicago. He succeeded his mentor, Dr. Sowerby, as organist-choirmaster at the Cathedral two years later. After serving in the US Army during the Vietnam era, Lind entered the publishing world, while continuing to serve various churches in the Chicago area. He is currently organist at Lord of Life Lutheran church in Schaumburg, IL. He has played recitals in Chicago area for several decades, has presented organ repertory workshops for the American Guild of Organists, and has composed extensively for the church. Mr. Lind has approximately 180 works published for the organ.

About the Piano Music:

When Love is Found - Bert Carlson

(c.1998, Augsburg Fortress)

Brian 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 hymns 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). His publications include What Language Shall I Borrow? - God-Talk in Worship: A Male Response to Feminist Theology (1989 and 2009), Praying Twice: The Music and Words of Congregational Song (2000), Advent, Christmas and Epiphany: Liturgies and Prayers for Public Worship (2008), Hymns for Today (2009) and seven hymn collections totaling 250 hymns.

O WALY WALY is a traditional English melody associated with the song "O Waly, Waly, gin love be bony," the words of which date back at least to Ramsay's Tea Table Miscellany (1724-1732), and as the setting for a folk ballad about Jamie Douglas. It is also well known in the Appalachian region of the United States. Hal H. Hopson (b. 1933) adapted and arranged O WALY WALY as an anthem in 1971 for his setting of 1 Corinthians 13, "Gift of Love"; his version became known as GIFT OF LOVE. More recent hymnals have begun publishing this tune in triple meter, contrary to the publisher's request, in order to avoid the long-held notes. The Companion to the United Methodist Hymnal noted that their committee's request for permission to use triple meter was denied, but that "in an assertion of free will over predestination, The Presbyterian Hymnal, 1990, included the text with a triple-meter form of the tune”.

Hopson was educated at Baylor University, Waco, Texas, and Southern Baptist Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky. He served various churches in the Nashville area as organist and choir director. He has also taught at Westminster Choir College, Princeton, New Jersey, and Scarritt Graduate School, Nashville, Tennessee. Over eight hundred of Hopson's hymn tunes and keyboard and choral compositions have been published. He takes an active role in many conferences and music clinics and was a major contributor to the Presbyterian Psalter (1994).

When love is found and hope comes home, Sing and be glad that we are one.
When love explodes and fills the sky, Praise God and share our Maker’s joy.

When love has flow’red in trust and care, Build both each day that love may dare
To reach beyond home’s warmth and light, To serve and strive for truth and right.

When love is tried as loved-ones change, Hold still to hope though all seems strange,
Till ease returns and love grows wise Through list’ning ears and opened eyes.

When love is torn and trust betrayed, Pray strength to love till torments fade,
Till lovers keep no score of wrong, But hear through pan love’s Easter song.

Praise God for love, praise God for life, In age or youth, in husband, wife,
Lift up your hearts, let love be fed Through death and life in broken bread.

J. Bert Carlson (1937-2017), 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.

About the Vocal Solo Music:

The Gospel of Grace - Mark Hayes

(c.1998, Alfred Publishing)

In this solo, Mark Hayes has set “Amazing Grace” and “I’m New Born Again” in a fun black gospel style.

"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.

“I found free grace and dying love (‘New-Born Again’)” is an African American spiritual of unknown origin. IIt was printed in Folk Songs of the American Negro No. 1 (Nashville, TN, 1907), edited by Frederick Jerome Work*, with an introduction by John Wesley Work (II)*. Its heading was ‘New-Born Again’, often used as the title of this hymn.

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.

’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved;

How precious did that grace appear the hour I first believed.

I found free grace and dying love, I’m new born again,